Before watching the comedy movie Dr. Strangelove, we had a small discussion about the foreign policy in the United States during the cold war. GRF Tyler was comparing Eisenhower and Kennedy Era which were two different approaches of handling the battle between the United States and Soviet Union during the cold war.
President Eisenhower was the president of the U.S from 1953-1961. He was considered as a progressive conservative. He was very much focused on foreign and military policy. His presidency was also dominated by the cold war and the confrontation with Russia. The U.S also developed a global nuclear power which is the main theme that is shown in Dr. Strangelove as there was a big tension between the U.S and Soviet Union. He supported mutually assured destruction (MAD) which he called “massive retaliation”, which supported equal or greater attack against Soviet Union. He was also supporting countries in Middle East and Latin America that stood against communism.
The successor of Eisenhower was Kennedy (1961-1963) who is known for establishing peach corps, Nuclear Test Ban treaty and the space race. During his time there was also tension with communist states. He tried to combat communism from being accepted in third world countries through peaceful ways. Unlike Eisenhower, he was more flexible with his foreign policy and used informal negotiations and bureaucracy to stop communism.
This seems like a fascinating discussion, and I certainly wish I could have attended. I would have certainly taken issue with Eisenhower’s foreign policy, and his myopic decisions to overthrow any regime which wasn’t immediately conducive to the interests of the United States, even if this was in the name of communism. For example, in 1953, his government backed the overthrow of the moderate reformist leader Mohmmad Mossadegh in Iran, simply because he advocated for Iran to control its own oil industry, and replaced with the brutal, repressive Shah, whose fall in 1979 led to the rise of a theocratic Shiite state under the Ayotallah. The records behind this still haven’t been released by the CIA.