Dual Realities Of The 1950s

Foreign and Domestic Affairs and the Dual Realities of the 1950s One of the key strategic plans of the President Harry Truman’s administration is encapsulated in the National Security Council (NSC) 20/4 of November 1948 and NSC 68 of April 1950, among others, stressing the containment of Soviet Union from controlling Eurasian territories, an approach which President Dwight Eisenhower continued using his own methods. During Eisenhower’s 1952 presidential campaign, he strongly attacked Truman’s national security leadership for being cost-inefficient and disorganized (Stueck 572). Serving previously as an informal chairman of Truman’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (before the position was established in 1949 by law), Eisenhower had commonalities with
power in the Middle East and the decline in options on the oil dispute that resulted in more aggressive U.S. policy in Iran (Marsh 113). The new more forceful approach began in the Truman administration, after a couple of years of wearisome mediation and policy ineffectiveness. By then, Truman realized that“[the U.S.] must strike out on an independent policy or run the gravest risk of having Iran disappear behind the Iron Curtain and the whole military and political situation in the Middle East change adversely to it” (Marsh 113). The Eisenhower administration sustained the process as Dulles and Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson agreed that the U.S. should take the responsibility of being a senior partner in Iran and the Middle East (Marsh 113). In August 1953, the Eisenhower administration started Operation Ajax to eliminate Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh which resulted in Iran’s role as a “U.S. client state”(Marsh 79, 114). The hardliner stance in Iran and the U.S. support for the coup against Mossadegh indicated the shifting context of a more independent and assertive U.S. policy (Marsh 114). Eisenhower administration supported containment like Truman but the former varied with the latter in the means of approaching it, specifically through covert CIA-operation led activities that promoted coups and replacement of leaders that were non-democratic or