The Foreign Service Journal, February 2005

India over Kashmir, the adherence of Pakistan to CENTO raised suspi- cions in New Delhi of U.S. motives, suspicions that lasted well into the 1970s and the prime ministership of Indira Gandhi. In 1957, seeking greater flexibili- ty in the administration of economic and military aid to confront the per- ceived communist threat in the Middle East, the Eisenhower administration gained congressional approval of a Middle East resolution that promulgated what became the Eisenhower Doctrine. Two hundred million dollars in aid was offered to those countries that would commit themselves to opposing international communism. The administration basically wanted a means of circum- venting strict congressional limits on the management of aid funds; it was true throughout the Cold War that, to be successful in Congress, any ini- tiative on aid had to be wrapped in an anti-Soviet context. A retired member of Congress, James P. Richards, was sent through the Arab Middle East to “sell” the doctrine and obtain commitments. Middle East nations, however, did not wish to “stand up and be count- ed,” particularly in the wake of U.S. support for the establishment of the state of Israel seven years earlier. Only two countries, Iraq and Lebanon, endorsed the doctrine. The Iraq Revolution occurred a year later. Lebanon was saved from chaos only by the intervention of U.S. Marines. Asian Dominoes Across Asia in Indochina, the French lost their position in Vietnam; at the Geneva Conference in 1954, the country was divided between North and South. The Kennedy administration saw the growing threat of North Vietnam to the anti-communist South as a wider threat to the nations of the region. The administration began a U.S. involvement that escalated eventual- ly into a full-scale war. The U.S. intervention in Vietnam was per- ceived in Washington as an essential battle to prevent the fall of Asian “dominoes” to the communists. But, in much of Asia, it was viewed as an effort to perpetuate French colonial- ism. One of the dominoes of concern to Washington was Indonesia. The Eisenhower administration and, especially, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, CIA chief Allen Dulles, were troubled by the policies of President Sukarno. They looked for dissident activities in the outer islands that might be supported to weaken or remove the Sukarno regime. The opportunity came in 1957 when dissident colonels in Sumatra organized a revolt and received arms from the CIA. The revolt collapsed and the CIA role was subsequently revealed, further enhancing the image of U.S. manipulation in Indonesia and the region. Paul Gardner writes of the after- math of this episode: “Although the U.S. denial of involvement in the PRRI/Permesta rebellion averted a situation in which the Indonesian government would have felt com- pelled to break diplomatic relations, it also caused Indonesians to dismiss denials of later reports of U.S. com- plicity in anti-Indonesian activities.” Throughout the 1960s, Washing- ton was obsessed with Soviet and Chinese threats to the emerging independent states of Africa. Through both covert actions and proxy wars, the U.S. opposed groups seen by Washington as pro-commu- nist but by many Africans as pro- independence. The murder of Patrice Lumumba in 1960, an inde- pendence hero in the Congo, is still blamed on the Americans. The accession of Mobutu Sese-Seko to power in Kinshasha became a prime example of America’s willingness to support corrupt and undemocratic autocrats in the name of fighting communism. U.S. resistance to independence for the Portuguese colonies in Africa was viewed as an effort to perpetu- ate colonialism. U.S. covert support for Joseph Savimbi’s UNITA move- ment in Angola and the long civil war that followed in the name of fighting communism devastated a significant part of Africa. Throughout this period, the U.S. image suffered through positions taken in the United Nations General Assembly on such issues as colonial- ism, apartheid and Palestine. Al- though the UNGA positions were not binding, the posture of the U.S. was frequently seen in Africa and Asia as reflecting opposition to basic nationalistic and racial attitudes in the newly emerging nations. The Reagan administration made mat- ters worse by seeking to tie aid levels to votes by African and Asian coun- tries on these issues. Washington’s reaction to per- 62 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 5 Understanding the results of Cold War policies can lead to a better understanding of the limitations of a superpower’s ability to control global events today.