As Dwight D. Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles came to personify the shortcomings of American foreign policy. This collection of essays, representing the first archivally based reassessment of Dulles's diplomacy, examines his role during one of the most critical periods of modern history. Rejecting familiar Cold War stereotypes, this volume reveals the hidden complexities in Dulles's conduct of foreign policy and in his own personality.

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"Was the John Foster Dulles who personified the Cold War as U.S. secretary of state in the 1950s the same man who denounced narrow nationalism as a leader of worldwide ecumenism and liberal Protestantism in the 1930s? In this remarkable study Mark Toulouse documents the 'transformation' of Dulles 'from prophet of realism to priest of nationalism,' overturning misconceptions of those historians who have tended to read Dulles's early years backward from what they know of him as secretary of sate. Christian missions and international diplomacy shaped John Foster Dulles from childhood. His father was a liberal Presbyterian minister; one grandfather had been a missionary to India, while the other had served as U.S. secretary of state under Benjamin Harrison, and an uncle would serve Woodrow Wilson in the same office. As a Princeton undergraduate Dulles accompanied his grandfather to an international peace conference at The Hadue in 1907, where he became a secretary to the Chinese delegation. That experience, and a year at the Sorbonne, pointed Dulles toward international law rather than the ministry. But he remained an active, ecumenically minded Presbyterian lay leader, serving in several important denominational posts. He successfully defended the the controversial Harry Emerson Fosdick and Henry P. Van Dusen before the Presbyterian General Assembly when fundamentalists attempted to depose them. In 1921 Dulles was appointed to the newly formed Commission on International Justice and Goodwill of the Federal Council of Churches. Dulles emerged as an international leader in 1937 at the ecumenical Oxford conference on life and work. Convinced in his discussions there of the ned to translate his inherited 'spiritual values' into practical international diplomacy, Dulles organized and became chairman of the Federal Council's Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace. Through the years of world war and as a participant in the United Nations Conference in 1945, Dulles sought a peace that would transcend the narrow concerns of nationalism and political ideology. But after 1945, as Professor Toulous shows, the 'prophetic realism' that had guided Dulles's ecumenical quest for world peace and justice became a 'priestly nationalism' that uncompromisingly pursued the international political aims of the United States in the name of a 'supreme moral law.' Toulouse's incisive analysis of that 'transformation' is compelling reading for scholars of international diplomacy and American religion, and for every person who seeks to reconcile the imperatives of religion with the necessities of statecraft" --

Are democracies less likely to go to war than other kinds of states? This question is of tremendous importance in both academic and policy-making circles and one that has been debated by political scientists for years. The Clinton administration, in particular, has argued that the United States should endeavor to promote democracy around the world. This timely reader includes some of the most influential articles in the debate that have appeared in the journal International Security during the past two years, adding two seminal pieces published elsewhere to make a more balanced and complete collection, suitable for classroom use.

In this sweeping history of United States policy toward Latin America, Lars Schoultz shows that the United States has always perceived Latin America as a fundamentally inferior neighbor, unable to manage its affairs and stubbornly underdeveloped. This perception of inferiority was apparent from the beginning. John Quincy Adams, who first established diplomatic relations with Latin America, believed that Hispanics were lazy, dirty, nasty...a parcel of hogs. In the early nineteenth century, ex-President John Adams declared that any effort to implant democracy in Latin America was as absurd as similar plans would be to establish democracies among the birds, beasts, and fishes. Drawing on extraordinarily rich archival sources, Schoultz, one of the country's foremost Latin America scholars, shows how these core beliefs have not changed for two centuries. We have combined self-interest with a civilizing mission--a self-abnegating effort by a superior people to help a substandard civilization overcome its defects. William Howard Taft felt the way to accomplish this task was to knock their heads together until they should maintain peace, while in 1959 CIA Director Allen Dulles warned that the new Cuban officials had to be treated more or less like children. Schoultz shows that the policies pursued reflected these deeply held convictions. While political correctness censors the expression of such sentiments today, the actions of the United States continue to assume the political and cultural inferiority of Latin America. Schoultz demonstrates that not until the United States perceives its southern neighbors as equals can it anticipate a constructive hemispheric alliance.

Waging Peace offers the first fully comprehensive study of Eisenhower's "New Look" program of national security, which provided the groundwork for the next three decades of America's Cold War strategy. Though the Cold War itself and the idea of containment originated under Truman, it was left to Eisenhower to develop the first coherent and sustainable strategy for addressing the issues unique to the nuclear age. To this end, he designated a decision-making system centered around the National Security Council to take full advantage of the expertise and data from various departments and agencies and of the judgment of his principal advisors. The result was the formation of a "long haul" strategy of preventing war and Soviet expansion and of mitigating Soviet hostility. Only now, in the aftermath of the Cold War, can Eisenhower's achievement be fully appreciated. This book will be of much interest to scholars and students of the Eisenhower era, diplomatic history, the Cold War, and contemporary foreign policy.

This collection of essays presented at a conference at West Point by leading political thinkers, including David Alan Rosenberg, Richard D. Challener, Lloyd C. Gardner, and Martin J. Sherwin, explores the national security policies developed by the Truman and Eisenhower administrations (1945-1960) in response to the threat of Soviet expansionism. Stressing that fear motivated the makers of Cold War policy, the contributors discuss such topics as the objections raised by Democrats to nuclear security strategy, Eisenhower's disputes with Army and Navy leaders, and the evolution of Cold War policy into today's global security policy.