THE EISENHOWER ERA ★^963The post–World War II era witnessed the crumbling of European empires.
The “winds of change,” said British prime minister Harold Macmillan, were
sweeping Africa and Asia. Decolonization began when India and Pakistan
(the latter carved out of India to give Muslims their own nation) achieved
independence in 1947. Ten years later, Britain’s Gold Coast colony in West
Africa emerged as the independent nation of Ghana. Other new nations—
including Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Kenya, and Tanzania—soon followed.
In 1975, Portugal, which five centuries earlier had created the first modern
overseas empire, granted independence to its African colonies of Mozambique
and Angola.
Decolonization presented the United States with a complex set of choices.
It created power vacuums in the former colonies into which, Americans feared,
communists would move. The Soviet Union strongly supported the dissolution
of Europe’s overseas empires, and communists participated in movements for
colonial independence. Many noncommunist leaders, like Jawaharlal Nehru of
India and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, saw socialism of one sort or another as
the best route to achieving economic independence and narrowing the social
inequalities fostered by imperialism. Most of the new Third World nations
resisted alignment with either major power bloc, hoping to remain neutral
in the Cold War. On the other hand, many nationalists sincerely admired the
United States and, indeed, saw the American struggle for independence as a
model for their own struggles. Ho Chi Minh, the communist leader of the Viet-
namese movement against rule by France, modeled his 1945 proclamation of
nationhood on the American Declaration of Independence. He even requested
that President Truman establish a protectorate over Vietnam to guarantee its
independence.
The Cold War in the Third World
By the end of the 1950s, the division of Europe appeared to be set in stone. Much
of the focus of the Cold War shifted to the Third World. The policy of contain-
ment easily slid over into opposition to any government, whether communist
or not, that seemed to threaten American strategic or economic interests. Jacobo
Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala and Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran were elected,
homegrown nationalists, not agents of Moscow. But they were determined to
reduce foreign corporations’ control over their countries’ economies. Arbenz
embarked on a sweeping land-reform policy that threatened the domination of
Guatemala’s economy by the American-owned United Fruit Company. Mossa-
degh nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, whose refinery in Iran was
Britain’s largest remaining overseas asset. Their foes quickly branded both as
communists. In 1953 and 1954, the Central Intelligence Agency organized the
How were the 1950s a period of consensus in both domestic policies and foreign affairs?