ter, no government or communications. ‘I ask
you’, Eisenhower challenged his military chiefs,
‘what would the civilised world do about it?’ He
then supplied the answer, ‘I repeat, there is no vic-
tory except through our imaginations.’ In charge
of policy at this critical time for the world, the
president firmly rejected the use of atomic
weapons in Asia and refused to consider wild
notions of launching a pre-emptive nuclear war
against Russia or China.
The superiority the US enjoyed in stockpiles
of nuclear weapons in the 1950s could be
employed only in defence of the West’s most vital
interests, not to attack weaker opponents.
Eisenhower would have used them if the Red
Army had attempted to overrun Western Europe
or if China had invaded Taiwan or, improbably,
had attacked Japan. But for Eisenhower their real
value lay in their deterrent effect – he was not
trigger happy and prayed they would never be
used. Yet he did not believe peace in Asia could
be restored by peaceful negotiation and compro-
mise. That, in the president’s judgement, was the
appeasement policy of Munich. When in July
1954 an armistice was finally concluded at Geneva
between the North Vietnamese and the French,
and Vietnam was partitioned close to the 17th
parallel, the US would not participate in the
settlement because it left the future of the whole
of Vietnam to be settled by elections in 1956.
In 1954 Eisenhower’s and Dulles’s main
effort was directed to bringing to life an Asian
defensive alliance similar to NATO in Europe.
By September the South-East Asian Collective
Defence Treaty was concluded and signed in
Manila by the US, Britain, France, Australia, New
Zealand, Pakistan, Thailand and the Philippines.
It promised self-help and mutual aid to develop
the signatories’ individual and collective capacity
to resist armed attack or subversion; an attack on
one was held to be a threat to all, and the allies
undertook to act to meet the common danger.
Cambodia, Laos and South Vietnam were
included in the region to be defended. But
SEATO never achieved the credibility of NATO.
There was no automatic provision of military aid
and Britain and France withdrew from providing
any military support.
The contrast between Europe and Asia in the
1950s and after is striking. NATO became an
effective alliance; SEATO did not, but relied for
its teeth on the US. In Europe policy decisions
had to be shared with allies where questions of
European defence were concerned. In Asia, the
US took its own decisions in the face of lukewarm
support from Western European allies. US policy
fulfilled most of its aims in Western Europe. For
example, it was largely American pressure and
Adenauer’s unequivocal decision to side with the
Western powers that restored the Federal
Republic to full sovereignty and brought it to
membership of NATO in 1955. And, despite
threats and diplomatic confrontations, there was
no war between communist states and the West in
Europe. The Asian peoples, by contrast, suffered
turmoil and wars. America, after Eisenhower left
the presidency, became increasingly involved in
the renewed Vietnamese Civil War.
In 1956, the hollowness of the political rhetoric of
‘freeing the enslaved nations’ from communist
control was so forcibly exposed that it was not seri-
ously employed again. The Soviet Union proved
itself strong enough to impose its will on the cen-
tral and Eastern European nations. In October of
that year the Poles defied the Russians, and this
encouraged the Hungarians, who took the notion
of independence from Soviet control much fur-
ther. During the last week of that month fight-
ing broke out between Soviet troops and the
Hungarians. Unbelievably, the Russians withdrew
from Budapest only to return in force on Sunday,
3 November 1956. Eisenhower, with Dulles in
hospital after his first operation for cancer, was
dealing simultaneously with the problems of the
British–French–Israeli war against Egypt, with the
Hungarian revolution and with his approaching
re-election (6 November). Increasingly desperate
Hungarian appeals for American help were rejected
by Eisenhower, although the CIA were eager to
supply air drops of arms. Eisenhower acknow-
ledged that Hungary lay within the Soviet orbit
and that the Soviet Union might well prefer to
fight rather than accept the disintegration of the
Warsaw Pact. The US thus confined itself to reso-
lutions that would be vetoed by the Russians in the
1
THE EISENHOWER YEARS 497
