Printed Page 742 Chapter Chronology

Liberation Rhetoric and the Practice of Containment

At his inauguration, Eisenhower warned that "forces of good and evil are massed and armed and opposed as rarely before in history." Like Truman, he saw communism as a threat to the nation's security and economic interests, and he wanted to keep the United States the most powerful country in the world. Eisenhower's foreign policy differed, however, in three areas: its rhetoric, its means, and — after Stalin's death in 1953 — its movement toward accommodation with the Soviet Union.

Although some Republicans, such as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, deplored containment as "negative, futile, and immoral," the Eisenhower administration practiced containment in Vietnam and intervened in Latin America and the Middle East. Eisenhower also pursued an ever-escalating arms race with the Soviet Union but sought to ease tensions between the superpowers toward the end of his presidency.