At his first 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 did not attempt to roll back communism with force. Nuclear weapons and CIA secret operations took on a more prominent role in defense strategy, and the United States intervened at the margins of Communist power in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Toward the end of his presidency, Eisenhower sought to ease tensions between the superpowers.