From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (111 page)

The alliance with Pakistan brought as many problems as benefits. Nehru hoped to keep the subcontinent free of the Cold War, but the United States brought it there. One major result, as Indians had predicted, was to provoke a profound anger against the United States, driving their country toward the Soviet Union. Nor did relations between the United States and Pakistan especially flourish under the alliances. It was never quite clear what role Pakistan would play in Middle East defense. Its incessant demands for the newest and most expensive military hardware annoyed and concerned top U.S. officials. Military aid from the United States enabled Pakistan's leaders to ignore major domestic problems and refuse to negotiate with India. In turn, Pakistan's leaders resented U.S. refusal to meet their demands and accused their ally of bad faith.
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In the mid-1950s, the United States initiated a shift in its policies toward South Asia. Khrushchev's 1955 trip to the subcontinent followed by major commitments of aid for India alarmed U.S. officials. Some pundits speculated by this time that competition between China and India in terms of economic development might be the pivot on which world history turned. A 1957 economic crisis suggested that India could be losing. The United States thus became more receptive toward economic assistance for India. At the same time, Eisenhower had concluded that America's "tendency to rush out and seek allies was not very sensible," even a "terrible error."
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The United States thus sought to contain military aid to Pakistan within reasonable bounds. To help stabilize South Asia, it set out to encourage negotiations between Pakistan and India on vexing issues such as the disputed territory of Kashmir.

The policy changes produced no more than modest gains and highlighted once more the difficulties of imposing Cold War frameworks on complex local situations. India happily accepted U.S. assistance, and relations improved somewhat in Eisenhower's last years. But it refused to negotiate with its archenemy. Pakistan deeply resented U.S. aid to India. While also refusing negotiations with its neighbor, it demanded more for itself. The United States could hardly refuse. Pakistan provided crucial posts for electronic eavesdropping on the Soviet Union. Bases at Peshawar and Lahore enabled high-flying U-2 spy aircraft to gather vital intelligence on Soviet military capabilities and missile installations. The 1958 coup in Iraq replaced a pro-American government with radical Arabs, making Pakistan more important for Middle East defense. Pakistan's shrewd and hard-nosed leader, Ayub Kahn, warned that U.S. bases put his country at risk, therefore necessitating F-104 fighters and Sidewinder missiles. The Eisenhower policy shift brought some balance to U.S. relations with South Asia and improved relations with India. But it did little to stabilize the subcontinent or resolve America's essential policy dilemmas there.
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In the raging Cold War competition for the allegiance of Third World nations, the United States found itself increasingly handicapped abroad by one of its most difficult problems at home—the denial of equal rights and opportunities for all its citizens and especially the segregation of African Americans in the South. Race relations at home intersected with foreign policy in various ways. African Americans now openly questioned their nation's claims to moral world leadership. "Advocacy of free elections in Europe by American officials is hypocrisy," the young minister
and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. observed, "when free elections are not held in great sections of America."
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African diplomats posted in Washington and at the United Nations ran up against discriminatory racial mores in the United States. Under fire for their handling of decolonization, Europeans turned the tables by pointing to the country's management of its own racial issues. Top officials increasingly recognized the contradiction. "We cannot talk equality to the peoples of Africa and Asia and practice inequality in the United States," Nixon warned the president upon returning from Africa in early 1957. "In the national interest, as well as for the moral issues involved, we must support the necessary steps which will assure orderly progress toward the elimination of discrimination in the United States."
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The Little Rock school desegregation crisis of September 1957 became a watershed issue for U.S. foreign policy. Eisenhower sent federal troops to the Arkansas capital with great reluctance. He was personally comfortable with segregation and had many friends among the southern elite. He believed social change could come only gradually and hesitated to intervene in what he considered a state matter. But Governor Orval Faubus's blatant defiance of Supreme Court school desegregation rulings left him no choice. More important, Little Rock had a huge worldwide impact. Scenes of federal troops escorting African American children to school while white foes of integration hurled ugly epithets of protest played in newspapers and especially on the powerful new medium of television across the world. Soviet and Chinese propagandists had a field day. Europeans still smarting from Suez crowed that America's handling of its own race problems hardly qualified it to lecture them. A Nigerian newspaper asserted that the United States "has no claim to be leader of Western democracies." The crisis in Arkansas was "ruining our foreign policy," Dulles warned the president; the impact in Asia and Africa "might be worse for us than Hungary was for the Russians."
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Little Rock thus inextricably linked foreign and domestic issues. Americans, Eisenhower among them, concluded that the nation must effectively address its domestic issues to validate its claim to be leader of the free world.

Following Little Rock, the Eisenhower administration took modest steps to address a serious problem. It made symbolic gestures to improve its image among emerging nations. It supported a Haitian candidate for
president of the UN Trusteeship Council. In the late 1950s, decolonization hit Africa with a vengeance, and the United States supported more openly the independence and even neutralism of new nations there. The State Department established a Bureau of African Affairs, removing that continent's questions from the European divisions traditionally more sympathetic to the colonial powers. In October 1958, for the first time, the United States voted for a U.N. resolution condemning apartheid in South Africa. There were, of course, limits to how far the administration would go. Following the notorious 1960 Sharpeville massacre in South Africa in which police brutally killed sixty-nine protestors and wounded two hundred others, the State Department disavowed a U.S. diplomat who had issued a mild statement of protest. Most important, the administration recognized that it could no longer remain indifferent to the international implications of racial problems at home. Eisenhower and even more his successors plainly saw how important they had become to the nation's global position and pretensions.
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Throughout its history, when facing a real or imagined foreign threat, the United States has taken a keener interest in the Western Hemisphere. The Cold War was no exception. During their first years, Eisenhower and Dulles continued with little change the Latin American policies they had inherited. They worried about Communism in the hemisphere, as elsewhere, but saw little reason for alarm or exceptional measures. Like Truman and Acheson, they rebuffed Latin American pleas for a hemispheric Marshall Plan, insisting that modest loans and private investment were the correct path to economic development. To sustain close ties with Latin American military leaders, they expanded their predecessors' military aid program. They mounted a major propaganda campaign featuring comic strips, cartoon books, and radio broadcasts warning the Latin American masses of the dangers of Communism. They continued the usual public relations measures of feting hemispheric leaders and celebrating Pan-Americanism—"you have to pat them a bit and make them think that you are fond of them," Dulles instructed the president.
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Continuing the practice dating to the 1920s, they accommodated the dictators who ruled thirteen of the twenty Latin American nations. Indeed, in their first years, they went much further, bestowing the Legion of
Merit on such distasteful characters as dictators Marcus Pérez Jiménez of Venezuela and Manuel Odría of Peru and entertaining Nicaragua's brutal tyrant Anastasio Somoza and Paraguay's Alfredo Stroessner. During a goodwill tour in 1955, Nixon publicly embraced Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, whom he compared to Abraham Lincoln, and the Dominican Republic's Rafael Trujillo. At a time when anti-Communism was the highest priority, democracy and human rights took a backseat. In any event, as Nixon explained, "Spaniards had many talents, but government was not among them."
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The administration also followed through on a policy initiative devised by its predecessor by using covert operations in the summer of 1954 to topple the leftist government of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala. A handsome and charismatic politician, the popularly elected reformer sought to modernize his nation's economy by encouraging factories, establishing banks, and exploiting the nation's mineral resources. He launched a massive land reform program, expropriating thousands of acres for redistribution to peasants. In 1952, he seized four hundred thousand acres of land belonging to the mighty United Fruit Company, the U.S.-owned corporation that dominated Guatemala's economy. Closely connected with the U.S. government, "the Octopus," as it was known to Guatemalans, raised the specter of Communism and furiously lobbied the administration to do something. No less than the pioneer of public relations, Edward Bernays, who had originally peddled bananas as a cure for indigestion, put together a network of propaganda operatives to discredit Árbenz in Guatemala and brand him a Communist in the United States. In America, at least, UFCO preached to the choir. Although the CIA could find no direct ties with Moscow, the administration was already deeply suspicious of Árbenz. When his government took anti-U.S. positions in inter-American meetings and purchased arms from Czechoslovakia (because it could not buy them from the United States), it confirmed what most U.S. officials already suspected: Árbenz was a Communist and therefore a menace to the hemisphere.
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Implemented by the CIA in the summer of 1954 with a budget of $3 million, Operation PBSUCCESS lived up to its code name. The agency employed mercenaries from various Central American countries and established training camps in Florida, in Honduras, and on Somoza's estate
in Nicaragua. CIA-trained teams using psywar tactics showered Guatemala with broadcasts and leaflets fomenting rebellion. They sent "mourning cards" to Árbenz and other leaders, hinting at doom for any recipient, and warned Catholics that pictures of Lenin and Stalin would replace statues of the saints in their houses.
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CIA propagandists exaggerated the strength of the uprising. On June 18, 1954, U.S.-picked rebel leader Castillo Armas "invaded" Guatemala with an "army" of about 150 men. A small "air force" of Cessnas and antiquated U.S. military aircraft "bombed" ammunition dumps and oil storage facilities in Guatemala City with such things as Molotov cocktails and blocks of dynamite attached to hand grenades. Wrongly persuaded that the United States would do anything to get rid of him, Árbenz, much like Mosaddeq, cracked under pressure, resigning on June 27 and fleeing into exile. Castillo Armas visited Washington shortly after and obeisantly inquired of Nixon: "Tell me what you want me to do and I will do it."
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The coup had significant consequences for all concerned. As in Iran, it succeeded despite numerous blunders in execution mainly because Árbenz, like Mosaddeq, lost his nerve. Top U.S. officials saw it as further confirmation of the ease with which hostile Third World governments could be eliminated. PBSUCCESS thus induced a great hubris in the agency and a certain complacency about Latin America and in time led to similar efforts in Cuba, British Guiana, and Chile. The coup produced a stable government friendly to U.S. interests, but for Guatemala it brought disaster. The overthrow of Árbenz shattered the political center and initiated a cycle of violence that would last for more than four decades. The CIA retained influence in Guatemala into the 1990s, assisting with a so-called counterinsurgency program that resulted in torture, political assassination, and the massacre of entire Mayan villages. Somewhere between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand people were killed in what the agency's inspector general later conceded was "one of the saddest chapters of American relations with Latin America."
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A series of shocking events in the Eisenhower administration's last three years produced dramatic shifts in U.S. Latin American policy. The hemisphere itself underwent major changes. A recession in the United States caused a catastrophic drop in prices for Latin American exports, halting economic growth and leaving widespread human misery.
Economic problems brought political instability. Ten of the thirteen dictators fell from power. Economic and political unrest also provoked in the hemisphere rising anti-Americanism.

An attack on Nixon in Caracas in May 1958 brought home to North Americans in the most alarming fashion the seething discontent among their southern neighbors. Already concerned about the turmoil in Latin America, the administration sent the vice president back on another fact-finding mission and goodwill visit. He encountered some verbal protests in Montevideo, Uruguay, and his entourage was stoned in Lima, Peru, but in Caracas his life was threatened. En route to a ceremony at the tomb of the liberator Simón Bolívar, his motorcade was surrounded and stopped by an angry mob shouting anti-U. S. slogans. As the crowd closed in, the police fled. The mob broke the windows of cars in which the vice president and his wife were riding. For nearly fifteen minutes, they were trapped and seriously endangered. An alert and intrepid driver finally extricated them to the safety of the U.S. embassy. Nixon returned to Washington to a hero's welcome; eighty-five thousand people lined the route from National Airport into the city.
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Some top officials at first dismissed the attacks as the work of Communist provocateurs, but CIA director Dulles insisted there was no evidence of Soviet involvement and conceded that there would be "trouble in Latin America even if there were no Communists."
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The attack on Nixon stunned the administration into recognition of the surging unrest in Latin America, producing in time reassessments of basic policies.