Table Of ContentEMPIRE AND REVOLUTION
Empire and Revolution
THE UNITED STATES
AND THE THIRD WORLD
SINCE 1945
Edited by
Peter L. Hahn
Mary Ann Heiss
OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
COLUMBUS
Copyright © 2001 by The Ohio State University.
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Empire and revolution : the United States and the Third World
since 1945 / edited by Peter L. Hahn, Mary Ann Heiss,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8142-0856-8 (alk. paper) —
ISBN 0-8142-5060-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
i. Developing countries—Foreign relations—United States.
2. United States—Foreign relations—Developing countries.
3. United States—Foreign relations—1945-1989. 4. United
States—Foreign relations—1989- . 5. Imperialism—United
States—History—20th century. 6. Revolutions—Developing
countries—History—20th century. I. Hahn, Peter L. II. Heiss,
Mary Ann, 1961-
D888.U6E46 2000
327.730i72'4—dc2i 00-009085
Text and cover design by Paula Newcomb.
Type set in Adobe San Serif by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Printed by McNaughton & Gunn.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum require
ments of the American National Standard for Information
Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.
ANSI Z39.48-1992.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: The Challenge of the Third World
Robert J. McMahon i
NATIONAL SECURITY AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION
His Finest Hour? Eisenhower, Lebanon, and the 1958 Middle
East Crisis
Douglas Little 17
The Caribbean Triangle: Betancourt, Castro, and Trujillo and
U.S. Foreign Policy, 1958-1963
Stephen G. Rabe 48
“Flee! The White Giants Are Coming!": The United States,
Mercenaries, and the Congo, 1964-1965
Piero Gleijeses 71
The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1968: Capitalism,
Communism, and Containment
Robert Buzzanco 94
vi CONTENTS
CULTURE
Decolonization, the Cold War, and the Foreign Policy of the
Peace Corps
Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman 123
The Influence of Organized Labor on U.S. Policy toward Israel,
1945-1967
PeterL. Hahn 154
Real Men Don't Wear Pajamas: Anglo-American Cultural
Perceptions of Mohammed Mossadeq and the Iranian
Oil Nationalization Dispute
Mary Ann Heiss 178
Gender Relations, Foreign Relations: The United States and
South Asia, 1947-1964
Andrew J. Rotter 195
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Like Boxing with Joe Louis: Nelson Rockefeller in Venezuela,
1945-1948
Darlene Rivas 217
“Fuel for the Good Dragon”: The United States and Industrial
Policy in Taiwan, 1950-1965
Nick Cullather 242
Conclusion
Peter L. Hahn and Mary Ann Heiss 269
Bibliographical Essay
Mary Ann Heiss and Peter L. Hahn 279
Contributors 285
Index 287
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We owe a debt of thanks to a number of individuals who helped to facili
tate the publication of this volume. Barbara Hanrahan, Malcolm Litchfield,
Emily Rogers, and Ruth Melville of the Ohio State University Press supported
and encouraged us as we prepared the manuscript. Robert J. McMahon was
gracious enough to write the volume’s excellent general introduction. And
the authors whose work is included here not only allowed us to publish or re
publish their essays but also delivered them before our publication deadline.
We are also grateful to Diplomatic History and The Journal of American History
for permission to reprint essays that originally appeared in their pages. We
also wish to thank Robert Buzzanco, Nick Cullather, Douglas Little, Stephen
G. Rabe, and Andrew Rotter for agreeing to designate the customary repub
lication fees as royalties to the Lawrence Gelfand-Armin Rappaport Fund
of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). The
Gelfand-Rappaport Fund, which supports the publication of Diplomatic His
tory, will also receive the royalties derived from the sale of this book. We
naturally encourage other scholars to support SHAFR's outstanding journal
by making their own contributions to the Gelfand-Rappaport Fund.
We are pleased and honored to dedicate this volume to Michael J. Hogan
and Melvyn P. Leffler, our advisers in graduate school and two of the world’s
finest diplomatic historians. Both continue to serve as inspirations, models,
and supporters, for which we are immeasurably grateful.
Introduction: The Challenge of the Third World
ROBERT J. MCMAHON
The rise of the Third World stands unquestionably as one of the key defining
features of modern international history. The newly emerging areas of Asia,
Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America threw off the shackles of colonial
ism and neocolonialism in the half century that followed World War II,
boldly articulated their own national aspirations, strove to achieve economic
as well as political independence, and became increasingly influential actors
on the world stage. In the broadest world-historical sense, the rise of the
Third World posed a fundamental challenge to Western global dominance—
the most sweeping such challenge of the modern era. “We propose to stand
on our own legs,” proclaimed India's Jawaharlal Nehru in March 1947. “We
do not intend to be the playthings of others.”1
The emergence of the Third World, together with the bloody, conflict-
ridden process of decolonization that brought it forth, not only coincided
temporally with the Cold War but was inextricably shaped by that same
Cold War—as each of the essays in this volume powerfully demonstrates.
Indeed, it was the all-encompassing struggle between the United States, the
Soviet Union, and their respective allies for global power, influence, and
ideological supremacy that gave birth to the very term Third World. A conve
nient political catchphrase that rather loosely lumped together the predomi
nantly poor and uncommitted areas of the planet, Third World originally
connoted an arena of contestation between West and East, the so-called First
World and Second World. It was an arena, in the view of many pundits,
academics, and geopoliticians, whose ultimate political orientation might
well determine the outcome of the Cold War.
The United States and the Soviet Union each identified vital national
i
2 Robert J. McMahon
interests in Third World territories. For Washington, as for Moscow, the
developing areas appeared critical to the achievement of basic strategic, eco
nomic, political, and ideological goals. Significantly, most of the major East-
West crises of the Cold War era erupted in the Third World, including nearly
all that threatened to escalate into direct U.S.-Soviet confrontations. The
only wars involving U.S. military forces during this period also took place in
the Third World. In fact, the vast bulk of the armed conflicts that have
broken out since the end of the Second World War have been fought there. It
is particularly telling that all but two hundred thousand of the estimated
twenty million people who died in wars fought between 1945 and 1990 were
felled during conflicts that raged across various parts of the Third World.2
The United States's interest in and involvement with the Third World is
not, of course, exclusively a post-1945 phenomenon. The United States it
self became a Third World power—though the term itself had not yet been
coined—when it seized possession of several Pacific and Caribbean territories
following the Spanish-American War of 1898. Its extensive trade links with
the non-Western world, of course, long predated the imperial surge of the
1890s. During the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wil
son, the United States substantially deepened its diplomatic, military, and
commercial involvement with non-Western areas. Roosevelt and Wilson
went a long way toward converting the Caribbean into a U.S. lake; they
helped establish, in the process, the commercial and military preeminence
of the United States throughout Latin America. Each of those activist presi
dents also regularly inserted the United States into East Asian affairs, viewing
that corner of the globe, too, as a necessary preoccupation for a burgeoning
industrial power with rapidly expanding commercial and geopolitical inter
ests. Even if other parts of the Third World—Africa, the Middle East, South
east Asia—commanded considerably less attention from U.S. leaders at this
time, the U.S. fixation with the Third World during the post-World War II
era clearly had strong historical antecedents.
But U.S. concern about, and involvement with, the Third World assumed
dramatically increased proportions during the post-World War II period.
That concern derived from an interrelated set of economic, geostrategic,
political, ideological, and psychological factors—many of which predated
the Cold War and all of which were further magnified by U.S.-Soviet antago
nism. The lessons U.S. planners took from the Second World War had ele
vated the importance of Third World territories well before the onset of the
U.S.-Soviet struggle. Determined to build a more peaceful, stable, and pros
perous world order out of the ashes of humanity's most horrendous conflict,
and realizing that technology and trade had shrunken the globe, Roosevelt
