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A joint biography of John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, who led the United States into foreign adventures that decisively shaped today's world as the Cold War was at its peak.

Do advisers affect foreign policy and, if so, how? Recent scholarship on elite decision making prioritizes leaders and the institutions that surround them, rather than the dispositions of advisers themselves. We argue that despite the hierarchical nature of foreign policy decision making, advisers’ predispositions regarding the use of force shape state behavior through the counsel advisers provide in deliberations. To test our argument, we introduce an original data set of 2,685 foreign policy deliberations between US presidents and their advisers from 1947 to 1988. Applying a novel machine learning approach to estimate the hawkishness of 1,134 Cold War–era foreign policy decision makers, we show that adviser-level hawkishness affects both the counsel that advisers provide in deliberations and the decisions leaders make: conflictual policy choices grow more likely as hawks increasingly dominate the debate, even when accounting for leader dispositions. The theory and findings enrich our understanding of international conflict by demonstrating how advisers’ dispositions, which aggregate through the counsel advisers provide, systematically shape foreign policy behavior.

The United States built its policy toward Middle Eastern issues, including Arab affairs particularly the Palestinian question on the strategy of Western defense of the Middle East and the expansion of U.S. military bases, which were used to encircle the former Soviet Union and to target its strategic depth.         Given the Middle East’s geographical proximity to the Soviet Union, the region was of great importance to U.S. national security. From the American perspective, this created the need to integrate the countries of the region into a system of alliances and military blocs.                                              John Foster Dulles’s policy in the Middle East relied on two main pillars. First, he was not keen to incorporate all Middle Eastern countries into the measures of military containment, but rather sought to apply a flexible strategy that focused on the so-called “Northern Tier” states Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and Iraq. These states possessed sensitive strategic locations that would allow the launching of a comprehensive air war against vital Soviet targets in the event of conflict. Second, Dulles’s policy was based on a stance of non-alignment toward Israel. The motives behind Dulles’s visit to the Middle East varied from one country to another. Nevertheless, the visit constituted a landmark event in Arab–American relations, as it was the first time a U.S. Secretary of State visited the region to closely examine its affairs and relations with the United States.           Reports from the Royal Iraqi legations and embassies stressed the importance of Arab officials refraining from making commitments to Dulles regarding relations with Israel, especially in political, economic, and social matters. They also highlighted the insistence of Arab states on implementing United Nations resolutions on Palestine and countering the spread of communism.                                                                Upon his arrival in Cairo on May 11, 1953, Dulles discussed with Egyptian officials the possibility of finding a solution to the Egyptian question. He expressed satisfaction and interest in his visits to Arab countries, listening to the views and proposals of their leaders, exchanging opinions with them on their respective national issues, and promising to convey their perspectives to the U.S. administration to help shape its policy toward the Arab world accordingly.                                                           Dulles’s visit to India on May 20, 1953, aimed at clarifying the U.S. position toward India, demonstrating goodwill, and discussing international issues, particularly the Korean conflict, the Kashmir dispute, and Sino–Indian relations. On May 22, 1953, Dulles visited Pakistan to discuss shared concerns with India, especially the Kashmir issue and Middle Eastern affairs, as well as the possibility of U.S. assistance to Pakistan in addressing its economic crisis.                                          It appears that Dulles’s Middle East tour was initiated by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower to hold talks with officials in Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, and Iraq regarding the establishment of a regional military defense pact in the Middle East and to emphasize the necessity of the region’s participation in such an alliance.                                                                     

According to Wilsey, Dulles classified these \"as dynamic powers acting much as the United States and Britain had as they expanded their territories in the nineteenth century.\" While leading the FCC's wartime Commission for a Just and Durable Peace, Dulles concluded that Americans had a \"divinely inspired mission\" to ensure the universal embrace of moral law as defined by American Protestant churches of a liberal persuasion. [...]Wilsey passes over in a few pages the issues that defined Dulles's term as secretary of state, above all his embrace of massive retaliation as the centerpiece of U.S. national security strategy.

Abstract This article focuses on John Foster Dulles's engagement with religion and the role it played in his worldview. In doing so, it argues that his embrace of Christian internationalism should be seen as a part of an intellectual progression shaped by Pragmatist working methods rather than a spiritual reawakening.

[...]though, little of this potential is realized, as the book suffers from four major shortcomings: a serious lack of secondary sources with a heavy reliance on a few outdated texts; a failure to identify any consistent worldview informed by Dulles's Christianity; a lack of engagement with Dulles's fully divergent reactions to fascism and communism; a shallow, poorly researched exploration of Dulles's long legal career and—most surprisingly in a book entitled God's Cold Warrior—his tenure as Secretary of State. [...]in equally opaque language, Wilsey tries to bridge Dulles's philosophical and religious beliefs by suggesting that Dulles believed, \"religion benefitted from pragmatism because pragmatism rescued religion from blind rationalism… (and) pragmatism demonstrated religion to have real use in the shaping of reality, both practically and theoretically.\" When Wilsey does mention Dulles's legal career, he barely connects it to the philosophical and religious beliefs described earlier. Since Wilsey initially frames God's Cold Warriors as an exploration of how Dulles's religious and philosophical beliefs influenced his real-world actions, the decision to largely ignore his work at Sullivan and Cromwell is odd. In Wilsey's telling, Dulles saw the rise of fascism as proof that dynamism, constant change, was the fundamental truth of international relations. [...]the countries fixated on maintaining the status quo after World War I (such as Britain and France) were doomed to be swept away by the fascist and revisionist powers.

[...]the people of the past can be the most foreign people we in the present will meet and the most difficult people for us to understand. What Theodore Lyman said of Ulysses S. Grant in 1864 certainly seemed apt for Dulles also: \"He habitually wears an expression as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it. \"Grandfather Foster,\" secretary of state under Benjamin Harrison, was deeply influential in Dulles's life.11 He was raised in the parsonage of the First Presbyterian Church of Watertown, New York- his father, the Rev. Allen Macy Dulles served as pastor of that church from 1887 to 1904, the year that Dulles matriculated into Princeton University as a timid sixteenyear-old. \"12 He then lived with his grandparents in Washington at their new home at 1323 18th St. while studying for his law degree at George Washington Law School from 1909 to 1911.

The accepted approach to American-Israeli relations during Eisenhower's presidency (1953-1957) holds that Eisenhower was aloof and distant toward Israel. Yet, Eisenhower's policies toward Israel during those years were nuanced and sophisticated, entwining interests and ideals. With the onset of the Cold War, Eisenhower aimed to preserve and increase American influence in the Middle East in a way that would not put Israel at risk, but would respond to concerns voiced at home about his policies toward Israel and the surrounding nations. Furthermore, the administration's approach was more continuous with Truman's than Eisenhower and Dulles let on, as evidenced by their policy of “friendly impartiality” toward Israel, attentiveness to Israel's military and economic needs, and sensitivity to the views of American Jewry.

In the last two decades, scholars have increasingly looked to understand the way that socially constructed norms and values have influenced the course of international diplomacy. Yet while much work has been produced on areas such as gender, far less has been written on the way that perceptions of illness affected the way that leading policymakers saw themselves, their allies, and their respective roles in the world. This article, by focusing on former US secretary of state John Foster Dulles, looks at the influence that perceptions of illness had on US foreign relations during the 1950s. First, it argues that US perceptions of British and French weakness - as typified by the ill-health being suffered by those nations' respective leaders - shaped American responses to the diplomatic crisis that erupted over the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Second, it highlights the substantial changes that took place in US policy when first President Eisenhower, and then subsequently Secretary Dulles, were stricken down by severe illness. In doing so it demonstrates how a better understanding of the relationship between illness, emotions and masculinity can help historians to better understand the course of Cold War foreign relations.