A Crisis of Confidence

Abstract

In the spring of 1951, US policy developed within the outlines which had emerged in December 1950. Rearmament was accelerated and steps taken to consolidate the Western bloc. In his state of the union message, Truman ruled out ‘appeasement’ of the USSR and warned that military strength was ‘the only realistic road to peace’. The United States was preparing for ‘full wartime mobilisation, if that should be necessary’.¹ The first priority remained NATO. In January 1951 General Eisenhower called for the creation of forty NATO divisions by 1952, the assumed year of crisis with the Soviet Union. In the Far East, preparations for a Japanese peace treaty speeded up with the despatch of John Foster Dulles to Tokyo in January 1951 as the President’s special representative.² Financial and military assistance to Indochina and the Philippines increased and links with Taiwan were consolidated by the despatch of a US military mission under General Chase in May.³ This ambitious programme, however, was developed against the background of continuing crisis in Korea which both fuelled partisan debate at home and caused grave tensions within the Western alliance.