Conclusion

Abstract

In the aftermath of the Second World War the United States had drastically demobilised its military forces. Such ruthlessness was not possible after the Korean war, as the United States had now become a global super power with the awesome responsibilities which such a role entailed. Moreover, the world was bitterly divided by the intense pressures of the cold war, a highly dangerous and volatile situation in which the US was a key player. This state of ‘no peace, no war’ presented the Eisenhower administration with enormous problems in trying to determine how much of its resources the country was willing and able to devote to military preparations to secure its national security goals. To add to these problems, the United States, which had possessed only a few atomic bombs in the mid- 1940s, was now facing a long period of technological competition — both quantitatively and qualitatively — with the Soviet Union. Finally, while in 1945 the international system had been monopolised by the ‘Big Three’ — the US, USSR, and the United Kingdom — by the time Eisenhower left the White House early in 1961, the international system had been enlarged by the emergence of independent third world nations whose aspirations were more often than not in conflict with the policies of the capitalist western and the Communist eastern blocs.