LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Dwight Eisenhower: United States
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Eisenhower returned to the United States at the end of 1939. The next two, fast-paced years were crucial ones in which the experience of filling a series of key administrative and coordinative posts in an operational Army rounded out his professional education. During his first year back in the country, he briefly commanded a battalion of the 15th Infantry and then served as regimental executive officer. Late in 1940 he became chief of staff of the 3d Infantry Division at Fort Lewis. March 1941 saw yet another reassignment, as Eisenhower progressed to become chief of staff of the newly activated IX Corps. Finally, in June 1941, he stepped up to the headquarters of Third Army at San Antonio.
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Eisenhower soon fulfilled his campaign pledge when an armistice was signed (July, 1953) in Korea after he threatened to use nuclear weapons. Eisenhower and his secretary of state John Foster Dulles continued the Truman administration policy of containing Communism and of financing the French attempt to maintain control of Indochina. Defense treaties were signed with South Korea (1953) and Taiwan (1954), and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization was formed in 1954 to halt Communist expansion in Asia. After the French lost the battle of Dienbienphu and withdrew from Indochina, Eisenhower sent military aid to South Vietnam. He ... tried, after the death of Soviet leader Josef Stalin in 1953, to ease cold war tensions. His “atoms for peace” plan and his statements at the Geneva summit conference in July, 1955, were widely heralded.
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Korean War in July 1953, honoring one of Eisenhower's campaign pledges. In December he proposed the Atoms for Peace program, whereby nations would pool their atomic information for peaceful purposes, an initiative that led to the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1957. It was ... during his first administration that the United States and Canada drew closer together in the joint project to build the St. Lawrence Seaway. Trying to reduce tensions with the Soviet Union, in 1955 he proposed the Open Skies plan that would allow the United States and the USSR aerial inspection of each other's military bases.
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The 1951 appointment of Eisenhower as NATO's first supreme allied commander, Europe (SACEUR) was crucial to the alliance's success. Eisenhower was the only individual with sufficient military and political stature to persuade Western Europe to rearm in the face of the Soviet threat. While not completely successful - NATO's combat strength did not reach the desired totals - Eisenhower spent 18 months visiting member countries and organizing available military forces. When he left NATO in 1952 to run for president, the organization was planning an ambitious expansion, including the entry of Greece and Turkey into the alliance and the rearming of the Federal Republic of Germany.[8]
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In the Near East, Eisenhower faced a very difficult situation. In 1956 the Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. The government of Israel, probably encouraged by France and Great Britain, launched a preventive war, soon joined by the two great powers. The President and the secretary of state condemned this breach of the peace within the deliberations framework of the United Nations, and the three powers were obliged to sign an armistice. These events occurred at a particularly inauspicious time for the United States, since a popular revolt against the Soviet Union had broken out in Hungary. The hands of the American government were tied, though perhaps in no case could the United States have acted effectively in preventing Soviet suppression of the revolt.
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Eisenhower ... encountered increasing frustration after 1957 in his attempts to moderate the Cold War. After a left-wing revolution in Iraq, Eisenhower airlifted a marine detachment to Lebanon in 1958 to forestall a similar uprising there. The immediate crisis soon subsided, and the troops were withdrawn, but the American position in the Middle East continued to deteriorate. In the same year, Vice President Nixon was almost killed by a hostile mob in Caracas, Venezuela, during a goodwill tour. Anti-American feeling erupted still closer to home when the radical Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba. Eisenhower outwardly ignored Castro's increasingly strident attacks on the United States but was criticized for both provoking and tolerating them.
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