Dull, duller and Dulles – was Churchill’s jibe about America’s Cold War icon unfair?
In the era of Trumpian foreign policy incoherence, a new intellectual biography of the American Cold War icon John Foster Dulles might seem welcome for hawks and doves alike. Indeed, Dulles’s tenure as secretary of state during the first six years of the Eisenhower administration could be viewed – even by the harshest left-wing critic of American imperialism – as a useful and reassuring point of reference, despite its narrow anti-communist dogma and too cavalier approach to the dangers of nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union and China. After all, the Eisenhower administration extricated the United States from President Truman’s stalemated Korean War and started no major new wars before the end of Eisenhower’s second term in January 1961.
