| dc.description.abstract | This study examines the Taiwan Straits Crisis of 1954-55 and how the Eisenhower administration handled the imbroglio and attempts to explain why the crisis lasted for such a long period of time. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles believed that in international relations between adversaries, the number one reason for the start of wars was miscalculation by one side or the other. Yet throughout the fall of 1954 and into the summer of 1955, the presidential administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower made America's position with regards to the Republic of China (ROC) controlled offshore islands anything but clear to Mao, the People's Liberation Army (PLA), or the international community. Eisenhower and the National Security Council (NSC) were consistently caught between two opposing philosophies and political realities in its dealing with the crisis. International pressure from the British and a hostile domestic and global public opinion, kept America from publicly declaring that it would defend the offshore islands. The administrations fear of handing communism what was viewed as another victory in the Cold War and irrevocably damaging Nationalist troop morale on Taiwan kept Dulles and Eisenhower from formulating a publicly clear and unequivocal policy for Formosa, the Pescadores and the nationalist-held islands. This failure extended a confrontation for nearly a year that should have ended in a matter of days or weeks. There has, to this point, never been a monograph written specifically about the Taiwan Straits Crisis of 1954-55. However, the event is well covered by journal articles and chapters in books discussing US foreign Policy, US diplomacy, the Cold War, the Eisenhower administration, US-China relations, Military history, and a variety of other topics. While the Taiwan Straits Crisis is not now a major incident engrained in the American public's conscience, like World War II or the Cuban Missile Crisis, it is a standard case study that is nearly always mentioned in major academic reference works. The first historical accounts of the crisis focused on the belief that Secretary of State John Foster Dulles singlehandedly ran American foreign policy during his tenure. The historiographical interpretation settled on a perception that Dulles and the military pulled Eisenhower to an unnecessary ideological confrontation with Mao Zedong's Peoples Republic of China (PRC). This interpretation was largely dismissed during the 1960s and 1970s as research began to confirm that, although Dulles had a great deal of influence, it was in the end Eisenhower who made the final decisions. As Eisenhower era documents slowly became available to the public, the next generation of historians began to grapple with how the crisis unfolded and in what respect Cold War ideology governed how the White House made decisions. With the publication, in the 1980s, of the Foreign Relations of the United States, covering this period, historians like H.W. Brands interpreted the crisis through the prism of the Dulles and Eisenhower policy of Massive Retaliation and saw the crisis as a test of that policy. The next era of investigation into this Cold War case study came from historians, both from the east and west, who used Chinese documents to tell, for the first time, the PRC side of the crisis, adding to our overall knowledge of the event. This thesis is an attempt to merge all of these schools, along with new original research, to come up with a more complete understanding of why Eisenhower and Dulles made the decisions they did in the 1950s with regards to Taiwan and the Offshore islands. This project concludes that Dulles came into the Eisenhower administration with a clear idea of how to conduct foreign policy. The new secretary of state believed in clarity of design and purpose. If America was straight forward in what it wanted and what it would and would not do, then miscalculation by the enemy, in this case worldwide Communism, would be negated. The best way to avoid a big war in the calculation of Dulles was to avoid misunderstandings between nations. Unfortunately, the dynamics of the Cold War and the realities of the offshore islands in the Taiwan Straits kept Dulles from implementing what should have been a rational, even successful policy. Because the KMT government on Taiwan was wrapping up so much of its prestige into holding all of the territory it still controlled, The US believed it could not allow the offshore islands to fall and result in catastrophic consequences for the morale of the nationalist military and destabilize Jiang's government. If Taiwan fell to the Communists as a result, then it would serve as the first domino of western leaning democracies to crumble. Southeast Asia, Japan, the Philippines could be next and America would be endanger of losing the Cold War altogether. However, American allies like Great Britain would not support a war over the offshore islands and American public opinion was decidedly against another conflict in Asia so soon after the conclusion of the deeply unpopular Korean War. The Eisenhower administration had painted itself into an ideological corner that created longstanding tensions and crisis after crisis all because it could not make a clear decision on the status of Quemoy, Matsu, and the other ROC holdings along the mainland Chinese coast. As a result of these findings, this study focuses on the offshore islands and why the Eisenhower administration was unable to make a final decision on their status and thereby giving the world a clear understanding of where the United States stood. In addition this project also investigates the US-Mutual Defense Treaty signed in 1954 and how it impacted this event more clearly than in previous works. For the first time, this endeavor takes the word of Eisenhower, Dulles, and the National Security Council when they stated that they could not allow the offshore islands to fall to the communists because it would damage the morale of ROC troops and the government of Jiang Jieshi. Furthermore, this thesis puts a new focus on the impact of British and international opposition to the United States position with regards to Quemoy and Matsu and explains how this opposition along with a lack of American domestic support, moderated the Eisenhower administration's actions and kept the US from going to war with the PRC. There are many opportunities for further research on this topic. One avenue would be to delve more thoroughly than this study does into the relationship between the White House and Congress and how House and Senate members affected the decision making process. The one major set of documents that remains classified, are National Security Administration documents that could have a wealth of information on what the intelligence was telling the administration with regards to the PRC. Also, along those lines an investigation into American support for raiding operations conducted by the ROC on the PRC could be of great value. Finally a project describing primarily the Joint Chiefs internal discussions and ultimate recommendations to the president would be a fascinating expose. Army Joint Chief General Mathew Ridgway was often at odds with the other chiefs on a variety of issues, the Taiwan Straits Crisis only being one of them. | |
