The July 23 Revolution and pacts (28), The US and the Baghdad Pact (iii). ‘The Third World'. By 1900, the United States had burgeoned into a power which combined the interesting characteristic of being conservative ideologically and expansive economically. Such a combination would not be encouraging to revolution. Interventions against rebellions in Cuba and the Philippines were followed by Theodore Roosevelt's pronouncement that the United States would act as a policeman to prevent upheavals in the Caribbean area. A decade later Woodrow Wilson rationalised the use of economic and military force against Mexico with an ideological justification that employed the traditional American liberal rhetoric. President Eisenhower's Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was the dominant figure in the nation's foreign policy in the 1950s. A patrician, visceral anti-communist closely tied to the nation's financial establishment, Dulles was obsessed with communism's challenge to US corporate power in the Third World. He denounced the "containment" of the Truman Administration and espoused an active programme of ‘liberation', which would lead to a ‘rollback' of communism. Dulles intensified the efforts to ‘integrate' the entire non-communist Third World into a system of mutual defense pacts, traversing almost 500,000 miles in foreign travels to cement new alliances that were modeled after the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), though far weaker. The emphasis on pacts was a logical culmination of the Truman-Acheson containment, which called for strong alliance systems directed by the US and collective security pacts. Dulles initiated the Manila Conference in 1954, which resulted in the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) pact that united eight nations either located in Southeast Asia or with interests there in a neutral defence pact. This treaty was followed in 1955 by the Baghdad Pact, uniting the so-called northern tier countries of the Middle East Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan in a defence organisation. However, the Kremlin was not really the source of the growing number of international crises, but rather the rampaging nationalisms, social reformism, and anti-imperialist moods in the Middle East, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. Dulles, along with most US foreign policy-makers of the era, failed to distinguish indigenous Third World social revolutionaries and nationalists from Soviet influence. In the Arab world, the focus was pan-Arab nationalism. And the roots of the ongoing US ‘war on terrorism' and 2003 Operation Iraqi Freedom can be traced through the 1950s. Since the region contained the world's largest oil reserves, the US was concerned about the stability and friendliness of the Arab regimes in the area, which the health of the US economy grew to depend upon. US companies had already invested heavily in the region. [email protected]
