The July 23 Revolution and pacts (29). The US and the Baghdad Pact (iv). Budgetary considerations. United States' pressure and promises of aid to the Baghdad Pact member states were key factors in the negotiations leading to the agreement. Initially, however, the United States did not directly participate in the pact ‘for purely technical reasons of budgeting procedures'. In 1958, the United States joined the military committee of the pact, which is generally viewed as one of the least successful of the Cold War alliances. While the United States had favoured the Baghdad Pact, it did not adhere to it. Several factors had contributed to the United States' attitude. First of all, it was feared that to do so would jeopardise United States' petroleum interests in Saudi Arabia and its efforts to find a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. But there were also certain budgetary restraints that had partly reduced the US anti-communist crusade to ‘covert operations' normally undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). US President Eisenhower had inherited from the Truman Administration a military budget of roughly $42 billion, as well as a paper (NSC-141) drafted by Acheson, Harriman, and Lovett calling for an additional $7-9 billion in military spending. With Treasury Secretary George Humphrey leading the way, and reinforced by pressure from Sen. Taft and the cost-cutting mood of the Republican Congress, the target for the new fiscal year (to take effect on July 1, 1954) was reduced to $36 billion. While the Korean armistice was on the verge of producing significant savings in troop deployment and money, the State and Defence Departments were still in an atmosphere of rising expectations for budgetary savings. Humphrey wanted balanced budget and a tax cut in February 1955, and had a savings target of $12 billion (obtaining half of which from cults in military expenditures). Although unwilling to cut deeply into defence, the president also wanted a balanced budget and smaller allocations for defence. Nothing, not even communism, seemed to obsess Eisenhower as much as his fear that capitalists would ruin their system by spending too much on defence. "Unless we can put things in the hands of people who are starving to death we can never lick Communism", he told his cabinet. Moreover, Ike feared that a bloated military-industrial complex (a term he popularised) "would either drive us to war. Laying the groundwork for this new approach to defence planning, Eisenhower announced a "radical change" on April 30. He rejected the idea that "we must build up to a maximum attainable strength for some specific date... Defence is not a matter of maximum strength for a single date," but instead a matter for the ‘long haul', meaning that military expenditures should be sustainable for many years without serious strain. To illustrate such reasoning, one could note how the defence spending was such an extraordinary burden on the Soviet economy. Perhaps a quarter of the actual share of the USSR's economy was devoted to the military sector. Defence in the US came nowhere close to consuming such a disproportionate share of resources (Americans spent six percent of a much larger GNP). On May 8, his first year in office, Eisenhower and his top advisors tackled this problem in Operation Solarium codenamed after the White House sunroom where the president conducted secret discussions. Although it was untraditional to ask military men to consider factors outside their professional discipline, the president instructed the group to strike a proper balance between his goals to cut government spending and an ideal military posture. The group weighed three policy options for the next year's military budget: the Truman-Acheson approach of containment and reliance on conventional forces; threatening to respond to limited Soviet "aggression" in one location with nuclear weapons; and serious "liberation" based on a thoroughgoing economic response to the Soviet political-military-ideological challenge to Western hegemony: propaganda campaigns, and psychological warfare. The third option was strongly rejected. Eisenhower and the group (consisting of Allen Dulles, Bedell Smith, C.D. Jackson, and Robert Cutler) instead opted for a combination of the first two, one that confirmed the validity of containment, but with reliance on the American air-nuclear deterrent. This was geared towards avoid costly and unpopular ground was wars. In addition, nuclear weapons were to play a larger role in containing the increasing numbers of insurgencies in the Third World. The question of relative capabilities was the crucial factor. Viewing international relations from a realist perspective, relative capabilities are the central element of the international system: units within the system that fail to adjust to threats and opportunities arising changing capabilities will not survive. Perhaps most influentially, the Eisenhower-Dulles approach adjusted American policy to the emergence of new nations in the Third World. [email protected]
