John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War

Author and journalist Stephen Kinzer on his book The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War in an interview for Readara.com

John Foster Dulles and Allen Welsh Dulles not only represented the priorities of the Eastern establishment but also the popular anxieties of their times in the 1940s and 1950s. The two Cold War warriors leveraged America’s pervasive paranoia about a communist expansion and the solid grip of U.S. elites on the country’s power structure by exaggerating views of the Soviet power.

The Dulles brothers came to represent the interest of Big Business as the interest of America, viewed the world through the Christian fundamentalism prism and diluted down the nation’s foreign policy to communism versus American capitalism, all this with a fervent belief in American exceptionalism. At that point there was no room for neutral nations in their vision of the world.

In their efforts to project power, the Dulles brothers led the U.S. intervention in Vietnam, Guatemala, Indonesia, Iran, Congo and Egypt with disastrous consequences for these vulnerable nations. While the operations seemed to have succeeded in the short term, they certainly hurt U.S. foreign policy in the long run. Had John Foster Dulles not been involved in the Geneva negotiations in the 50s, the U.S. would have most likely avoided the disastrous war in Vietnam.

Even six decades after the Dulles era, the question of America's role in foreign affairs and how this dominant military and economic power should conduct itself in global politics is still guided by the same narrow interests and prejudices.