John Foster Dulles: Apostle of American Empire

Join us as we welcome Dr Bevan Sewell to speak about his recently released book John Foster Dulles Apostle of American Empire.

John Foster Dulles was one of the most prominent American Cold War policymakers, but arguably one of the least well known in terms of who he was and what shaped his thinking. Derided for a long time as a reflexive, hardline anti-communist zealot, most famous for the doctrine of Massive Retaliation and for being complicit in a series of ruinous interventions in the Global South, academic interest in Dulles diminished markedly from the 1980s as historians began to focus more closely on the part played by Dwight D. Eisenhower and other prominent Cold War foreign policy figures, like George Kennan or Henry Kissinger, who were considered more colourful or intellectually rewarding. As a result, Dulles ended up frozen in time: an archaic relic of the Cold War, unable to see past the struggle with the Soviet Union while world-historical changes unfolded all around him.

However, more recent works—particularly those placing an emphasis on religion—have adopted a fresh approach to considering Dulles’s life and career. In doing so, they have unpacked the importance of two crucial things. First, that Dulles was an important interlocutor on foreign affairs from the 1910s up until his death in 1959, a refocusing that has allowed greater attention to be paid to the factors shaping his thinking long before he became Secretary of State. Second, that focusing more closely on the entirety of his life reveals the importance—and more radical nature—of much of his earlier thinking on international matters, particularly in the 1930s and the 1940s, when the twin shocks of the Great Depression and World War 2 prompted wide-ranging reappraisals of American foreign relations. That Dulles would emerge in the 1950s as a trenchant and unyielding Cold Warrior was in no way pre-ordained. Moreover, a longer assessment of the way his ideas evolved discloses important continuities and evolutions in his thinking that help us to make sense of things like the most notable advocate for massive retaliation being someone previously opposed to nuclear weapons’ use.

This book talk will therefore examine the intellectual trajectory of Dulles’s life and outline the key themes and ideas that shaped his approach to world making. By emphasising the importance of travel, Pragmatism, and what we might call ecumenism, it will delineate the core ideas that animated Dulles’s engagement with the world, noting the way these elements informed and shaped his understanding of power, religion, nationalism, and the concept of peace, while identifying crucial limitations around questions of race and self-determination. In its final part, it will reflect on how these elements factored into the policy ideas and debates during Dulles’s time serving as Eisenhower’s Secretary of State.

Meet our speaker:

Bevan Sewell is an Associate Professor in American History and former Co-Editor of the Journal of American Studies (Cambridge University Press). His main areas of interest lie in American and British political and foreign relations history during the twentieth century. He is the author of The U.S. and Latin America: Eisenhower, Kennedy and Economic Diplomacy in the Cold War, which was published by I.B. Tauris in 2016, and has published articles in Diplomatic History, the English Historical Review, International History Review, Intelligence and National Security, and is the co-editor of Foreign Policy at the Periphery: The Shifting Margins of US International Relations since World War II. Presently, he is working on an intellectual biography of John Foster Dulles and is just beginning a new project on the contested concept of rights in 1970s and 1980s Britain.

Meet our chair:

Professor Matthew Jones is Professor of International History and the Cabinet Office official historian of the UK strategic nuclear deterrent. He specializes in US and British foreign and defense policy, decolonization in South East Asia, and nuclear history.

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