Soothing the Communists and allaying the war fears of Europeans would set off Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) and the Nationalists on Taiwan as well as conservatives in the United States, and it might demoralize friends and clients in Asia. What would please the Republic of China (ROC) would provoke, to one degree or another, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Soviets, the NATO allies, and a significant portion of moderate-to-liberal opinion in America. 124 Testing Massive Retaliation I 125 onize groups in positions to inflict damage on the administration, the United States, or both. 4) 0 1988by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Cold Warriors: Eisenhower’s Generation and American Foreign Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming in 2988) and is completing a study of American policy toward the Third World from 2945 to 2960. Brands, jr., teaches history at Texas A G. Much of it involved the fact that any course of action would antagH. Beyond this, however, opinions rapidly diverged, and considerable disagreement arose among decision-makers over the issue of the offshore islands. Eisenhower, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Arthur Radford, and nearly everyone else of influence in Washington, a secure Taiwan in friendly hands represented the sine qua non of American policy in the Strait. The documents reveal the Eisenhower administration struggling to preserve important strategic assets in the Far East in the face of competing diplomatic, political, and bureaucratic forces. As a consequence it is now possible to trace the evolution of American policy in considerable detail. The documentary record of the decision-making process in Beijing, Moscow, and Taibei remains closed to researchers, thereby precluding a complete and balanced history of the crisis, but on the American side much of the highest-level material has recently been declassified. credibility was on the line, and that if their approach didn’t succeed, their entire defense policy might be undermined. However, they appeared to believe that U.S. was thus approaching the brink of nuclear war over strategically trivial islands. Dulles and Eisenhower recognized that the U.S. went without using these weapons, the less would be their deterrent value. would shortly reach the point when it would have to ”face up to the question whether its military program was or was not in fact designed to permit the use of atomic weapons.” He feared that the longer the U.S. interests? As Secretary of State John Foster Dulles recognized during the crisis, the U.S. The crisis was an early test of the EisenhowerDulles doctrine of “massive retaliation.” Was the American threat to protect its commitments by using anything in its arsenal, including nuclear weapons, a credible one? How should such commitments and threats be signalled, to whom, and when? Could they be effective to promote U.S. would go to war with the People’s Republic of China over Jinmen (Quemoy) and Mazu (Matsu) in the Taiwan Strait. IF o r eight months in 19, much of the world wondered whether the U.-S. Testing Massive Retaliation Credibility and Crisis Management in the Taiwan Strait H. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Massive retaliation