![]() They can’t see their way through to winning a war now and I don’t think they’ll start one,” he told the president and his cabinet at a White House meeting on January 31, 1951, after whirlwind meetings with the military and political leaders of the NATO nations. “I personally think those guys in the Kremlin like their jobs. Though the fear of an attack on Western Europe was immense, and American forces spent the next four decades arming and training and war-gaming for it, Ike doubted that the Russians would launch it at the time or thereafter. ![]() The linchpin was an agreement that an attack on one NATO nation was an attack on all.Įisenhower dismissed as propaganda the Russians’ threats against America arming NATO. The United States gave explicit nuclear and conventional military guarantees to every member through the NATO treaty, and in return American military power was cemented on European soil. NATO united America and eleven European nations in a military alliance of mutual defense. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization had been founded in April 1949 to prevent that disaster, but it existed almost entirely on paper at the time Ike took command. Eisenhower later told reporters at a news conference in Moscow: “I see nothing in the future that would prevent Russia and the United States from being the closest possible friends.” That vision proved to be an illusion.īy the time President Truman recalled Eisenhower to duty at the end of 1950 to serve as the first military chief of NATO, it looked as if World War III might be at hand one bolt from the blue might start the final conflagration. Stalin, in turn, judged the American commander a humane and kindhearted man. Eisenhower found Stalin, flush with victory, a strangely fatherly figure. At a great feast in the Kremlin, Ike and Uncle Joe drank champagne toasts to each other. The bones of millions of civilians and soldiers lay in that blood-soaked land. ![]() On the thousand-mile flight from Berlin, accompanied by his Red Army counterpart, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, he had looked down from the window of his low-flying four-engine turboprop, and he could not see a building still standing on Russian soil. ![]() Eisenhower had gone to Moscow to meet with Stalin in August 1945, two days after Truman unleashed the bomb and forced Japan into unconditional surrender. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |