John Foster Dulles: Address to the United Nations on the Suez Crisis

John Foster Dulles was one of the first secretaries of state of the cold war era. Steadfast in his beliefs and an experienced orator, Dulles adeptly explained the Eisenhower administration’s foreign policy decisions in public forums. Particularly when controversial matters needed to be addressed, Dulles, rather than Dwight Eisenhower, publicly spoke about them. In the conformist 1950s, when critiques of U.S. cold war policy were considered tantamount to embracing Communism, Dulles’s unflinching commitment to destroying the global Communist threat was widely embraced and almost never challenged. Dulles’s complete conviction of the righteousness of the anti-Communist cause as well as the significance of his role in the battle against Communism contributed to the strength of his public orations. He never faltered or reconsidered his position in interviews, and his responses, like his speeches, tended to have a proselytizing quality. Influenced by his experience as a clergyman, Dulles presented matters in terms of good and evil or black and white; based on his reasoning, gray areas did not exist.

In July 1956, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal—that is, took over its ownership and operation, thus removing the canal from British (and, to a lesser extent, French) control. The Suez Canal links the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea, the latter of which provides access to the Indian Ocean. The area surrounding the Suez Canal is the only land bridge connecting Africa and Asia. The nationalization of the canal sparked the Suez Crisis of 1956 and threatened peace throughout the world. When Nasser refused to hand the canal over to the European powers, the British and French began bombing Egypt. In the midst of this crisis, Dulles gave his Address to the United Nations on the Suez Crisis on efforts to resolve the crisis.