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Dulles moved on from there to settle the intolerable situation in Korea, in which the Kaesong-Panmunjom truce talks had dragged on for 18 months while U.S. and U.N. forces suffered thousands of casualties a week. He informed Red China, through India's neutralist Prime Minister Nehru, that it would have to conclude the Panmunjom talks or risk an all-out U.S. drive to win the war. Red China signed. Dulles was improvising, experimenting, learning as he went along. His next move: Indo-China. First, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Radford recommended U.S. naval air strikes to help the beleaguered French, but Dulles was against it, and the President vetoed this plan; subsequently, the French handed over North Viet Nam (pop. 14 million) to Communism. But after that, the U.S. haltingly, then decisively, threw U.S. support to a shaky new Nationalist government in South Viet Nam, helped negotiate and set up a brand new Southeast Asia Treaty Organization ("Pactomania," said the critics) that has faced up to Communism in Southeast Asia ever since.
When, in early 1955, the Communists launched concerted attacks against Chinese Nationalist positions up and down the Formosa Strait, Dulles took it as a crucial probe of U.S. intentions. His response was immediate and unmistakable. The President sought and got a congressional resolution of support for U.S. defense of Formosa and the Pescadores; the President followed that up with a personal letter to Nationalist China's Chiang promising support at islands Quemoy and Matsu. Result: the Communists backed off, and the whole Red China offensive, rolling ever since Mao Tse-tung came out of the Yenan caves, was bogged down.
Showdown: 1956
In Central Europe the cold war entered another phase. On Communism's side of the Iron Curtain Stalin had died, plunging the Kremlin into years of medieval intrigue while Nikita Khrushchev emerged as new dictator. On the allies' side, the phenomenon was the emergence of Western Europe, through Marshall Plan recovery and its own industry, as a hopeful, prospering showcase of what free men could do. At Budapest, in October and November 1956, Hungarian freedom fighters, workers, students, soldiers proved the Communist puppet government to be a hollow sham, reveled in five days of freedom, looked to the U.S. and the U.N. for help. The U.S. had no plan of action, and the revolt was smashed, but with it were smashed Communist pretensions of benevolent big brotherhood and Moscow's hopes for reliance on satellite armies.
One complicating factor in Hungary—which doubtless made Moscow bold—was that simultaneously the West was involved in the tragic affair of Suez. The buildup to Suez: 1) Dulles angered Egypt's Dictator Nasser when he pulled back U.S. aid from the Aswan Dam in retaliation for Nasser's acceptance of Red arms; 2) Nasser seized the Suez Canal; 3) Dulles tried with U.S. allies, with the U.N., to work out a solution and failed. But when Britain, France and Israel launched a sudden attack against Egypt without notice to the U.S., Dulles took the toughest stand for principle of his career. Said he, extemporaneously, in one of his finest speeches at the U.N.: