Evan Thomas, Ike’s Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2012), 496 pp., $29.99.

MOST HISTORICAL questions have no more than modest relevance for current policy debates. Times and context change. The American economy grew rapidly under the protectionist regime of the late nineteenth century; would it thrive under a new protectionist regime? It’s impossible to say, given the radically different nature of the modern world economy. The Vietnam War demonstrated the difficulty of defeating a committed insurgency aided by outside forces; is the American effort in Afghanistan similarly doomed? Maybe, but Afghans aren’t Vietnamese, and the Taliban isn’t communist.

Yet there is one historical question that has direct and overriding policy implications. It might be the most important historical question of the last century and must rank among the top handful of all time: Why has there been no World War III? To sharpen the question, in light of the answer many people reflexively supply: Did the existence of nuclear weapons prevent a third world war?

The question’s significance is obvious, given the consequences of such a war. Its answer is less so, despite that reflexive response. Broadly speaking, there are two possible answers. One is that, yes, nuclear weapons prevented a third world war by pushing the cost of victory far beyond any achievable benefits. This answer presumes that the ideological competition between the United States and the Soviet Union would have escalated to war had the big bombs not scared the daylights out of everyone. The second answer is that, no, the nukes didn’t prevent the war. Something else did. Perhaps war simply wasn’t in the cards.

The first answer seemed reasonable during the quarter century after World War II. The salient model of international relations was the war-prone system of the period from 1914 to 1945. Great powers seemed fated to fight things out like characters in a Greek tragedy—unless some deus ex machina intervened to pull them back. Nukes were that device.

On the other hand, maybe the 1914–1945 model wasn’t applicable to the postwar period. Perhaps the more instructive parallel was the century from 1815 to 1914, when no Europe-wide (let alone worldwide) conflict took place. Perhaps peace, not war, is the ground state of international affairs.

The policy implications of these alternative answers could not be more different. If nuclear weapons were indeed essential to preventing World War III, then the United States and other countries ought to preserve and maintain their nuclear arsenals. It needn’t follow that the nukes should proliferate—although one could reasonably ask whether, if deterrence works among superpowers, it would also work among regional powers. But at least the largest powers ought to keep their nuclear powder dry.

By contrast, if war was not otherwise ordained—if nuclear weapons were not the critical deterrent to war—then the policy implication is just the opposite. The nukes ought to be dismantled. Unnecessary and expensive, they are a horrible accident waiting to happen. The world has been very lucky not to experience nuclear destruction since 1945; such luck can’t last forever.

EVAN THOMAS appears to subscribe to the first school of thought. It forms the premise for Ike’s Bluff, the bluff being that Dwight Eisenhower would use nuclear weapons if the Soviet Union or China pushed too hard against the American sphere. The title is a bit misleading in that Thomas grants that he doesn’t know if the bluff was in fact a bluff or not. “He had kept the peace by threatening all-out war,” Thomas says in summarizing Eisenhower’s eight years in office, adding that he judges it “likely” that Eisenhower had no intention of using nuclear weapons. But he then cites Robert Bowie, who worked with Eisenhower and subsequently studied the issue as a historian, to the opposite effect. “He was sure Ike would have been willing to use nuclear weapons in a crisis (say, if Red China moved on Taiwan),” Thomas writes of Bowie.

We’ll never know, if only because Eisenhower himself probably didn’t know. The great strength of Thomas’s engaging and insightful book is his portrayal of Eisenhower’s ambivalence on some central questions of policy. Eisenhower was elected president in 1952 on the strength of his illustrious performance as supreme allied commander in Europe in World War II. At a time when Americans were more fearful than they had ever been in their national history—legitimately fearful of the Soviet Union’s recently acquired nuclear capability, unduly fearful of communist infiltrators in the U.S. government—they looked to Eisenhower for reassurance. Eisenhower sealed his triumph over Adlai Stevenson by promising to go to Korea, where peace talks to end the war there had bogged down. He didn’t say what he would do in Korea, but millions of Americans assumed that the man who had brought victory home from the greatest war in history could bring victory, or at least peace, home from the limited conflict in Korea.

Eisenhower went to Korea and looked around. Then he returned to America and pondered how to break the logjam in the peace talks. He and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles hinted that if the communists remained intransigent, the United States might use nuclear weapons against them. The logjam broke, although the death of Stalin and the doubt it cast over continued Soviet support for the North Koreans and Chinese probably had as much to do with the breaking as Eisenhower’s saber rattling.

Nonetheless, the episode propelled American diplomacy into the nuclear era. Harry Truman had dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, but after World War II he put the new weapons on the shelf. He didn’t threaten to use them when the Soviets were slow to evacuate Iran in 1946. He didn’t brandish them when the Russians blockaded Berlin in 1948. He didn’t talk about employing them to rescue the Chinese Nationalists from the Chinese Communists in 1949. He conspicuously rejected the advice of Douglas MacArthur to use them in the Korean War in 1951, and he fired MacArthur after the general publicly pressed the matter.

Truman’s seven years of refusing to engage in nuclear diplomacy were followed, within mere weeks, by Eisenhower’s eager embrace of it. Yet Eisenhower’s views on nuclear weapons were mixed, at times conflicted. Even as he suggested that nuclear weapons might be as usable as conventional weapons, he made clear he knew they were something quite different. Thomas deftly describes what many Eisenhower watchers considered the finest speech he ever gave: an April 1953 address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in which he movingly explained what the arms race was costing America and the world. “The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in thirty cities,” Eisenhower said. He went on:

***We pay for a single fighter plane with a half a million bushels of wheat. We pay for a new destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.***

Eisenhower’s remarks were all the more noteworthy in that he was in physical agony while delivering them. Thomas devotes considerable space to Eisenhower’s health, which was far worse than most Americans realized. At the moment of his speech to the editors, he was suffering from acute gastrointestinal distress of a sort that had plagued him his whole adult life. The pressure of work aggravated the condition; the only thing that reliably relieved it was escape from the demands of office. This was why Eisenhower spent so much time playing golf.

But he suffered a heart attack in 1955 and a stroke in 1957. He underwent surgery to remove an intestinal obstruction in 1956. His doctors and press spokesmen conspired to conceal the gravity and extent of his physical troubles. Some of their concern was simple care for Eisenhower’s privacy. But no small part of it was connected to Eisenhower’s reliance on nuclear weapons as a tool of diplomacy. Presumably, if the Soviets discovered that Eisenhower was incapacitated, they might try to jump Berlin or gain an advantage elsewhere. At the same time, Americans and others watching Eisenhower wanted to know that the man with his finger on the nuclear trigger was of sound mind and reasonably sound body.

Thomas’s treatment of Eisenhower’s health is almost his only diversion from foreign policy. He spends a few pages defending Eisenhower’s civil-rights policy against the standard criticism that the Kansas-reared president only grudgingly enforced the Supreme Court’s landmark anti–Jim Crow decision in the 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education. Interestingly, given Thomas’s emphasis on foreign policy, he neglects to note that in the speech Eisenhower gave explaining his reasons for sending federal troops to enforce desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas, the president cited foreign-policy concerns. The world was watching, Eisenhower said, to see if people of color could get fair treatment in America. In a period when hundreds of millions of newly independent people of color in Asia and Africa were choosing between the American system and the Soviet system, this was a matter of gravest importance.

Nor does Thomas cover the waterfront of foreign policy. Africa gets scant mention and Latin America little beyond an account of the CIA’s part in the 1954 overthrow of the Jacobo Arbenz regime in Guatemala. The Middle East is treated sporadically. Thomas discusses Iran and the restoration of the shah in 1953, the Suez War of 1956 and the landing of U.S. troops in Lebanon in 1958. This crisis-driven coverage is appropriate to Thomas’s purpose, which is to examine Eisenhower’s approach to the big issues of national security. But it leaves the reader wondering whether Eisenhower’s responses always suited the stimuli. Mohammed Mossadegh had powerful enemies within Iran; his government might have fallen without the push from the United States. If it had, subsequent generations of Iranians would have had a harder time making a villain out of America. Thomas quotes Eisenhower as asking, at a meeting of the National Security Council on Iran, why it wasn’t possible “to get some of the people in these down-trodden countries to like us instead of hating us.” He seemed honestly puzzled. Yet he signed off on an operation that increased the hatred for the United States. If the decision was necessary—if Iran and its oil were in imminent danger of a Soviet takeover—the anti-American sentiment Eisenhower’s decision generated may have been a necessary cost of defending American security. But Thomas’s tight focus on Eisenhower gives us the view from the Oval Office without allowing us to assess the accuracy of that view—and therefore the wisdom of Eisenhower’s decisions.

THE AUTHOR recounts an intellectual exercise conducted at the beginning of Eisenhower’s first term in which the policy of containment inherited from the Truman administration was revisited and critiqued. The participants in Project Solarium (named for the White House room where they met) examined alternatives to containment, most notably an aggressive policy designed to roll back Soviet control of Eastern Europe. The group concluded that the aggressive policy, which prominent Republicans such as John Foster Dulles had endorsed while in attack-Truman mode during the 1952 political campaign, was dangerously irresponsible. Yet the exercise underscored the principal deficiency of containment: its escalating and evidently unlimited expense. Eisenhower was a fiscal conservative, and he feared that the United States might spend itself into oblivion manning the ramparts of the free world. His preoccupation became containing spending while containing communism. It inspired his adoption of the “New Look,” a strategic posture based on the expectation that nuclear weapons would be readily available to counter Soviet aggression.

Eisenhower approved the New Look, but he left its elaboration to others in the administration. Dulles took the lead, explaining to the Council on Foreign Relations in early 1954 that the United States would not allow America to be nibbled to death fighting brushfire wars in out-of-the-way places. Only months after the end of the war in Korea, a conflict that seemed to epitomize what Dulles was describing, the new approach appeared straightforward and resolute. “The basic decision was to depend primarily upon a great capacity to retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of our own choosing,” Dulles said. His audience and foreign-policy analysts interpreted him to mean that the United States might use nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union or China should those countries allow or encourage their communist protégés to attack noncommunist regimes.

This was indeed what Dulles meant. But he couldn’t follow through because the “massive retaliation” policy, as it came to be called, was incredible on its face. Would the United States really launch a nuclear war over some peripheral interest? It strained belief. Eisenhower and Dulles had the opportunity to demonstrate their nuclear resolve—or lack of resolve—that spring when Vietnamese Communists besieged the French fortress of Dien Bien Phu. Some of Eisenhower’s top military advisers, including Arthur Radford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, thought Dien Bien Phu provided the perfect opportunity to show the world that the administration was serious about making nuclear weapons part of its available arsenal. Eisenhower danced around the subject before deciding that Vietnam was a bad place for American intervention. “No military victory is possible in that kind of theater,” he wrote in his diary. Yet he pushed responsibility for America’s nonintervention onto Congress and onto the British, saying he would deploy American force only with legislative approval and with allies. He knew neither would be forthcoming. Neither was.

EISENHOWER LATER had an even better chance to show he was willing to use nuclear weapons. China claimed authority over Taiwan, to which the Nationalists had fled in 1949 after losing to the Communists on the mainland. But China lacked the amphibious ability to cross the hundred-mile Taiwan Strait, and so Beijing fulminated at the Nationalists from a distance. A couple of islands claimed by the Nationalists, however, lay within shelling distance of the mainland, and periodically the Chinese opened fire. The Eisenhower administration, in keeping with a partisan Republican fondness for the Nationalists, signed a mutual-defense pact with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government, making Washington indirectly responsible for the vulnerable islands.

To the Eisenhower administration, the islands became the Sudetenland of the Cold War: strategically insignificant but politically essential. Communism was on a roll in Asia, administration officials reasoned, and to lose the offshore islands would signal that America’s guarantees were no better than those of Britain and France to Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. The islands were indefensible by conventional arms, which meant the United States would have to go nuclear if the Chinese assaulted them in force.

Again, some of the president’s top advisers lobbied for a nuclear response. Chairman Radford contended that if the United States didn’t deliver at least a tactical nuclear riposte to China’s blatant provocation, the world would conclude that the New Look and massive retaliation were a sham and the Americans would never go nuclear. Dulles told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the United States needed to push back hard against China. “We have got to be prepared to take the risk of war with China, if we are going to stay in the Far East,” Dulles said. “If we are not going to take that risk, all right, let’s make that decision and we get out and we make our defenses in California.”

Eisenhower appeared to agree. A reporter asked him if the United States would use nuclear weapons in the event of war with China. The president replied, “I see no reason why they shouldn’t be used just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else.”

But then he backed away. Perhaps he thought he had made his point sufficiently. Perhaps he estimated that the war fever rising on the Republican Right was getting out of hand. In any event, he deliberately muddled the question of nuclear weapons at a subsequent news conference. His press secretary, James Hagerty, cautioned him against talking the administration into a corner. Eisenhower replied with a smile: “Don’t worry, Jim, if that question comes up, I’ll just confuse them.”

So he did. “The only thing I know about war was two things,” Eisenhower said, continuing:

***The most changeable factor in war is human nature in its day-by-day manifestation; but the only unchanging factor about war is human nature. And the next thing is that every war is going to astonish you in the way it occurred and the way it is carried out. So that for a man to predict, particularly if he had the responsibility for making the decision, to predict what he is going to use, how he is going to do it, would I think exhibit his ignorance of war; that is what I believe. So I think you just have to wait, and that is the kind of prayerful decision that may some day face a President.***

Eisenhower was pleased with his obfuscation, but matters had gotten beyond his control. He had placed himself and the country in a position where the decision to initiate war—a war that would require a nuclear response from America—lay with the Chinese. And he couldn’t say what the Chinese would do. In his diary, he remarked that war was “entirely possible.” And it would be over some trivial bits of real estate. “Those damn little offshore islands,” he muttered amid the crisis. “Sometimes I wish they’d sink.”

The Chinese spared Eisenhower and the world a war. Continuing to denounce the Nationalists and the Americans, they settled for sporadic shelling of the islands rather than a concerted assault. Thomas gives Eisenhower more credit than he deserves for the outcome. Thomas concedes the president took a gamble, but he likens it to that of an experienced poker player. “Eisenhower was able to bluff without showing his hand,” Thomas says, employing the metaphor of his title. “Such were the odds of the gambler.”

Thomas’s book breaks little ground unfamiliar to Eisenhower specialists. The revision of Eisenhower’s reputation as a divot-chopping dullard began three decades ago. Thomas cites the pertinent academic sources and the documents on which the revision was based. The masterful Ike he portrays has been a standard feature of the literature for some time. Thomas’s treatment is valuable nonetheless for the verve of its telling and convenience of bringing disparate and specialized sources together.

Thomas also adeptly integrates recent research on Soviet leadership and decision making. A central challenge for Eisenhower during the fifties was figuring out who was in charge in Moscow, particularly after Stalin’s death in 1953. Not until the 1955 summit meeting at Geneva, where Nikita Khrushchev overruled Nikolai Bulganin to nix Eisenhower’s proposal to open the skies of each superpower to reconnaissance flights by the other (a rejection that cost the United States little, as the U-2 program was well under way), did American leaders perceive how the struggle was playing out. “I saw clearly then, for the first time, the identity of the real boss of the Soviet delegation,” Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs.

Yet discerning Khrushchev’s emergence afforded only modest guidance to American policy. Khrushchev was unpredictable, blustering one day, backtracking the next. Uncertainty about Khrushchev and his intentions was part of the grand imponderable facing American policy makers during the Cold War. And it necessarily affects any judgment of Eisenhower’s presidential performance. A president may be decisive, bold, articulate and charismatic. Eisenhower was sometimes these and sometimes not. But the most basic question about a president is: Is he right? Does he accurately perceive the world? Does he understand the motives and intentions of his competitors and counterparts? Does he foresee the consequences of his actions?

American strategic planning and foreign policy during the Cold War were designed to deter or defeat an attack by the Soviet Union. The United States spent hundreds of billions of dollars to that end, and it engaged in wars in Korea and Vietnam that claimed nearly a hundred thousand American lives. Was the money well spent? Were the deaths necessary? Did the Soviet Union ever seriously contemplate attacking the United States?

Regarding the Eisenhower years, Thomas thinks not. “The fear of Soviet attack that gripped policy makers in the early 1950s seems exaggerated, even paranoid, from a post–Cold War perspective,” he says. “It turns out that the Soviets were even more afraid of an attack than the West was.” Thomas doesn’t address the likelihood of a conventional attack in Europe, but on the subject that kept Americans awake at night he declares, “During Dwight Eisenhower’s term of office, the chances of the Soviet Union even trying to launch a nuclear attack on the United States were remote.” Soviet nuclear capabilities were no match for those of the United States, and the Soviets knew it.

Eisenhower knew it too. Thus, Thomas wonders why the president let Americans think a Soviet attack was a genuine possibility, especially during the post-Sputnik period when fears of the apocalypse reached alarming proportions and eroded his standing with the American people. “It is puzzling that Eisenhower did not do more to reassure his frightened countrymen,” Thomas says. He suggests that this was part of Eisenhower’s big bluff. “Perhaps he believed that for the American nuclear threat to be credible to the watching Russians, the Americans, too, had to believe that nuclear war was a real (if remote) possibility.”

ALL THIS points to an inescapable conclusion: the angst Americans felt about nuclear war during the fifties was largely self-inflicted. The foremost threat to world peace in that era was not the Soviet Union or China but the United States. Soviet aggression consisted almost exclusively of ill treatment of those already in the Soviet sphere; Soviet foreign policy was marked by caution rather than adventurism. The Chinese sent troops to Korea after American troops approached the Yalu River, but otherwise they too stayed close to home. When Eisenhower and Dulles fretted about the need to go nuclear, they were responding not to threats to American security but to challenges to American credibility—to their credibility. And when that credibility was strained, the strain owed to such improbable guarantees as the one given to Chiang over the offshore islands.

Eisenhower wasn’t cynical, but he recognized that cynicism—and narrow self-interest—drove much of American Cold War policy. The army and its political and industrial sponsors resented, resisted and ultimately defeated his emphasis on nuclear weapons. The New Look lost its way not only because Eisenhower was never willing to pull the nuclear trigger but also because Congress refused to unfund conventional forces. The result was the worst of both worlds: the high risk of reliance on nuclear weapons along with the high cost of procurement of conventional arms. Eisenhower was a proud man who didn’t lightly admit defeat, but his farewell address, delivered in the weary tone of an old man finally showing his age, essentially acknowledged that much of American national-security policy was being dictated by a “military-industrial complex” for purposes only tangentially related to American security.

The subtitle of Thomas’s book—“President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World”—sounds like something the marketing department at Little, Brown and Co. cooked up. But to the extent that the subtitle captures the reality of Eisenhower’s presidency, the reader is compelled to ask whom Eisenhower was saving the world from. He himself wouldn’t have said he was saving the world, but he would have said he was guarding America and its allies against communism. And in defending his nuclear brinkmanship, he would have argued that strong measures were required to hold back the communist tide. Yet, as the crisis in the Taiwan Strait revealed, these strong measures entailed risks of nuclear war for which Eisenhower and the United States would have borne the blame. Arthur Radford wanted just such a war to demonstrate America’s seriousness. But most of the world would have thought the Americans were out of their minds to launch a nuclear war over islands the Americans themselves judged inconsequential. And the ironic result doubtless would have been to win far more converts to communism.

Eisenhower wasn’t out of his mind. But the policy structure over which he presided verged on the irrational. Eisenhower held back the irrationality, with difficulty. He saved America from itself—and in doing so, maybe he did save the world.

H. W. Brands has written various books on American history and foreign policy. His most recent title is The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace (Doubleday, 2012).