SOURCE: "John Foster Dulles and the Creation of the South-East Asia Treaty Organization in 1954," in International History Review, Vol. 11, No. 3, August, 1989, pp. 457-77.

In the following essay, Dingman discusses the successes and limitations of Dulles's involvement in the creation of SEATO, an organization that Dulles largely envisioned as designed to check possible communist aggression in Southeast Asia.

When John Foster Dulles resigned as secretary of state in 1959, newspapers provided readers with the statistics of his statesmanship. The record was impressive: he had travelled nearly half a million miles on more than a hundred visits to forty-six countries on every continent except Antarctica. Among Dulles's accomplishments during his tenure as secretary of state was the conclusion of three collective security pacts. These, when added to the three similar treaties he had negotiated for the Truman administration, linked the United States with ten Asia/Pacific states. Of all these treaties...