By ‘they’ we mean the Arab world, specifically Iran, Iraq, Vietnam, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Cuba pretty much all of South America.
FRESH AIR: In 1953, for the first and only time in history, two brothers were appointed to head the overt and covert sides of American foreign policy. President Dwight Eisenhower appointed John Foster Dulles secretary of state, and Allen Dulles director of the CIA. Journalist Stephen Kinzer says the Dulles brothers shaped America’s standoff with the Soviet Union, led the U.S. into war in Vietnam, and helped topple governments they thought unfriendly to American interests in Guatemala, Iran, the Congo and Indonesia. In his new book, The Brothers, Kinzer says the Dulles’ actions “helped set off some of the world’s most profound long-term crises.” John Dulles died in 1959. President Kennedy replaced Allen Dulles after 
the covert operation he recommended to overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba ended disastrously in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Kinzer tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that the Dulles’ shared background and ideology played out in their policy decisions: “They had this view of the world that was implanted in them from a very young age,” Kinzer says. “That there’s good and evil, and it’s the obligation of the good people to go out into the world and destroy the evil ones.” MORE
STEPHEN KINZER: The Dulles brothers not only saw a danger coming from the Soviet Union, which of course was a nuclear-armed state at the height of the Cold War and for many years afterward, they also saw an equal danger coming from countries all over the world that were embracing what we now see as simple nationalism. Countries that emerged and decided that they didn’t want to side with the United States in the Cold War and didn’t want to be involved in the Cold War, seemed to the Dulles brothers to be tools of the Kremlin. They completely failed to understand the nature of third-world nationalism. You had hundreds of millions of people in Africa, Asia and even in Latin America emerging from colonialism. They were looking for a place in this tumultuous world. The Dulles brothers couldn’t see that; they assumed that all these neutralist and nationalist movements were part of the Kremlin strategy. MORE
