How Far Was the Failure of the Hungarian Uprising Due to the Failures of the West?
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How far was the failure of the Hungarian uprising due to the weakness and the incompetence of the West in 1956?The Hungarian Uprising, in hindsight, never had a chance of succeeding from the start, because Khrushchev would never have let them leave the Warsaw Pact willingly and become independent, and Eisenhower never had any intention of sending men behind the Iron Curtain. The failure of the uprising was Imry Nagy’s fault for being ignorant because Nagy decided after the extent of the demonstrations in Hungary, despite his reforms, that he would abandon the ties he held with the Soviet Union and leave the Warsaw Pact, to appeal for help from the UN. This was somewhat a bad idea on the whole, since the USSR were members of the UN so had the power to veto, so would have been unhelpful anyway.However, the West were completely ignorant and unhelpful as to the Hungary situation and this led to the UN losing some credibility in Europe at the time, as the Hungarians had been encouraged by a pirate radio station from West Germany saying the West would help them and send men to help if they were to try and overthrow Communism. However, as I’ve said Eisenhower had no intention and would not send men to Hungary, leaving the Hungarians out on their own against Russia, with false hope, showing their incompetence towards the situation. At the time of the appeal the world had turned to the Suez Crisis, which began at the same time. However, the West still made no reaction to the appeal and no attempt to help, despite the call from Eisenhower for ‘Roll Back’.
I think that overall, the Hungarian Uprising was the West’s fault as far as not sending in a response to the 15 divisions (200,000 men) and 4000 tanks that the Soviets sent into Budapest. They could have helped they were just unwilling and perhaps unprepared to do so. The lack of response from the UN to Nagy was a sign of their weakness maybe to be seen to be outright fighting in a proxy war against the Soviets. Overall they could have just been trying not to make advances into the Cold War that would bring it out of its lack-of-fighting state. However I definitely think they were incompetent in this case and not at all willing to help a country that wanted to pull away from Communism and become independent.