In foreign policy, his government supported the United Kingdom during the Suez Crisis and got involved in the Congo Crisis, by accepting white refugees and supporting State of Katanga and its leader Moise Tshombe.
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It also provided airlift support in the following crises: the nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956; the Hungarian Revolution of 1956; the 1958 Lebanon crisis; support for UN forces in the Congo in 1960–1961; the invasion of India by Communist Chinese forces in 1962–1963; airlift of peacekeeping forces to Cyprus in 1964; and the Middle East crisis of 1967.
In the 1964 civil war, all the 46 nuns were kidnapped by Simba rebels and taken to Wamba, and later to Isiro where some of them were killed, amongst others Marie-Clémentine Anuarite Nengapeta.
Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of independent Congo, was executed in January 1961 during the Congo Crisis.
The song Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner, co-written by singer-songwriter Warren Zevon and former mercenary David Lindell about a fictitious mercenary in sub-Saharan Africa, states that "in sixty-six and seven, they fought the Congo war." The Congo Crisis itself ended by the end of 1965, with the Kisangani Mutinies in 1966 and 1967 as part of its aftermath.
During the Congo Crisis, Indian peacekeepers with recoilless rifles destroyed at least one ex-Belgian Greyhound manned by Katangese separatists.
In its early decades, the body was largely paralyzed by the Cold War division between the US and USSR and their allies, though it authorized interventions in the Korean War and the Congo Crisis and peacekeeping missions in the Suez Crisis, Cyprus, and West New Guinea.