Upon the request of President of Columbia Dwight D. Eisenhower, in 1951 Fox became the first director of the university's Institute of War and Peace Studies, a position he would hold for 25 years. Fox said that the new institute would focus on security studies and that its aim was "to find a road to security with the most peace and the least war." Early areas of focus for the institute were civil–military relations and the Cold War and nuclear strategy; these areas, and especially the first, were of particular interest to Fox. Meanwhile, Fox remained focused on developing the academic discipline of international relations theory and was one of the key influential figures in discussions about that theory during this period.