The Road to the Permanent Warfare State
by Gregory Bresiger, Posted August 10, 2011
In modern political society it is probably a fact that national leadership can heighten foreign crises to the point where war becomes almost inevitable and public approval, at least for a time, automatic. -- Arthur A. Ekirch Jr. Ideas, Ideals, and American Diplomacy
War is Peace. -- George Orwell, 1984
The U.S. government today is a contradiction. It presides over a nation supposedly at peace. Yet it is always preparing for war. It is a perpetual warfare state -- a government under which liberty and property are less and less secure.
It is one in which the average citizen must pay higher and higher taxes for the skyrocketing costs of a leviathan state that spends $671 billion a year on "defense" so that it can police the world. The citizen, in the supposed interest of safety, must yield more and more liberties. He must endure more intrusions owing to "national security." That's because the U.S. government's imperial foreign policy of the past 65 years has made myriad enemies.
But America didn't always have a foreign policy of endless enemies, alliances, countless interventions, and endangered liberty. Indeed, there was a time when the United States shunned all military alliances. It had no huge military establishment.
To become a leviathan, the United States had to undergo a transformation. Much of that transformation happened during the presidency of Harry Truman, who succeeded Franklin Roosevelt in the spring of 1945 and was president until the winter of 1952-53. Under Truman, American policymakers rejected the noninterventionism and trade-oriented foreign policy that had characterized early America.
"The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible," George Washington wrote in his Farewell Address. As a general practice, he recommended against alliances because the nation would be bogged down in quarrels and wars. "It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world," he wrote. He also counseled that the nation "observe good faith and justice towards all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all."
That pacific, no-alliance policy is today what mainstream media often scornfully call "isolationism." Nevertheless, isolationism was the norm of American foreign policy for more than a century. It was a policy that was explained by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, in 1821.
"[The United States] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy," he famously said. "She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own." Adams also warned that if the nation ever veered from this noninterventionist standard, "she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication.… The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force."
An example of the isolationist policy that once characterized the United States was the Greek war for independence in the 1820s. Adams, like most Americans, wanted the Greeks to break away from the Ottoman Empire. Still, the U.S. government unlike many Western governments provided no military aid to the rebels. Americans sympathized with the struggle of people who wanted freedom, but believed that the role of the U.S. government was not to remake nations. It also wasn't its place, Americans believed in the 19th century, to join alliances and become a part in the struggle for world power. That changed in the 20th century.
Sen. Robert Taft was a conservative Republican who in the 1940s and 1950s tried to restore America's noninterventionist tradition. He warned that the policy of alliances would "promote war instead of peace." What should America's foreign policy be in an era of turbulence, of war, and near wars? Taft, in his only book, A Foreign Policy for America, wrote that the United States should work on improving itself rather than going around the world trying to correct other nations: "The United States should set an example of living so well at home that all other nations will wonder, envy and decide to emulate us."
America's traditional foreign policy
Isolationist supporters had spurned empires like those of Britain and France, along with their countless wars. There was another part of this isolationist tradition.
The hostility to empires included a suspicion of large standing armies. That was a libertarian idea. It was based, in part, on the experience of Britain in the English Civil War which ended in a military dictatorship presided over by Oliver Cromwell and the later Glorious Revolution of 1688. Standing armies, many Englishmen believed after the Glorious Revolution that drove out James II, inevitably led to domestic tyranny.
That anti-militarist tradition, as transmitted to America through some of the great English philosophers, called for reduced military budgets once a war was over, in order to protect against undue military influence in society. Many of the Founding Fathers supported the anti-militarist tradition, as expressed in the 18th-century writings of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in The Independent Whig and Cato's Letters.
Their writings charged that James II's attachment to a big military had been dangerous. "King James II wanted no Army to help him to preserve the Constitution, nor to reconcile the People to their own Interest: But, as he intended to invade and destroy both, Corruption and a Standing Army could enable him to do it; and (thank God) even his Army failed him," according to Cato's Letters.
Trenchard's and Gordon's work, which appeared in colonial America, was very popular. Large standing armies, many Americans believed, were inimical to liberty and became one of the causes of the American Revolution. Anti-militarism was an important part of the heritage of liberty of the United States.
George III, American revolutionaries wrote in the Declaration of Independence, "kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies, without the consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power."
Those policies resulted in an anti-militarist sentiment in early America that developed into a tradition dominant for a century and that took another century to extinguish. Still, in the 19th century it was strong.
"Has not the experience of the past demonstrated," warned Rep. William Baker of Kansas late in the 19th century, "that just as you increase the army and the navy of a country you deprive a people to that extent of their liberties?"
Indeed, in his book The Civilian and the Military, Arthur A. Ekirch Jr., quotes Grant administration Interior Secretary Carl Schurz as saying Americans should be proud of not needing a large navy. "This is their distinguishing privilege and it is their true glory," said Schurz, who had fled his native Germany in 1848 because of its militarism.
America's often misinterpreted isolationist tradition was also alive in the 20th century, although it was growing weaker. In the 1930s, Sen. William Borah said that in matters of trade the United States "has never" been isolationist. But "in all matters political, in all commitments of any nature ... we have been isolationist."
Weakening the tradition with war
The process of destroying America's noninterventionist tradition began around the turn of the 20th century, with the tragic Spanish-American War of 1898. Like George W. Bush's war on Iraq in the early part of the 21st century, the Spanish-American War was justified by extremely questionable evidence in this case the role that Spain was thought to have played in the blowing up of the American battleship Maine, which had been sent to Havana on a "goodwill tour" during a time of heightened tensions between Spain and Cuba.
Just as there was never any evidence uncovered establishing that there were WMDs in Iraq, which President Bush had used to justify war on Iraq, so too no evidence was found linking the Spanish government to the explosion of the Maine. U.S. Navy Adm. Hyman Rickover affirmed that lack of evidence in his book El Maine y La Guerra de Cuba. He noted that, when the Maine exploded, Spanish sailors rushed to save Americans. A few weeks afterwards, when America had been stampeded into war, some of those Americans would be trying to kill their rescuers.
The isolationists were the Americans who opposed the Spanish-American War. They were the ones who formed the Anti-Imperialism League. They were also the Americans who opposed American entry into World War I.
They were suspicious of secret agreements that Franklin Roosevelt made in the 1930s to bail out the British. They are also the ones we will meet in this article who objected to the militarization of American foreign policy. But, with each war and near war, the strength of isolationism declined.
Truman triumphant
Finally, in the decade after World War II, the isolationist influence on American foreign policy was shunted to the margins of American life. That's when America turned its back on what was left of its isolationism. The United States entered its first peacetime military alliance, NATO. The U.S. National Security Council in 1950 wrote a then- secret government paper, NSC-68, that justified a significant increase in military spending. Although declassified two decades later, there has been little public discussion about its significance and even today few people have ever heard of it. Americans also passively accepted the Truman Doctrine, a policy stating that the United States would support Greece and Turkey with economic and military aid to prevent them from failing under the control of the Soviet Union.
This time, owing to the Truman Doctrine, the United States became involved in a war in Greece. It intervened with the justification of fighting communism. Without a doubt, it was a major turning point in American history.
We will explore in this series how, why, and when the transformation happened. It was roughly from the end of World War II in 1945 until about a decade later.
That's when all of the major elements of an America as a national-security state were adopted: an imperial presidency that unilaterally made war, sometimes secretly; a huge military establishment; permanent military alliances; and a permanent spying organization, the CIA.
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd1105d.asp
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The Road to the Permanent Warfare State, Part 2
by Gregory Bresiger, Posted August 31, 2011
[George} Kennan's policy was based on the idea that we must "regard the Soviet Union as a rival, not a partner in the political arena." Walter Lippmann
What President Truman accomplished in the 1940s and 1950s with the help of men such as George Kennan was to jettison the historic idea of isolationism and to gain widespread acceptance for the policies of a national-security state. That signal change is now rarely debated, just as few people challenge the ideas of the welfare state. Empire is now "a way of life," wrote historian William Appleman Williams in 1959 in his book The Tragedy of American Diplomacy.
Those changes dramatically transformed the political landscape in America. Both major political parties, no matter how much they criticized each other then and since, are fully committed to the garrison state, now in place for the last 65 years. Almost all major political figures in post–World War II America not only accepted the garrison state, they also used it to further American "interests."
Yet the road from isolationism to garrison state followed a strange, ironic path in the case of Kennan.
George Kennan was an obscure State Department official in Moscow in the 1930s and through most of World War II. A specialist in Soviet affairs, his State Department writings and complaints about Stalin were dismissed by amateur diplomats such as U.S. ambassador Joe Davies, the author of Mission to Moscow a silly book with inscribed photos from Stalin and a Soviet prosecutor. Davies insisted that the Soviet show trials of the 1930s were fair. He sent out Kennan, his translator, for sandwiches during trial breaks.
Yet by the end of the war and for about five years after World War II until he was exiled to academia in 1950, this ex-sandwich order-taker was arguably the most important foreign policy advisor in the Truman administration. He became the head of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff. His quick rise was based on two signal documents, a long telegram from Moscow in 1946 and a subsequent article in the influential Foreign Affairs magazine. Those documents were the basis of the containment doctrine adopted by Truman.
Kennan's words were seized upon during a time when the Soviet Union's supreme leader, Joseph Stalin, was making postwar speeches in which he said that capitalism and communism were enemies and could never be reconciled. Yet that was the kind of Stalin speech that had been standard before the Soviet Union's World War II alliance with the Americans.
Kennan's writings, which had been ignored for years, were suddenly closely read by policymakers, including the president. They used his writings to transform America into a garrison state by the early 1950s. The new order would eventually be accepted by both major parties. That's when the philosophy of isolationism fully expired, with the United States taking on the role of confronting the Soviets everywhere around the globe.
"It will be clearly seen," Kennan wrote in 1946, "that the Soviet pressure against free institutions of the Western World is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy." Kennan's ideas were mostly accepted by subsequent administrations.
Yet ironically, Kennan, in the first volume of his memoirs, later disowned a large part of U.S. foreign policy. "Much of it," he wrote, "reads exactly like one of those primers put out by alarmed congressional committees or the Daughters of the American Revolution, designed to arouse the citizenry to the dangers of the Communist conspiracy."
Kennan, one of the intellectual godfathers of the garrison state, believed that many of his ideas were distorted to justify alliances, huge military budgets, and interventions around the world with little or no strategic import.
Kennan's doubts
Kennan later said he thought the United States should confront the Soviets in only five strategic points around the world. He conceded that his writings were not clear on that point and were used as a rationalization for interventions all over the world.
Kennan opposed NATO and National Security Council Paper 68 (NSC-68) and criticized many of the principles of Truman Doctrine, all of which we will review in this series. He opposed the Vietnam War and called for nuclear disarmament. The irony is that, by the 1990s, he came to believe that the isolationist tenets of John Quincy Adams, albeit with certain adjustments, "are entirely suitable" and "greatly needed as a guide for an American policy in the coming period."
Also toward the end of his life, Kennan tried to persuade George W. Bush a man he called "extremely shallow" not to go to war against Iraq. But the damage had already been done 60 years before.
American elite policymakers embraced the ideas of the Truman Doctrine, NATO, and the National Security Act of 1947 (which created the National Security Council and the CIA), even though most Americans then or now know little of the National Security Act or the Truman Doctrine or a myriad other creations of the warfare state that have become a permanent part of our society.
NSC-68, along with sweeping changes outlined in the NATO charter and in the Truman Doctrine, was a watershed. After World War II, America indeed went abroad in search of "monsters to destroy," from the Near East to Korea to Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan.
NSC-68 became one of documents that justified a state of permanent war or near war. It was initiated by the first modern Defense secretary, James Forrestal, just after World War II. It was Forrestal who coined the term "semi-war."
The term is defined as a "condition in which great dangers always threaten the United States and will continue doing so into the indefinite future," according to Andrew Bacevich, a former career military officer and author of the 2010 book Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War.
Semi-war, Bacevich adds, means the nation faces the prospect of hostilities "beginning at any moment, with little or no warning. In the setting of national priorities, readiness to act becomes a supreme value."
Kennan, in the 1970s, attacked the concept of semi-war. He complained that the overemphasis on military policy combined with a view that one could never effectively negotiate with the Soviets were two of the great mistakes of foreign policy.
It resulted, he warned, in the "extreme militarization not only of our thought but of our lives that has become the mark of our postwar age. And this is a militarization that has profound effects not just on our foreign policies but also on our society."
It also had another danger, according to Kennan:
- It has led to what I and many others have come to see as a serious distortion of our national economy. We have been obliged to habituate ourselves to an expenditure annually of a great portion of our national income on the production and export of armaments, and the maintenance of a vast armed force establishment purposes that add nothing to the real productive capacity of our economy, and only deprive us every year of tens of billions of dollars that might otherwise go to productive investment.
Sen. John Kennedy, successfully running for president in 1960, argued there was "a missile gap." The United States, he claimed, was falling behind the Soviet Union and must expand its military faster.
Yet White House aide and Kennedy family historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in his book A Thousand Days, later conceded it was a canard. He says that Kennedy's Defense secretary, Robert McNamara, in "a candid background talk to newspapermen, was ready to dismiss the gap as an illusion."
Therefore, a superfluous military buildup in Kennedy's presidency went ahead, as it had in Truman's and Eisenhower's. There had been so many scares followed by military buildups in post–World War II America that Eisenhower would publicly warn about "a military-industrial complex" in his Farewell Address. Nevertheless, Eisenhower did little to dismantle it.
Ronald Reagan in 1980 also rode to power on the specious claim that the United States was a crippled giant that needed a 1,000-ship navy. The Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) a 1970s committee many of whose members would serve in the Reagan administration and some of whom had worked on NSC-68 argued that the Soviet Union had a first-strike nuclear capability. The CPD claimed that the Soviet Union could impose nuclear blackmail on the United States. It was a dubious claim, given that the United States retained a triad of nuclear capabilities, including land- and sea-based strike forces. And it had been so for decades following World War II.
The sky is always falling.
But, as we will see in this series, the claims of pending doom worked again and again. Those claims were overdone, enabling the garrison state to grow relentlessly in war and peace no matter how baseless or overblown the threat, creating a spiral of useless defense spending, wars, and near-wars. Even when a threat was exposed as a hoax, the budget increase was never reversed. The same had occurred in the 19th-century British Empire, as detailed in Richard Cobden's masterful pamphlet The Three Panics.
The change to an American leviathan to combat the supposedly monolithic threat was also the result of the Truman Doctrine, which was born out of the containment idea. Truman, in a famous speech to Congress in 1947, succeeded in spooking the nation. He persuaded the country that the Soviet Union, with all communist countries united behind it, was moving toward world domination. Both were absurd claims, as we will see.
But how could the president sell them?
Truman would have to make an overwhelming case that America and most of the world was threatened. He needed a set of principles, a doctrine, to guide the nation. What he got was a doctrine that would outlast his administration and the enemy it was designed to confront.
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd1106d.asp
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