Discussion of U.S. foreign policy often proceeds as if the foreign and domestic are neatly separated realms. But what if the expanded purview of U.S. global policing has in fact been a medium for the expansion of coercive governance without democracy at home as well as overseas? As historians have documented, to launch the Cold War the Truman administration had to “scare the hell out the American people,” as Senator Arthur Vandenberg allegedly counseled President Truman to do in March 1947, on the grounds that the U.S. public expected to live at peace and lacked the requisite martial ambition. Similarly, a high-level study in the mid–1950s, directed by Harvard Professor William Yandell Elliott, concluded that the United States could not simply allow countries to revolt from colonial empires and conduct their own affairs. Instead, U.S. economic and resource needs were such that “it will not always be possible for the West to avoid interventions which are too reminiscent of colonialism to win the approval of Western and native liberals.” Then, much as now, the disastrous military interventions of the future were being set in motion without the check of democratic politics.
Interventions proceeded apace, beginning with the secret C.I.A.–initiated overthrow in 1953 of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran and of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala the following year. A decade later Washington used a minor skirmish in the Gulf of Tonkin as pretext for sending U.S. ground forces to Vietnam. In the 1980s came the funding of the Nicaraguan Contras in contravention of congressional prohibitions codified in the 1982–84 Boland Amendment. This pattern endured with the hyping of the threat posed by Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” as a prelude to the 2003 invasion.
A trail of intentional deceit, manipulation, and fraud has thus marked efforts to conscript or mislead a skeptical U.S. public into wars subsequently judged to have been unnecessary, unaccountable, and unjust. Professor Elliott, it turns out, was the Ph.D. advisor to a young Henry Kissinger, a man whose career indexes much of this tragic arc. It was Kissinger, after all, who observed, when signaling U.S. support for the military overthrow in 1973 of Chile’s democratically elected socialist president, Salvatore Allende, that such matters were too important to be left to the will of the Chilean people. So it might be said of U.S. leaders’ attitude toward the American people.
The problem is greater than the Beltway insulation of foreign policy making. The bipartisan political consensus supporting a hypertrophied U.S. global military presence is a popular target, but it can obscure the longer-standing cycles of foreign threat inflation in the interests of partisan politics and defense industry gains. This domestic political dynamic regularly clouds international judgment and corrupts democratic politics. Lyndon Johnson viewed the Vietnam war as a price to pay, lest cherished domestic priorities become casualties to G.O.P. attacks that he “lost Vietnam” as the Truman administration had supposedly “lost China” (a key charge of Senator Joseph McCarthy). Presidential candidate Richard Nixon chose to sabotage the Paris Peace Accords in 1968 rather than risk losing the election to Hubert Humphry, allowing the war to rage on at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.