When President Donald Trump declared a national emergency last month, as the coronavirus outbreak worsened, he deployed language familiar and perhaps oddly comforting to many Americans. Designating himself “a wartime president,” Trump likened the country’s COVID-19 response to the U.S.’s mobilization during World War II. “Every generation of Americans has been called to make shared sacrifices for the good of the nation,” Trump insisted.
This rhetorical maneuver reflected the long American history of declaring “war” on any conceivable enemy — whether physical, abstract, domestic or foreign. But as familiar and ubiquitous as war might be for many Americans, at least figuratively, that same history also shows that it is a poor framework through which to understand complex social problems such as poverty and public-health emergencies like the novel coronavirus or drug addiction.
War has been a permanent condition and the governing metaphor for American life since at least the Second World War. Instead of reining in its military and defense infrastructure at the end of the war — and the beginning of what is ironically known as the “postwar” period — the U.S. opted to go in the opposite direction, bolstering the national security state in the hopes of thwarting the perceived Soviet and Communist threat. A massive expansion of federal power, the National Security Act of 1947 formed the skeleton of our modern national defense apparatus. The Act established the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council (NSC), a cabinet-level body that would help formulate military and foreign policy on the president’s behalf.
Drafted and circulated in 1950, the council’s NSC-68 report cast the young Cold War in stark, severe terms. It declared “that the cold war is in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake” and argued that Americans must be willing to “give up some of the benefits which they have come to associate with their freedoms.” In other words, though World War II had ended in victory, Americans would continue seeing the world through a wartime lens — and indefinitely so.
In many ways, the assumptions underlying NSC-68 would guide U.S. foreign policy through the end of the Cold War and beyond. Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union and thus the end of the Cold War, the U.S. — “[f]reed from major challengers” — remained committed to military action, although it often couched these interventions in terms of “human rights.”