Evil Empire 17with Hitler. There are no returns on appeasement.” Forrestal, a skilled
bureaucratic infighter, had made his fortune on Wall Street and frequently
framed his arguments in economic terms. The bomb and the knowledge
that produced it, Forrestal argued, was “the property of the American
people”—control over it, like the U.S. seizure of Japan’s former Pacific
Island bases, needed to be governed by the concept of “sole Trusteeship.”
Truman sided with Forrestal. Stimson retired that very same day, his
swan song ignored, and Wallace, soon to be forced out of the Truman
administration for his left-wing views, described the meeting as “one of
the most dramatic of all cabinet meetings in my fourteen years of Wash-
ington experience.” Forrestal, meanwhile, went on to be the country’s first
secretary of defense in 1947 and is the man who illustrates perhaps more
than anyone else how Cold War militarism achieved its own coherence
and legitimacy by adopting economic logic and criteria—that is, by envi-
sioning military power as an independent domain of capital expenditure
in the service of a political economy of freedom. From his pivotal work
in logistics and procurement during World War II, to his assiduously
cultivated relationships with anti–New Deal congressmen and regional
business leaders sympathetic to the military, Forrestal both helped to
fashion and occupied the nexus of an emerging corporate-military order.
He only served as defense secretary for eighteen months (he committed
suicide under suspicious circumstances in 1949), but on the day of that
fateful cabinet meeting, he won the decisive battle, advocating for what
he once called a state of ongoing “semi-war.”
The post–World War II rise of a U.S. military-industrial complex
is well understood, but it still remains hidden in plain sight. Today
warnings about Donald Trump’s assault on the “liberal international
order” are commonplace while less examined is how we arrived at a point
where democratic and “peacetime” governance entails a global military
infrastructure of 800 U.S. military bases in more than 70 countries.