SinghMoreover, this infrastructure is under the command of one person,
supported by a labor force numbering in the millions, and oriented to
a more-or-less permanent state of war. If a politics of threat inflation
and fear is one part of the answer, the other, more prosaic component is
that the system itself is modeled after the scope of business and finance.
By managing a diverse portfolio of assets and liabilities and identify-
ing investment opportunities, it envisions a preeminently destructive
enterprise as a series of returns calibrated to discretionary assessment
of threats and a preponderance of force. This was Forrestal’s bailiwick.a little-known anecdote about Truman’s 1947 call to Congress for
decisive intervention in the Greek civil war—generally viewed as the
official declaration of the Cold War—illustrates this point. Truman’s
speech is famous for its emphasis on political freedom, particularly the
idea of protecting peoples’ rights to self-determination against “armed
minorities”—“the terrorist activities of several thousand armed men, led
by communists.” “One of the primary objectives of the foreign policy of
the United States,” Truman said, establishing the characteristic linkage
between World War II and the Cold War, “is the creation of conditions
in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free
from coercion.... Our victory was won over countries which sought to
impose their will, and their way of life, upon other nations.”
The moral and rhetorical heightening of the opposition between
democracy and communism (and, incipiently, terrorism) was a conscious
choice. Truman was famously advised by Republican senator Arthur Van-
denburg that securing public and congressional support for unprecedented
and costly peacetime intervention into European affairs entailed “scaring
the hell out of the American people.” Another, less visible choice, however,