Evil Empire 23likewise recognized that the animating logic was not strictly anti-
communist but counterrevolutionary—indeed even racial. The inevita-
ble dissolution of the colonial system meant that the challenge of U.S.
policy in the coming period was broader than the struggle with Soviet
communism, as “all persons with grievances, whether economic or racial
will be urged to seek redress not in mediation and compromise, but in
defiant, violent struggle.” Inspired by communist appeals, “poor will
be set against rich, black against white, young against old, newcomers
against established residents.”by eliding soviet designs with those of heterogeneous movements
demanding effective sovereignty and challenging material deprivation,
Forrestal and his colleagues contributed to a perverse recasting of the
dynamic of European colonial disintegration as the field of Soviet
imperial expansion. This rhetorical and ideological frame practically
demanded the militarization of U.S. foreign policy, with U.S. “counter-
force” the only alternative to a world ruled by force. As such, along with
Arthur Radford, Forrestal was instrumental in developing the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), and that agency’s work soon echoed his. In
1948, for instance, a CIA document entitled “The Break-Up of Colonial
Empires and its Implications for US Security” defined expressions of
“economic nationalism” and “racial antagonism” as primary sources of
“friction between the colonial powers and the US on the one hand, and
the states of the Near and Far East on the other.”
The CIA’s analysts suggested that poverty and a legacy of anti-colonial
grievances rendered colonized and formerly colonized peoples “peculiarly
susceptible to Soviet penetration” and warned that the “gravest danger”
facing the United States was that decolonizing nations might fall into