Singh
Those charged with governing the controlling seat of U.S. global-
ism consistently doubted the compatibility of normative democratic
requirements and the security challenges they envisioned, including
distrust that often bordered on contempt for the publics in whose
name they claimed to act. “We are today in the midst of a cold war,
our enemies are to be found abroad and at home,” remarked Bernard
Baruch, coining the term that names this era. In this context, “the
survival of the state is not a matter of law,” Acheson famously declared,
an argument similar to one being advanced by former Nazi jurist
Carl Schmitt. Vandenberg, echoing defenders of Roosevelt’s accretive
accumulation of war powers, was positively wistful lamenting “the
heavy handicap” that the United States faced “when imperiled by an
autocracy like Russia where decisions require nothing but a narrow
Executive mandate.” For Forrestal, “the most dangerous spot is our
own country because the people are so eager for peace and have such
a distaste for war that they will grasp for any sign of a solution of a
problem that has had them deeply worried.”
Forrestal felt that the danger at home manifested itself most
frustratingly in the threat that congressional budgeting posed to mil-
itary requirements. The preservation of a state of peace was a costly
proposition when it revolved around open-ended threat prevention the
world over. Upholding the permanent preponderance of U.S. military
power at a global scale required a new type of fiscal imagination, one
that had to be funded by the future promise of tax receipts. During
his final year in office, Forrestal’s diary records in mind-numbing
detail his worries about acquiring Pentagon funding adequate to his
projections for global military reach. In Forrestal’s view, budgetary
considerations were captive to the wrong baseline of “peak of war
danger” and combatting “aggression” rather than to “maintenance of
a permanent state of adequate military preparation.”