Singh
spending to security prerogatives, military Keynesianism thus achieved
a permanent augmentation of U.S. state capacity no longer achievable
under appeals to Keynesianism alone.the embedding of the global priorities of a national security state, which
sometimes appears inevitable in retrospect, was by no means assured in the
years leading up to the Korean War. It was challenged by uncooperative
allies, a war-weary or recalcitrant U.S. public, and politicians who were
willing to cede U.S. military primacy and security prerogatives in the name
of international cooperation. But by 1947, men such as Forrestal had laid
the groundwork for rejecting the Rooseveltian internationalist inheritance,
arguing it was necessary to “accept the fact that the concept of one world
upon which the United Nations was based is no longer valid and that
we are in political fact facing a division into two worlds.” Although the
militarization of U.S. policy is often understood to have been reactive and
conditioned by threats from the outside, his ruminations illustrate how mil-
itarized globalism was actively conceived as anticipatory policy (in advance
of direct confrontations with the Soviet Union) by just a few architects and
defense intellectuals—men under whose sway we continue to live and die.
Ultimately, the declaration of the Cold War says more about how
these U.S. elites represented and imagined their “freedom” and envisioned
the wider world as a domain for their own discretionary action and ac-
cumulation than it did about enabling other people to be free, let alone
shaping the terms of a durable and peaceful international order. As early
as 1946, Forrestal began taking important businessmen on tours of the
wreckage of Pacific Island battles, which also happened to be future sites for
U.S. nuclear testing. Forestall described these ventures as “an effort to provide
long-term insurance against the disarmament wave, the shadows of which I