SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
world war ii
The Rubble of Gaza and the Ghosts of Tokyo
The WWII firebombing of Tokyo marked the crossing of a moral Rubicon from which the US has yet to return, setting the precedent for the normalization of the deliberate annihilation of urban centers as an acceptable instrument of modern warfare.
Mar 10, 2026
Amid the so-called “ceasefire,” as imperial grifters and disaster capitalists jockey to remake Gaza in their image and in accordance with their own interests, the genocide has not abated. In its current phase, while the killing continues daily, its defining feature is the deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, in whole or in part. From the outset, Israel has pursued this objective through a policy of urbicide: the systematic annihilation of Gaza City, Khan Younis, Rafah, Jabaliya, Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahiya, and Deir al-Balah.
Palestinians remain steadfast in their refusal to be erased. Yet Israel’s assault has rendered Gaza nearly uninhabitable. This devastation cannot be easily dismissed with antiseptic euphemisms such as “collateral damage,” a term long employed to sanitize the mass slaughter of civilians. Intent can be inferred from actions, and policy from sustained patterns of conduct.
Even setting aside the relentless stream of genocidal rhetoric, the campaign bears all the hallmarks of design. That Israel commands one of the most technologically advanced militaries in the world further erodes the pretense that those killed were unintended casualties rather than the victims of deliberate targeting, or at least a wanton indifference to civilian life.
Still, denial persists. US Ambassador Mike Huckabee recently suggested that Israel has exercised extraordinary restraint. The record tells a different story. More than 81% of structures in Gaza are damaged or destroyed. Little has been spared: homes, hospitals, markets, and schools. In the first 16 months alone, Israel killed at least 75,000 Palestinians, precipitating a 34.9-year collapse in life expectancy in Gaza. This is a demographic shock rivaling or exceeding those witnessed in Bosnia and Rwanda. The true toll, with countless bodies entombed beneath the rubble, certainly surpasses the official numbers.
The early architects of aerial Armageddon sought not only the obliteration of cities but also the erosion of the longstanding principle of civilian immunity.
We have not seen such systematic urban destruction since World War II. Gaza, a captive enclave with a besieged population that is nearly half children and one of the most densely populated places on Earth, has endured six times the explosive tonnage equivalent of the Hiroshima bomb. This comparison has not been lost on observers, from A-bomb survivors to Holocaust historians.
Yet Hiroshima and Nagasaki then, and Gaza today, would have been largely unimaginable without the firebombing of Tokyo that preceded it 81 years ago. On the night of March 9-10, 1945, American bombers turned a “paper city” into a hellish inferno, incinerating some 100,000 Japanese civilians in the single most destructive air raid in history. The attack did more than raze Tokyo; it marked the crossing of a moral Rubicon from which the US has yet to return, setting the precedent for the normalization of the deliberate annihilation of urban centers as an acceptable instrument of modern warfare.
The End of the Peace and the Emergence of Air Power
The road to Tokyo began in the trenches. At the turn of the 20th century, war was largely conceived of as a conflict between conventional armies. Consequently, civilians comprised only 5% of the dead. The First World War marked a dramatic escalation, raising that figure to more than 15% of violent deaths. By World War II, civilians constituted roughly 65%. In Gaza today, more than 80% of those killed are civilians.
The initial leap in destructiveness, as the mechanized mass killing of World War I left vast swaths of the globe strewn with mutilated bodies of a lost generation, produced contradictory responses. For many, the senseless slaughter made clear that armed conflict could no longer be seen as politics by other means. Whatever rationales states historically invoked to sanctify organized violence collapsed, as war waged with modern technology revealed itself to all parties as little more than industrialized murder-suicide.
In the aftermath of this carnage arose a wave of internationalist political utopianism. The nascent League of Nations promised a forum in which states could resolve conflicts through diplomacy. The 1925 Geneva Protocol sought to ban the worst excesses of the recent war, prohibiting chemical and biological weapons. The 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact went further, renouncing war altogether. To many, it seemed conceivable that it truly had been the war to end all wars.
Collective punishment against civilians succeeds only in making war more horrific and criminal while failing to render it significantly shorter.
Yet such sentiments soon yielded to geopolitical realities and to a mounting conviction that future wars could not be prevented, only won. For a new generation of military strategists, the stalemate of the trenches was less a cautionary tale than a technical problem to be solved. As Italian General Giulio Douhet insisted, the answer was air power. Bombers could fly over the front lines, shatter societies from above, and deliver decisive victory.
The early architects of aerial Armageddon sought not only the obliteration of cities but also the erosion of the longstanding principle of civilian immunity. If noncombatants could not be targeted outright, then the definition of “civilian” had to be stretched to the point of incoherence. Military planners justified this shift with a perverse claim that targeting civilians was the humanitarian path, since swift, concentrated destruction would supposedly end wars more quickly.
As US Army Air Forces General Curtis LeMay later put it, in war “you’ve got to kill people, and when you’ve killed enough they stop fighting.” Others insisted that in a total war there were in effect no civilians. If workers contributed to the war effort, willingly or not, directly or indirectly, they could legitimately be struck in their factories or “dehoused” in their homes.
In less crude terms, with the veneer of scientific theory to legitimize the practice, a cadre of defense intellectuals advanced the idea that “morale,” or the collective will to fight, could itself be treated as a target. Yet as historian Ran Zwigenberg makes plain, morale was an imprecise and nebulous concept, and merely served as “another abstraction that allowed for the indiscriminate killing of civilians.” The “psychological science” behind it, the claim that societies possess a breaking point, rested on little empirical evidence.
This conclusion was not borne out in Britain, where Nazi bombing during the Blitz failed to break resistance. Its validity was further undermined after the war by the findings of the US Strategic Bombing Survey. Ultimately, as Robert Pape concluded in Bombing to Win, bombing civilians has rarely, if ever, proved decisive in compelling governments to concede or collapse and, if anything it stiffens resolve. In short, collective punishment against civilians succeeds only in making war more horrific and criminal while failing to render it significantly shorter.
The Shattering of the Bombing Taboo
Washington was slow to embrace this descent into unrestrained aerial warfare. This was a practice that in the 1920s and 1930s, became increasingly commonplace: Britain in Iraq, Italy in Abyssinia and Spain alongside Nazi Germany, and Japan in China. Such campaigns were widely condemned for what they were, a fundamental breach of the laws of war.
Some prescient observers recognized where this trajectory would inevitably lead. Leo Szilard, who would soon serve as a central catalyst in the development of the atomic bomb, warned even before such a weapon was feasible that the logic of aerial bombardment pointed toward catastrophe. “The discoveries of scientists,” he cautioned, “have given weapons to mankind which may destroy our present civilization if we do not succeed in avoiding future wars.”
It was in Japan that the US would most fully embrace its identity as a “bombing country” (having bombed more than 30 countries since 1945).
But the clearest expression of American opposition came from President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself. On the first day of World War II, he called on the warring parties to renounce the “inhuman barbarism” that was “the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or of unfortified cities.” Even months into the fighting, he doubled down, emphasizing that the United States has long “pursued a policy of wholeheartedly condemning the unprovoked bombing and machine gunning of civilian populations from the air.”
Yet with the US entry into the war, Washington quickly disregarded this prior prohibition, joining the British in bombing German industrial cities. The campaign, justified as retaliation for the Blitz, during which the Nazis killed 43,000 civilians, would inflict more than 10 times the fatalities. As John Gordon of the Sunday Express wrote approvingly, “Germany, the originator of war by air terror, is now finding that terror recoiling on herself with an intensity that even Hitler in his most sadistic dreams never thought possible.”
Given the wartime mobilization and the existential stakes, it is perhaps unsurprising that there was little opposition to these Allied tactics. But it was not nonexistent. A small transatlantic coalition of pacifists and religious leaders under the banner of the Bombing Restriction Committee, issued a series of pamphlets condemning the immorality and strategic shortsightedness of the campaign. They warned if the Allies resorted to the tactics of the Nazis, they risked replicating in victory the very methods they claimed to be fighting to defeat.
Among those who called attention to the perilous precedent being set was the American theologian, John Ford. Responding to the claim that virtually everyone in an industrial society constituted a legitimate military target, Ford pointed out that in an average city such as Boston at most a quarter of the population could plausibly be said to work in war industry. The vast majority were therefore incontrovertibly protected under international law. “Even in the most totally war-minded country in the world,” he insisted, “certainly innocent civilians far outnumber those whose status could be considered doubtful.” Phrases such as “military necessity,” he warned, had consequently become little more than “a mere catchword, and a cloak for every sort of excess.”
Yet the drumbeat of war drowned out dissent over the means in pursuit of the end of the war. From generals and government officials to Walt Disney and the Looney Tunes, air power was celebrated across American political and cultural life. Yet the most destructive phase was to come. It was in Japan that the US would most fully embrace its identity as a “bombing country” (having bombed more than 30 countries since 1945).
The Long Shadow of Tokyo
In January 1945, Curtis LeMay assumed command of the strategic air campaign against Japan. For the next eight months, he would preside over the firebombing of 67 Japanese cities. The campaign began in force on March 9-10, 1945, with Operation Meetinghouse. That night, 334 B-29 bombers circled the skies over Tokyo, unleashing 1,665 tons of napalm on densely populated neighborhoods below. Tokyo was a tinderbox. Within hours, the city was transformed into a sea of flame and, by morning, reduced to a landscape of ash.
The napalm, a gelatinous petroleum-based weapon developed at Harvard in 1942, burned to death up to 200,000 people, by some more recent estimates. The raid charred at least 15 square miles of the city and left more than a million homeless. In the aftermath, the New York Times suggested that 1 to 2 million people were killed. While a clear exaggeration, such sensationalist reports revealed something valuable to military planners: The public had an appetite for merciless violence against the “enemy.” This perception helped give a green light not only for the continued months of bombing but also for the atomic bombings that followed.
But despite relying on the language of military necessity, the Tokyo bombing scarcely maintained the pretense of striking military targets. With the military deployed to the front lines, it was women and children, the sick and injured, and the elderly who remained behind. The aerial campaign thus amounted to a policy of collective punishment: mass killing carried out in the hope that it would produce favorable political outcomes. In other words, it was a policy of terrorism.
The mass killing of civilian populations from the air was not repudiated but quietly institutionalized.
This logic was evident in the planning itself. In 1944, the United States began constructing model Japanese homes to test these new tactics. As a short film produced by the First Motion Picture Unit explained, Tokyo was devastated by an earlier earthquake. The city center was rebuilt in a sturdier architectural style that stood in stark contrast to the “sprawling, flimsy wooden paper slums” that housed “millions of Japanese workers.” The “man-made earthquakes” that were to be unleashed by the bombers, as the narrator promised, were never tested against replica government buildings or industrial sites. They were only designed to set ablaze the homes of civilians.
The planners of the raid understood the implications. As LeMay himself reportedly remarked, “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” Yet at both the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, where Nazi and Japanese high officials were prosecuted for their crimes, aerial bombardment of cities was conspicuously absent from the indictments.
Despite the hundreds of thousands killed from the air, the clear illegality of the practice was never seriously scrutinized. Telford Taylor, the chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg, acknowledged the contradiction in his final report to the War Department. Even “if the first badly bombed cities… were suffered at the hands of the Germans,” he wrote, the subsequent bombings “were the results not of reprisal but of deliberate policy, and bore eloquent witness that aerial bombardment of cities and factories has become a recognized part of modern warfare as carried on by all nations.”
To prosecute others for methods the Allies themselves had refined would have exposed the trials to even stronger charges of victor’s justice and might have placed limits on the use of such tactics in the future. Instead, the precedent was left undisturbed. In this way, a fundamental hypocrisy was embedded in the emerging postwar legal order. The mass killing of civilian populations from the air was not repudiated but quietly institutionalized.
The consequences have reverberated ever since. The laying waste to German and Japanese cities was followed by the millions killed in Korea and Vietnam. In recent decades, aerial campaigns have claimed tens of thousands of lives in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iran, and beyond. The rubble of Gaza today serves as the latest horrific reminder that the central lesson of this history remains unlearned: that might does not make right; that bombing can unleash endless horrors in war but cannot bring peace.
Keep ReadingShow Less
From Guernica to Gaza, Air War Is a Horror That Lets Its Perpetrators off the Hook
An idea has emerged among US leaders that it’s not really a war if Americans are above it all and aren’t dying. But what is it to the civilians below?
Aug 29, 2025
Killing from the sky has long offered the sort of detachment that warfare on the ground can’t match. Far from its victims, air power remains the height of modernity. And yet, as the monk Thomas Merton concluded in a poem, using the voice of a Nazi commandant, “Do not think yourself better because you burn up friends and enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done.”
Nine decades have passed since aerial technology first began notably assisting warmakers. Midway through the 1930s, when Benito Mussolini sent Italy’s air force into action during the invasion of Ethiopia, hospitals were among its main targets. Soon afterward, in April 1937, the fascist militaries of Germany and Italy dropped bombs on a Spanish town with a name that quickly became a synonym for the slaughter of civilians: Guernica.
Within weeks, Pablo Picasso’s painting “Guernica” was on public display, boosting global revulsion at such barbarism. When World War II began in September 1939, the default assumption was that bombing population centers—terrorizing and killing civilians—was beyond the pale. But during the next several years, such bombing became standard operating procedure.
Dispensed from the air, systematic cruelty only escalated with time. The blitz by Germany’s Luftwaffe took more than 43,500 civilian lives in Britain. As the Allies gained the upper hand, the names of certain cities went into history for their bomb-generated firestorms and then radioactive infernos. In Germany: Hamburg, Cologne, and Dresden. In Japan: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.
“Between 300,000-600,000 German civilians and over 200,000 Japanese civilians were killed by allied bombing during the Second World War, most as a result of raids intentionally targeted against civilians themselves,” according to the documentation of scholar Alex J. Bellamy. Contrary to traditional narratives, “the British and American governments were clearly intent on targeting civilians,” but “they refused to admit that this was their purpose and devised elaborate arguments to claim that they were not targeting civilians.”
Past Atrocities Excusing New Ones
As the New York Times reported in October 2023, three weeks into the war in Gaza, “It became evident to US officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign. In private conversations with American counterparts, Israeli officials referred to how the United States and other allied powers resorted to devastating bombings in Germany and Japan during World War II—including the dropping of the two atomic warheads in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—to try to defeat those countries.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told then-US President Joe Biden much the same thing, while shrugging off concerns about Israel’s merciless killing of civilians in Gaza. “Well,” Biden recalled him saying, “you carpet-bombed Germany. You dropped the atom bomb. A lot of civilians died.”
Routine reverence for America’s high-tech arsenal of air power has remained in sync with the assumption that, in the hands of Uncle Sam, the world’s greatest aerospace technologies would be used for the greatest good.
Apologists for Israel’s genocide in Gaza have continued to invoke just such a rationale. Weeks ago, for instance, Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador to Israel, responded derisively to a statement by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer that “the Israeli government’s decision to further escalate its offensive in Gaza is wrong.” Citing the US-British air onslaught on Dresden in February 1945 that set off a huge firestorm, Huckabee tweeted: “Ever heard of Dresden, PM Starmer?”
Appearing on Fox & Friends, Huckabee said: “You have got the Brits out there complaining about humanitarian aid and the fact that they don’t like the way Israel is prosecuting the war. I would remind the British to go back and look at their own history. At the end of World War II they weren’t dropping food into Germany, they were dropping massive bombs. Just remember Dresden—over 25,000 civilians were killed in that bombing alone.”
The United Nations has reported that women and children account for nearly 70% of the verified deaths of Palestinians in Gaza. The capacity to keep massacring civilians there mainly depends on the Israeli Air Force (well supplied with planes and weaponry by the United States), which proudly declares that “it is often due to the IAF’s aerial superiority and advancement that its squadrons are able to conduct a large portion” of the Israeli military’s “operational activities.”
The “Grace and Panache” of the “Indispensable Nation”
The benefactor making possible Israel’s military prowess, the US government, has compiled a gruesome record of its own in this century. An ominous undertone, foreshadowing the unchecked slaughter to come, could be heard on October 8, 2023, the day after the Hamas attack on Israel resulted in close to 1,200 deaths. “This is Israel’s 9-11,” the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations said outside the chambers of the Security Council, while the country’s ambassador to the United States told PBS viewers that “this is, as someone said, our 9-11.”
Loyal to the “war on terror” brand, the American media establishment gave remarkably short shrift to concerns about civilian deaths and suffering. The official pretense was that (of course!) the very latest weaponry meshed with high moral purpose. When the US launched its “shock and awe” air assault on Baghdad to begin the Iraq War in March 2003, “it was a breathtaking display of firepower,” anchor Tom Brokaw told NBC viewers with unintended irony. Another network correspondent reported “a tremendous light show here, just a tremendous light show.”
As the US occupation of Iraq took hold later that year, New York Times correspondent Dexter Filkins (who now covers military matters for The New Yorker) was laudatory on the newspaper’s front page as he reported on the Black Hawk and Apache helicopter gunships flying over Baghdad “with such grace and panache.” Routine reverence for America’s high-tech arsenal of air power has remained in sync with the assumption that, in the hands of Uncle Sam, the world’s greatest aerospace technologies would be used for the greatest good.
In a 2014 commencement speech at West Point, then-US President Barack Obama proclaimed: “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come.”
After launching two major invasions and occupations in this century, the United States was hardly on high moral ground when it condemned Russia for its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and frequent bombing of that country’s major cities. Seven months after the invasion began, Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to justify his reckless nuclear threats by alarmingly insisting that the atomic bombings of Japan had established a “precedent.”
Whoever Doesn’t Count Goes Uncounted
Journalist Anand Gopal, author of the brilliant book No Good Men Among the Living, spent years in Afghanistan after the US invasion of that country, often venturing into remote rural areas unvisited by Western reporters. While US media outlets were transfixed with debating the wisdom of finally withdrawing troops from that country in August 2021 and the flaws in the execution of the departure, Gopal was rendering a verdict that few in power showed the slightest interest in hearing: The US war effort in Afghanistan had involved the large-scale killing of civilians from the air, and civilian deaths had been “grossly undercounted.”
In Helmand Province (“really the epicenter of the violence for the last two decades”), Gopal investigated what had happened to the family of a housewife named Shakira, who lived in the small village of Pan Killay. As he explained during a DemocracyNow! interview, she had lost 16 members of her family. “What was remarkable or astonishing about this was that this wasn’t in one airstrike or in one mass casualty incident,” he pointed out. “This was in 14 or 15 different incidents over 20 years.” He added:
So, people were living—reliving tragedy again and again. And it wasn’t just Shakira, because I was interested, after interviewing her, to see how representative this was. So, I managed to talk to over a dozen families. I got the names of the people who were killed. I tried to triangulate that information with death certificates and other eyewitnesses. And so, the level of human loss is really extraordinary. And most of these deaths were never recorded. It’s usually the big airstrikes that make the media, because in these areas there’s not a lot of internet penetration, there’s not—there’s no media there. And so, a lot of the smaller deaths of ones and twos don’t get recorded. And so, I think we’ve grossly undercounted the number of civilians who died in this war.
Citing a UN study of casualties during the first half of 2019, the BBC summed up the findings this way: “Some 717 civilians were killed by Afghan and US forces, compared to 531 by militants… Air strikes, mostly carried out by American warplanes, killed 363 people, including 89 children, in the first six months of the year.”
During my brief trip to Afghanistan 10 years earlier, I had visited the Helmand Refugee Camp District 5 on the outskirts of Kabul, where I met a 7-year-old girl named Guljumma. She told me about what had happened one morning the previous year when she was sleeping at her home in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand Valley. At about 5:00 am local time, the US Air Force dropped bombs. Some people in her family died. She lost an arm.
As Guljumma spoke, several hundred people were living under makeshift tents in the refugee camp. Basics like food arrived only sporadically. Her father, Wakil Tawos Khan, told me that the sparse incoming donations were from Afghan businessmen, while little help came from the government of Afghanistan. And the United States was offering no help whatsoever. The last time Guljumma and her father had meaningful contact with the US government was when its air force bombed them.
Normal and Lethal
When Shakira and Guljumma lost relatives to bombs that arrived courtesy of the US taxpayer, their loved ones were not even numbers to the Pentagon. Instead, meticulous estimates have come from the Costs of War project at Brown University, which puts “the number of people killed directly in the violence of the post-9-11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere” at upwards of 905,000—with 45% of them civilians. “Several times as many more have been killed as a reverberating effect of the wars—because, for example, of water loss, sewage and other infrastructural issues, and war-related disease.”
The increasing American reliance on air power rather than combat troops has shifted the concept of what it means to be “at war.” After three months of leading NATO’s bombing of Libya in 2011, for instance, the US government had already spent $1 billion on the effort, with far more to come. But the Obama administration insisted that congressional approval was unnecessary since the United States wasn’t actually engaged in military “hostilities”—because no Americans were dying in the process.
The daily horrors in Gaza still echo the day when bombs fell on Guernica.
The State Department’s legal adviser, former Yale Law School dean Harold H. Koh, testified at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the nation’s actions targeting Libya involved “no US ground presence or, to this point, US casualties.” Nor was there “a threat of significant US casualties.” The idea was that it’s not really a war if Americans are above it all and aren’t dying. In support of Koh, a former colleague at the Yale Law School, Akhil Reed Amar, claimed that the United States truly wasn’t engaged in “hostilities” in Libya because “there are no body bags” of American soldiers.
Ten years later, in a September 2021 speech at the United Nations soon after the last American troops had left Afghanistan, President Biden said: “I stand here today, for the first time in 20 years, with the United States not at war.” In other words, American troops weren’t dying in noticeable numbers. Costs of War project codirector Catherine Lutz pointed out in the same month that US engagement in military actions “continues in over 80 countries.”
Seeking to reassure Americans that the Afghanistan withdrawal was a matter of repositioning rather than a retreat from the use of military might, Biden touted an “over-the-horizon capability that will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on any direct threats to the United States in the region and to act quickly and decisively if needed.” During the four years since then, the Biden and Trump administrations have directly sent bombers and missiles over quite a few horizons, including in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, and Iran.
Less directly, but with horrific ongoing consequences, stepped-up US military aid to Israel has enabled its air power to systematically kill Palestinian children, women, and men with the kind of industrial efficiency that fascist leaders of the 1930s and 1940s might have admired. The daily horrors in Gaza still echo the day when bombs fell on Guernica. But the scale of the carnage is much bigger and unrelenting in Gaza, where atrocities continue without letup, while the world looks on.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump Continues the American Tradition of Placing His Faith in War
The nation’s ongoing support for the interminable conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, along with ever-expanding defense budgets and militarized policing at home, suggests little has changed in the ensuing decades.
Aug 19, 2025
Since inauguration day, the Trump White House has routinely evoked a deep-rooted Cold War framework for expressing America’s relationship with war. This framing sits at odds with the president’s inaugural address in which US President Donald Trump, conjuring Richard Nixon, argued that his “proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.”
From January 2025 on, the administration has instead engaged in a steady drumbeat of aggressive militaristic taunting, threatening real and perceived enemies, foreign and domestic alike. From ordering 1,500 active-duty troops to assist with border patrolling and deportation missions, to the secretary of defense censuring the nation’s armed forces for not focusing enough on “lethality,” the Trump administration is reviving a decades-long trend within an increasingly militarized US foreign policy—a faith in and fear of war and its consequences.
Since the end of World War II, Americans crafted and then embraced a rather disjointed relationship with war, exhilarated by its possibilities to transform the world and make them safe, while also fearing wars they could not prevent or, perhaps worse, win. This tension between faith and fear has haunted Americans and led to a persistent failure to align ends and means in carrying out US foreign relations.
Of course, ideals, interests, and power matter when it comes to foreign policy. Cold War commentators insisted that international politics was a “struggle for power.” True, some critics worried about the consequences of using “raw power” to achieve global dominance while overestimating threats. They fretted that wielding power might actually produce foreign policy crises rather than solve them.
A false faith in war, taken to its extreme, bred not just hyper-patriotism, but xenophobia and nativism.
But in the decades following the Second World War, many Americans feared that if the United States “lost” the burgeoning Cold War, their nation might not even survive. It was a tense time. World War II gave Americans the world… and the faith necessary to rule it. But seemingly new evils emerged that gave pause to policymakers and the general public alike.
Here were inklings of a relationship between faith and fear that would inform US foreign policy ever since. I talk about this in my new book, Faith and Fear: America's Relationship with War since 1945. A secular faith in war to solve any foreign policy problem, coupled with fears of America’s enemies bringing destruction to the nation’s shores, indelibly shaped policy choices when it came to containing communism around the globe.
In short, Americans largely held faith that war would always be utilitarian, a “rational means” for attaining their desired ends.
In such a cognitive framing, war might bring chaos in the dangerous world of which realists warned, but it also lured with the promise of influence, even dominance, the chance to reshape or control whole swaths of the globe.
Now by faith, I’m not talking about religious determinants in US foreign policy. For sure, church leaders used their pulpits in service to both God and the anticommunist cause. Instead, I’m expressing faith as an anecdote for policymakers’ unwavering trust and confidence in war, as a vital tool for achieving policy objectives.
Civilian and military leaders held faith in nuclear arsenals deterring communists’ pursuit of “world domination.” They assumed covert paramilitary operations would stabilize nations in Latin America and the Middle East, enduring nationalist struggles in the postcolonial era. And they faithfully believed that war would aid in modernization efforts aimed at transforming societies abroad, similar to later 21st-century counterinsurgency theorists and regime change advocates seeking to bring liberal democracy and freedom to parts of the world supposedly still living in darkness.
Military force thus became an integral component of how policymakers and citizens alike related with the outside world. After World War II, war occupied a place in America it never relinquished.
Not everyone believed this was healthy for America. Dissenters have long worried about a garrison state emanating from this process of militarizing our foreign policy, but too often their voices were drowned out. The United States had to generate power, so the argument went, and then use that power to advance its political aims against an unyielding, atheistic enemy.
But faith also partnered well with domestic politics. Eager politicians extolled the nation’s military capabilities, diminishing the costs of war while worshipping its benefits. Rarely did they consider the possibility that military intervention might make matters worse, exacerbating local problems instead of solving them.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, those who didn’t accept this compulsory faith were branded as unpatriotic heretics. A false faith in war, taken to its extreme, bred not just hyper-patriotism, but xenophobia and nativism. In the process, dissent was driven to the political periphery. It seemed far easier, and far more patriotic, to embrace false promises of easy, if not eventual victory when the nation committed itself to war.
Aside this essentialist faith in war sat a fear that nearly all national security threats, both foreign and domestic, were existential ones. Americans bounded their faith in war to a kind of Hobbesian, primal fear of the unknown.
So, what were Americans afraid of? What left them in a near constant state of Cold War paranoia? Well, everything. They feared atomic war and “unconventional” war. They feared an anarchic international system seemingly under threat by godless communist forces. They feared arms races and missile gaps, threats abroad and threats at home. They feared depressions and recessions, the future and the past. They feared Soviet spies and Cuban “revolutionaries,” and, perhaps worst of all, they feared each other.
Americans displayed a kind of “neurotic anxiety” born of perpetually exaggerated fear. The parallels to today are striking. Had not the 9/11 attacks, as just one example, also revived long-simmering, stereotypical fears that Muslim extremists, in literary critic Edward Said’s words, might “take over the world”?
And, not surprisingly, as the Cold War persisted, opportunistic politicians and big business realized that existential fear could be a useful tool for persuasion, propaganda, and profit. Taken to its politicized extreme, fear could breed a form of militarized consensus.
In fact, the insidious relationships between legislators and lobbyists became a hallmark of Cold War politics as major defense firms were rewarded for the nation’s increased military posture. As one journalist noted in 1961, the purposes of the military-industrial complex fit “neatly in the atmosphere of crisis… as the United States continued to be held in the grip of wartime thinking.”
These tensions between faith and fear matter because they endure. For Cold War Americans, not unlike today, war was immensely relevant. As George Kennan, the father of “containment,” saw it in 1951, “many people in this country are coming to believe that war is not only unavoidable but imminent.”
The nation’s ongoing support for the interminable conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, along with ever-expanding defense budgets and militarized policing at home, suggests little has changed in the ensuing decades.
Ultimately, these interactions between faith and fear have the potential to culminate into a spiraling, never-ending militarization of American foreign policy that leaves us far less safe in an uncertain world.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular