Since inauguration day, the Trump White House has routinely evoked a deep-rooted Cold War framework for expressing Americaâs relationship with war. This framing sits at odds with the presidentâs inaugural address in which Mr. Trump, conjuring Richard Nixon, argued that his âproudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.â
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 nationâs armed forces for not focusing enough on âlethality,â the Trump administration is reviving a decades-long trend within an increasingly militarized U.S. foreign policy â 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 âstruggle for power.â True, some critics worried about the consequences of using âraw powerâ to achieve global dominance while overestimating threats. They fretted that wielding power might actually produce foreign policy crises rather than solve them.
But in the decades following the Second World War, many Americans feared that if the United States âlostâ the burgeoning Cold War, their nation might not even survive. It was a tense time. World War II gave Americans the worldâ¦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 U.S. 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 Americaâs enemies bringing destruction to the nationâs 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 ârational meansâ 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. (...)
Paul Chamberlinâs masterful new book, Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II, is a vitally important work that fundamentally reframes our understanding of the twentieth centuryâs most devastating conflict. It meticulously dismantles the comfortable and enduring narrative of a simple âgood versus evilâ struggle, replacing it with a more complex and unsettling truth: World War II was, at its core, a catastrophic clash between rival, racist, and relentlessly brutal empires. While Chamberlin, an Associate Professor of History at Columbia University, makes it unequivocally clear that the Axis powers were an abominable evil and their defeat a necessary cause for celebration, his book brilliantly demonstrates that the Allies were far more similar to their enemies in their motivations, strategies, and criminality than standard histories admit. This review will explore the bookâs monumental thesis: that World War II is best understood not as an ideological crusade for democracy, but as the bloody, pivotal turning point in the global history of empireâa conflict where all major powers fought to build or preserve their own imperial dominance.
Chamberlinâs argument is a persuasive indictment of the imperial hubris that defined the era. With the precision of a scholar and the narrative grip of a master storyteller, he situates the conflict within a much longer story of the rise and fall of world empires, a context that traditional accounts have often downplayed. He challenges the conventional wisdom by arguing that the warâs immense moral clarityâthe righteous victory over fascismâhas paradoxically stifled historical debate and obscured the uncomfortable truths about its origins and conduct. Scorched Earth is not a polemic, but a forensic audit of how the imperial ambitions of all belligerents, cloaked in self-serving ideologies, plunged the world into an abyss of violence and paved the way for a new, American-led global order. (...)
The Silicon Valley crowd fully acknowledges the problems current industry leaders have had in producing effective weapons at an affordable price, and they have an answer â give the money to them instead, and they will produce nimble, affordable, easily replaceable, software driven weapons that will restore America to a position of global primacy.
But the new guard is interested in much more than just building new products that they can sell to the Pentagon. The leaders of these emerging tech firms â led by Elon Musk at SpaceX, Peter Thiel at Palantir, and Palmer Luckey at Anduril â describe themselves as âfoundersâ who will drag America from the doldrums to a position of unparalleled military dominance.
And unlike the CEOs of the big contractors, these new-age militarists are vocally hawkish. Some, like Palmer Luckey, have publicly gloated about how we can beat China in a war that he sees coming in the next few years, while others, like Palantir CEO Alex Karp, have cheered on Israelâs campaign of mass slaughter in Gaza, even going so far as to hold the companyâs board meeting in Israel at the height of the war as a gesture of solidarity.
Even after Elon Muskâs messy public breakup with Donald Trump, the tech sector still has a leg up over the old guard in influence over his administration. Vice President J.D. Vance was employed, mentored, and financed by Palantirâs Peter Thiel, and former employees of Anduril, Palantir, and other military tech firms have been appointed to influential positions in the national security bureaucracy.
Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin and its cohort have a strong hand to play in Congress, where campaign contributions, hundreds of lobbyists, and suppliers located in a majority of states and districts give them immense power to keep their programs up and running, even in cases where the Pentagon and the military are trying to cancel or retire them.
Even at a proposed budget of $1 trillion a year, there may need to be some tradeoffs between legacy firms and new tech companies as the Pentagon chooses the next generation of weapons. The missing ingredient in all of this is the voice of the public, or strong input from members of Congress who care more about forging an effective defense strategy than they do about bringing Pentagon dollars to their areas.
"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."
