To Govern the Globe by McCoy Alfred W

Author:McCoy, Alfred W.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2021-11-15T16:00:00+00:00

James Van Fleet, commander of UN forces, Columbia Orphanage, Seoul, South Korea, 1952 (Credit: Author’s Collection)

The president who presided over the military operations that had accompanied America’s ascent to global power was Dwight Eisenhower, the son of a failed general-store owner in Abilene, Kansas, and another member of the West Point class of 1915. During World War II, he had forged the Allied coalition that defeated the Germans in North Africa, mounted a massive amphibious landing in France, and breached Germany’s last defenses. As president during the Cold War decade of the 1950s, he oversaw the synthesis of science, industry, and weapons procurement into what he called a “military-industrial complex” to maintain America’s technological edge.78

By the end of the Eisenhower presidency in 1960, the Pentagon had built a nuclear triad of weaponry that gave it “a virtually invulnerable strategic deterrent.” While the US Navy’s fleet of five nuclear-powered submarines cruised the ocean depths carrying sixteen nuclear-armed Polaris missiles each, its fourteen attack carriers, including the atomic-powered USS Enterprise, were also equipped for nuclear strikes. Moreover, the Strategic Air Command had 1,700 bombers ready to drop nuclear payloads on the Communist bloc, including six hundred behemoth B-52s with a range of eight thousand miles. Meanwhile, the Air Force had developed Atlas and Titan ballistic missiles that could carry nuclear warheads more than six thousand miles.79

Drawing on the country’s economic strength, the Pentagon lavished funds—growing rapidly from $33 billion annually in 1959 to $87 billion in 2009—on scientific research.80 Its close alliance with defense contractors produced incessant technological innovation, including the world’s first system of global telecommunications satellites, which would evolve during the Cold War into its chief means for military navigation, intelligence, and communication.81 To exercise its dominion over the skies, Washington would elaborate on the British Empire’s doctrine of “freedom of the seas” to include the sky and even space, where its military satellites could orbit without restraint.82

Such a massive military apparatus rested on geopolitical foundations of extraordinary strength. As historian John Darwin has explained, Washington achieved its “colossal Imperium … on an unprecedented scale” after World War II by becoming the first power in history to control the strategic axial points “at both ends of Eurasia.” Indeed, when the Cold War reached Asia at the start of the Korean War in 1950, the National Security Council issued a memorandum (NSC-68) stating that “Soviet efforts are now directed toward the domination of the Eurasian land mass” and requiring that the US expand its military “to deter, if possible, Soviet expansion, and to defeat, if necessary, aggressive Soviet or Soviet-directed actions.” To encompass Eurasia, the defense budget increased almost fourfold from $13.5 billion to $48.2 billion, launching an increase of military appropriations that continues to this day.83 In defense of its dominance over that vast continent, Washington would, over the next 40 years, fight two hot wars in Korea and South Vietnam to check communist expansion, while the CIA waged large covert operations around its southern edge, probing relentlessly for vulnerabilities in the Sino-Soviet bloc.

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