Relentless Struggle: The National Security Movement and the Remaking of the American State, 1945-1953 29 views

This dissertation analyzes the transformation in U.S. foreign relations after World War II, explaining why and how the United States became a global military superpower. Between 1945 and 1953, a national security revolution entrenched the new principle that U.S. security required the active management of foreign politics using a permanent global military supported by perpetual limited mobilization. Existing explanations based on the global structure of power, the exogenous shocks of World War II and the Cold War, and endogenous changes in midcentury American society are unable to fully explain this revolution. To enable a more complete analysis, this dissertation introduces two new concepts. It argues that a “national security movement” campaigned between 1945 and 1953 to create a “national security system”—a self-reproducing and self-stabilizing nexus of interdependent policy, institutional, economic, political, and ideological-cultural elements governing the U.S.’s approach to the world. Motivated by a narrative of the 1920s and 1930s that blamed World War II in part on the U.S.’s reactive military policy, a group of military, political, business, media, and civic leaders worked to reshape American society in order to permanently make the U.S. a proactive actor in the great powers’ military affairs. By 1953, this national security movement had successfully remade the system of U.S. foreign relations and defeated politically powerful alternatives like global cooperation, political-economic statecraft, and hemispheric defense. The victory of the national security movement made global military intervention and limited mobilization the modus operandi of the U.S. government and the common sense of the American people.

PHD (Doctor of Philosophy)

U.S. foreign policy; National security; U.S. history; Cold War; World War II; U.S. military

English

All rights reserved by the author (no additional license for public reuse)

2026-06-18