Arsenal of Democracy.

• Author: Coffey, John
• Position: Book review

Arsenal of Democracy

Review by John Coffey

Julian E. Zelizer, Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security--From World War II to the War on Terrorism, New York: Basic Books, 2010, ISBN-13: 978-0465015078 583 pp., $35.00

"Ambition, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition, and many other motives not more laudable than these, are apt to operate as well upon those who support as those who oppose the right side of a question. Were there not even these inducements to moderation, nothing could be more ill-judged than that intolerant spirit which has at all times characterized political parties." (1) Thus wrote that arch-partisan and political street-brawler, Alexander Hamilton.

Princeton historian Julian Zelizer has written a big book to make a small point, namely, that in the post-World War II era political partisanship has proven the norm rather than exception in America's national security politics. As he explains in exhaustive detail for 500 pages (laden with 50 pages of footnotes), since the brief, bipartisan interlude of 1947-48 when Vandenberg ("politics stops at the water's edge") Republicans joined President Truman to lay the foundations of Cold War foreign policy, fierce, self-seeking partisanship has ruled the day.

Franklin Roosevelt masterfully built a broad Democratic political coalition supporting liberal internationalism and a national security architecture, including the draft. By the 1948 election a Democratic bipartisan strategy created the institutions of the national security state (CIA, DOD, NSC, aid to Greece/Turkey, the Marshall Plan). Realizing that bipartisanship would not win elections, the GOP adopted a hawkish alternative to liberal internationalism, setting in motion an enduring political competition.

By the 1950 congressional mid-terms and 1952 presidential race, the Republican Right exploited McCarthyism and the fall of China to promote a conservative internationalism, making national security a partisan electoral issue for a generation. The Vietnam War shattered the Democratic consensus on national security and opened the way to the abolition of the draft in 1973, dismantling a system in place since 1940 that bound average citizens to the nation's defense. Pushing conservative internationalism to its limits with the Iraq and Afghan wars, George W. Bush exposed the fissures in the conservative agenda (security v. cost, militarism, executive power, regime change v. nation-building), leaving the GOP...