War and Defense

I've been thinking a lot about the Cold War recently, and coincidentally also read a number of pieces that critique American foreign policy and the way that war has been framed.

It occurred to me that the Defense Department used to be called the War Department. And it turns out that the name change happened in 1949. Just as the Cold War kicked off and American foreign policy became even more aggressively imperialist (in the name of defending the nation from imperialist Communism).

The particular article that got me thinking about this irony pointed out that the rhetoric of US foreign policy today is based in a language of fear, despite the fact that we have the most powerful military, by far, on the planet. Americans are afraid and politicians feed that fear. In the pre-Cold War era, we didn't have the biggest military in the world, but we had the courage to call our military the war machine which it is, rather than hide behind the language of the cowardly bunker-mentality.