ute authority over the rest of the world.”
NSC-68 said the Soviets sought “the complete subversion or forcible destruction of the machinery of government and structure of society in the countries of the non-Soviet world and their replacement by an apparatus and structure subservient to and controlled from Moscow.”
Here was practically a religious rationale for fighting communism everywhere. Indeed, Truman, in his memoirs, complained that “the international Communist movement was fanatical. It denies the existence of God and wherever it can it stomps on the worship of God.” That statement was sometimes true and sometimes not, depending on the communists.
The problem with that idea was that it now placed the United States in the role of God’s avenging angel, wrote historian Walter McDougall in Promised Land, Crusader State.
McDougall noted that presidents such as Wilson and McKinley had also justified some of their imperial policies by saying that “God has brought us to our present position of power and strength for some great purpose.”
But that thinking had led to foreign-policy disasters: the United States beating down the Philippine independence movement after the Spanish-American War — a dirty war widely criticized at the time by the Anti-Imperialist League, whose ranks included Mark Twain — and intervening in the Russian Civil War after World War I.
The United States, according to NSC-68, was the Soviets’ principal adversary. It was also the only nation capable of thwarting a Kremlin design for world domination. “This fact,” it said, “imposes on us in our own interests, the responsibility for world leadership.” And it would be an expensive responsibility in many ways, as Americans would learn in myriad wars.
The administration ultimately used the Korean War and NSC-68 as reasons for tripling the defense budget. But other costs, such as the costs of sending more troops to Europe and elsewhere, were also driving up spending. This huge defense spending would have an adverse long-term effect on the United States, as it has in the case of other empires, as explained in Paul Kennedy’s book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.
The NSC-68 worldview would cause the United States to be less competitive with countries that didn’t spend so much on defense. It would lead to a dollar crisis that would eventually result, in the early 1970s, in Richard Nixon’s breaking the last link of the dollar to gold.
That meant that American governments were free to inflate, or debase, the currency as much as they wanted. Most did. That’s because it was expensive to pay for the permanent warfare state of NSC-68 as well as for a huge welfare state.
But there were objectors to NSC-68. Even some of the important American policymakers, some who had helped formulate the containment idea, believed NSC-68 was flawed, as we will see in our next segment.
This article originally appeared in the November 2011 edition of Freedom Daily. Subscribe to the print or email version of The Future of Freedom Foundation’s monthly journal, Future of Freedom (previously called Freedom Daily).