id know, but was ignored. An example of the latter occurred when Truman sent troops to Korea without congressional approval. Later John Kennedy would send the first U.S. troops into Vietnam without congressional debate.
Congress, in these undeclared wars, was sometimes informed after the fact, leading to debates that were pointless. That’s because actions had been taken and would not be reversed unless Congress insisted on cutting off funding for ongoing military operations. That’s something that would inevitably lead to accusations that Congress was “unpatriotic” or “didn’t support our boys” in Vietnam (Korea, Iraq, et cetera). And how many members of Congress could survive that criticism?
There was no contemporary criticism of NSC-68 because it wasn’t publicly debated. And even in Arthur Schlesinger’s much-celebrated 1970s book, The Imperial Presidency, NSC-68 is never mentioned. He did, however, note that numerous documents were classified and complained about “the shackled historian.”
Yet some Americans, with an awareness of how their country departed from its isolationist traditions, objected to where Truman was taking the country. The NSC-68 mindset of an America ready to confront the world — of a militarized nation with great-power responsibilities almost everywhere, acting as the world’s policeman — has not changed.
An expensive foreign policy
However, as the policy of the Cold War and intervention was conceived in the 1940s, there were some dissenters in the Truman administration. Some opposed it on philosophic grounds. Others couldn’t abide a huge military buildup when the United States was at peace. The Korean War broke out a few months after NSC-68 was written in the spring of 1950. The war ended the internal NSC-68 debate and the document was approved by Truman.
NSC-68 launched the United States on what amounted to a world crusade.
“The Soviet Union,” according to NSC-68, “unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute 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, 