1947 National Security Act rebranded imperial expansion as defensive security
Evidence
The 1947 National Security Act made security a key element of the postwar order, creating the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Council, and the Central Intelligence Agency. This new and growing infrastructure of the postwar imperial state was presented not as an expansion of US power and hegemony on the global stage, but rather as a form of defensive security, most evident in the renaming of the Department of War as the Department of Defense. Cold War liberals insisted that the United States was not an empire like other European colonial powers. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 744
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
Related
- Renaming the Department of War as Defense reframed imperial expansion as defensive security (similarity 0.88)
- US postwar security state disguised imperial expansion as defensive exceptionalism (similarity 0.88)
- Imperial expansion is legitimized as defensive and sustained by manufactured fear. (similarity 0.84)
- The 1958 National Defense Education Act enlisted universities in Cold War empire (similarity 0.79)
- NSC 68 subordinated every aspect of American life to national defense (similarity 0.79)