Postwar US planners saw the war as empire-building and fused national with global security

Evidence

Roosevelt and others saw that the United States would have to exert its power through increasingly subtle and discreet means: the installation of bases as well as periodic displays of military might to keep as much of the world as possible within the rules of an economic and political system favorable to the United States. In 1970, a Senate committee found that “by the mid-1960s, the United States was firmly committed to more than forty-three nations by treaty and agreement and had some 375 major foreign military bases and 3,000 minor military facilities spread all over the world, virtually surrounding the Soviet Union and communist China.” As the late geographer Neil Smith explains, “global economic access without colonies” was the postwar grand strategy, with “necessary bases around the globe both to protect global economic interests and to restrain any future military belligerence.” Alongside U.S. economic and political might, the base network became a major and lasting mechanism of U.S. power, allowing control and influence over swaths of the earth vastly disproportionate to the land actually occupied. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 96 (#expands, via linked claim)

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said of the Suez crisis that what “the British and French have done is nothing but the straight, oldfashioned variety of colonialism of the most obvious sort.” In contrast, the United States crafted a new model of imperialism on the basis of what McAlister has called “benevolent supremacy.” This model was premised on the notion that a US-dominated world would ensure liberty and democracy for all through the mechanism of free-market capitalism. Henry Luce, publisher of the magazines Life and Time, captured this new global role in an editorial titled “The New American Century.” He argued that the United States was a “Good Samaritan” that would bring about “freedom and justice” around the world in the postwar period. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 245 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: US postwar security state disguised imperial expansion as defensive exceptionalism — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 732; US domestic security institutions integrate private fusion centers into empire; America pursued WWII deliberately to build a postwar world order it would lead (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• America pursued WWII deliberately to build a postwar world order it would lead #corroborates (0.95)
• Postwar US power substituted a global base network for direct colonial control #expands (0.90) — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 96
• The US distinguished its postwar dominance from old colonialism as benevolent supremacy #expands (0.88) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 245
• Postwar US empire was legitimated through modernization theory and Orientalism #expands (0.82) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 256
• US post-war hegemony repurposed Orientalism and modernization theory to justify empire. #expands (0.82) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 28
• Postwar America had to persuade a decolonizing world of its leadership #expands (0.80) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 897
• US financial-military hegemony structured the postwar Fordist world economy #expands (0.75) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 825
• US overseas bases extend an ancient imperial strategy of encircling domination #expands (0.72)