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International politics and domestic institutional change: the rise of executive war-making autonomy in the United States

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International politics and domestic institutional change: the rise of executive war-making autonomy in the United States

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International Politics and Domestic
Institutional Change
The Rise of Executive War-Making Autonomy in the
United States

by

Eric J. Hamilton

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirement for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
POLITICAL SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

August 2015

ii
Table of Contents

Figures iii

Abstract iv

Acknowledgements v

Introduction 1
International Politics, State-Building, and the Rise of Executive War-Making Autonomy in the
United States

Chapter One 35
Democracy, the State, and War

Chapter Two 65
A Realist Theory of the Dynamic State: State-Building for Executive War-Making Autonomy

Chapter Three 103
Executive War-Making Autonomy in Historical Perspective, 1787-1890

Chapter Four 141
The Rise to World Power and the Struggle to Build a National Security State, 1890-1920

Chapter Five 192
The Drift Toward Executive War-Making Powers, 1890-1941

Chapter Six 245
Systemic Pressure and Institutional Stress in a Shrinking World, 1941-1950

Chapter Seven 289
State-building for Executive War-Making Autonomy in the Postwar Period, 1945-1960

Conclusion 361
The Modern American War-Making Executive: Theory, Research, and Practice

Bibliography 379

iii
Figures

Figure 1.1: The State of Democratic State Autonomy 55

Figure 1.2: The State as a Dynamic Unit 57

Figure 2.1: Basic Macro-Micro-Macro Model 93

Figure 2.2: Boudon-Coleman Diagram of State Adaptation 95

Figure 2.3: Theoretical Expectations 99

Figure 6.1: Institutional Problems in the Postwar Period 279

iv
Abstract

Executive autonomy is a critical factor for explaining foreign policy behavior because states with
less constrained executives are often able to act more quickly, decisively, and flexibly. Yet,
while IR scholars have studied the role autonomy plays in foreign policy behavior, less attention
has been paid to its origins. What are the institutional sources of autonomy and why and when
are such institutions likely to crystallize? The dissertation constructs a theoretical framework to
study these questions using a macro-micro-macro model embedded with a series of mechanisms.
Based on a second-image reversed approach and drawing on bellicist theories of state formation,
the dissertation then develops a theory of the state as a dynamic set of institutions that decision-
makers attempt to redesign when interstate security competition increases. In democracies, this
entails building and streamlining national security decision-making organizations and processes,
and centralizing decision-making authority in the executive. The dissertation uses this theory to
explain the development of executive war-making autonomy in the United States. Using a
longitudinal research design, it focuses on comparative case studies of three temporal phases—
1787-1890, 1890-1941, and 1941-1960—to observe the relationship between security
competition, institutional stress, and state-building. The research shows that the three periods
vary in terms of the systemic pressure faced by the United States and that this variation in turn
helps explain three distinct institutional logics: institutional formation in the first period,
institutional resistance in the second, and institutional adaptation in the third. The dissertation
shows theoretically how international security competition produces and reproduces states that
are prone to war. Empirically, it shows the importance of America’s original institutional
arrangement for national security, but also the profound transformation that arrangement
underwent in the postwar period and the continuing relevance of that transformation today.

v
Acknowledgements

Completing a PhD program and dissertation can at times be a very difficult journey.
Thankfully, no one undertakes this journey alone. Along the way, many wonderful individuals
and institutions played a vital role in my intellectual development and the completion of this
project. I owe them a great deal of appreciation.
My first acknowledgements are to my dissertation committee: Patrick James, Brian
Rathbun, and Norrin Ripsman. Pat played an integral role in recruiting me to USC and has
served as my advisor since my first day in the PhD program. Many years later I realize that
having the right advisor goes a long distance in graduate school and that it is not something all
students get to enjoy. I am very thankful I did. Pat has always enthusiastically supported my
development and was a great supporter of this project from the beginning. He gave me critical
feedback throughout the dissertation process, and, equally important, he gave me the space to
develop the ideas that became the core of the project. Brian meanwhile has served as a mentor
throughout my time at USC. We arrived in the same year and quickly developed a fruitful
working relationship. I have learned a lot from him over the years about how to be both a
productive and a thoughtful scholar. With respect to the dissertation, I owe Brian a tremendous
amount of appreciation for making a number of crucial interventions along the way that helped
me develop my own ideas and kept me on the right track. Finally, Norrin has played an
important role in supporting my work and forcing me to think through my concepts and
arguments more clearly. Even though I depart from some of Norrin’s ideas about state autonomy,
his work on the subject provided an important starting point for me and his comments and
suggestions have been much appreciated. Together, the three of them made an excellent team. I
have not taken all of their suggestions and any mistakes remain my own. But the dissertation is
surely a better product because of their many efforts.
I would also like to acknowledge a number of other individuals at USC who have
supported my PhD studies over the years. Most importantly, I would like to thank Steve Lamy
and Gerry Munck. Steve supported my teaching interests and other aspects of my studies in
countless ways. Gerry encouraged me to be a better IR scholar by pressing me to be a social
scientist with broad interests first and foremost. I also need to acknowledge the support of other
faculty members including Jeb Barnes, Rob English, Jacques Hymans, Saori Katada, Dan Lynch,
John Odell, Jeff Sellers, Nick Weller, and Geoff Wiseman, as well as institutional staff including
Linda Cole, Cathy Ballard, Veri Chavarin, and Indira Persad. The former added tremendous
value to my education, while the latter provided the less obvious but nonetheless indispensable
support that made my studies and research possible. I would also be remiss not to mention others
from Temple University, Georgetown University, and elsewhere that supported me along the
vi
way including Scott Gratson, Michael Leeds, Barbara Manaka, John Hulsman, Kim Kagan, Dan
Byman, Kate McNamara, and Liz Stanley.
I have also been lucky to receive important institutional support over the years. USC was
a wonderful place for my PhD studies and invested in my development more than any other
institution. I have received tremendous funding for my education and research from the School
of International Relations, the Center for International Studies, and the Dornsife College of
Letters, Arts and Sciences. I would specifically like to acknowledge the College Doctoral
Fellowship, the Center for International Studies Dissertation Fellowship, the endowed Russell
Fellowship, the College Dissertation Completion Fellowship, and the Willard and Betty Beling
Scholarship from the Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation. I would also like to thank the
Center for Excellence in Teaching (and Dana Coyle in particular) for allowing me to be a
teaching fellow there and helping me to hone the teaching side of my academic training. In Los
Angeles, I would also like to thank UCLA where I spent many days using the university’s
extensive library system. Though there is a vigorous rivalry between USC and UCLA, Los
Angeles is lucky to have two such outstanding institutions. Finally, I need to thank the
University of Göttingen in Germany where I was a guest researcher in residence while
completing the writing of my dissertation in 2014-2015. I owe a debt of gratitude to Anja
Jetschke and Patrick Theiner for hosting me under the Chair of International Relations, and to the
rest of my colleagues in the department for making my experience so welcoming and engaging.
It was a pleasure to be associated with such a historic university.
Many peers and friends have made this journey less lonely. At USC, I’d like to
acknowledge Mariano Bertucci and Matt Gratias in particular. They have been wonderful
colleagues and great friends. I cherish my relationships with them and their families. For their
friendship and collegiality I’d also like to acknowledge Justin Berry, Fabian Borges, Juvenal
Cortes, Tyler Curley, Parker Hevron, Chin-Hao Huang, Joey Huddleston, Eunice Kang, Mark
Paradis, Simon Radford, Scott Wilbur, Seanon Wong, Nicholas de Zamarcoczy. At UCLA, I’d
like to acknowledge special relationships with Carl Bergquist and Jenjira Yahirun, and Yuval
Feinstein and Lotem Giladi. I miss our times together.
Finally, I would like to thank my family for all of their support, love, and patience over
the years. My parents Greg and Linda Hamilton are truly special people. They gave me the
foundation to succeed in life and have believed in me ever since. I owe them more than I can
explain and ever repay. Thank you. My brother Jason, his wife Carrie, and their children Isabella
and Connor have always supported me and offered many welcome respites from this project and
others over the years. My grandfather James Hamilton was my direct connection back to the pre
and postwar periods. He may not have known it, but his service to country and life experiences
gave me an intuitive feel for this project. The fact that I lost him in the middle of it left a hole in
my life, but also made thinking about the historical changes in American history more
meaningful. My mother and father in-laws Mürüvvet and Ruşen Özgen have always supported
my work, even if it meant that my wife and I have been absent from their life for more they or
we would have preferred.
My greatest thanks go to my wife Zeynep Özgen who is an inspirational person. She is
the most loving wife, my best friend, and a brilliant social scientist. I can’t possibly imagine
spending my life with anyone else. Just days after defending my dissertation, we welcomed our
son Derin James Hamilton into the world. He is an amazing little boy and I couldn’t have asked
for a greater treasure at the end of my PhD. I’m excited to see what our future holds together.
! 1
Introduction

International Politics, State-Building, and the Rise of Executive
War-Making Autonomy in the United States

Americans have traditionally thought of the post-World War II period in terms of Henry
Luce’s vision of the “American century”—a time when America’s power, ideas, and values
transformed the world.
1
Indeed, it would be difficult to overstate America’s impact on world
politics since Luce’s article first appeared in February 1941. Later that year the United States
became a full—and ultimately decisive—participant in the Allied victory in World War II. After
the war, America led a massive effort to help stabilize and rebuild war-torn countries in Europe
and elsewhere, as well as to create new international institutions of economy, law, and security.
2

To shore up these more legal-internationalist efforts, the United States also actively shaped
elections, engineered coups, supported subversives, propped up strongmen, and conducted a
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
Luce’s article appeared on the eve of America’s entry to World War II with the purpose of persuading
the country to take responsibility for being a world power. He argued that while American culture and
products had already found their way around the world, a more expansive form of internationalism was
required—one which would be driven by “a sharing with all peoples of our Bill of Rights, our Declaration
of Independence, our Constitution, our magnificent industrial products, our technical skills.” Andrew
Bacevich contends it is “the most famous essay” ever published in “arguably the most influential popular
periodical in American history.” Reprinted as Henry R. Luce, “The American Century,” Diplomatic
History 23, no. 2 (1999): 159–71; Andrew J. Bacevich, “Life at the Dawn of the American Century,” in
The Short American Century: A Postmortem, ed. Andrew J. Bacevich (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2012), 3–4.
2
See G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American
World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
! 2
range of military interventions around the world.
3
Together, America’s actions to build and
police a new international order molded the domestic politics and economies of countries both in
and outside of the western bloc, as well as the international politics of the Cold War period.
Yet for as much as the United States helped shape and transform world politics in the
second half of the twentieth century, American politics, society, and culture were similarly
reconstituted by the country’s global responsibilities. Nowhere was this change more profound
than with respect to America’s national security institutions and practices.
4
Looking back
retrospectively after the Cold War, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted the significance of
the transformation: “The Cold War changed us. We used to be pretty much what we started out
to be: a republic that expected normally to be at peace. If we were more warlike than we
pretended, we rarely prepared for war as if it were always imminent…With the cold war all this
changed. We became a national security state, geared for war at all times.”
5
The noted legal
scholar John Hart Ely includes in the legacies bequeathed to the United States by the Cold War:
“…a sense of permanent emergency, a consequent condition of continuous large-scale military
preparation; covert military operations of a sort we never ran or sponsored before; the infectious
attitude of secrecy, even dishonesty toward the American people that such operations necessarily
involve us in; the ruinous borrowing required to finance it all.”
6

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3
See for example Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western
Europe (New York: Frank Cass, 2005); Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime
Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York: Henry Holt, 2006); John Prados, Safe for Democracy: The
Secret Wars of the CIA (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006).
4
The impact was far wider and helped transform the country’s domestic politics, economic life, and
culture. Here I am interested solely in the structure of the American state and government as they relate to
national security. On the wider domestic effects of the Cold War see for example Michael S. Sherry, In
the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
5
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Peace Dividend,” New York Review of Books, June 28, 1990, 3.
6
John Hart Ely, War and Responsibility: Constitutional Lessons of Vietnam and Its Aftermath (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993), ix.
! 3
By nearly any measure, the changes in America’s national security capabilities,
architecture, and decision-making processes from the period before World War II to the postwar
period were tremendous. The postwar construction of a “national security state” has received
considerable attention from security scholars in recent years.
7
Much of the literature has sought
to explain how the United States managed to build greater military power in the postwar period
without sacrificing its democratic institutions and becoming, in the words of Harold Lasswell, a
“garrison state.”
8
A related and equally important part of the development of the national
security state, however, has not received sustained and systematic treatment: how did the United
States manage to project military power overseas on a regular basis since World War II despite
the constraints built into the country’s democratic system of government. Solving this puzzle, I
contend, requires a greater focus on America’s state structure and decision-making procedures
and how they were adapted to deal with the country’s changing international security
environment. The explanation that I advance focuses specifically on the development of
executive war-making autonomy in the United States.
I define autonomy as the degree to which state structure and decision-making procedures
provide executive officials with the ability to translate their preferences into policy outcomes
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
7
The broader literature in this area is enormous. Several works that look specifically at the development
of the American national security state include Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold
War and the National Security State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977); Bartholomew H. Sparrow, From
the Outside In: World War II and the American State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996);
Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison
State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2000); Amy Zegart, Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC (Palo Alto: Stanford
University Press, 2000); Douglas T. Stuart, Creating the National Security State: A History of the Law
That Transformed America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
8
Harold D. Lasswell, “Sino-Japanese Crisis: The Garrison State versus the Civilian State,” China
Quarterly XI (1937): 643–49; Harold D. Lasswell, “The Garrison State,” The American Journal of
Sociology 46, no. 4 (1941): 455–68.
! 4
notwithstanding societal preferences.
9
Here I am specifically concerned with the degree to which
the executive is able to employ military force in the conduct of foreign policy. The main question
I address in the dissertation is: where does such autonomy come from?
Today, we take executive war-making autonomy for granted to some extent in the United
States. When President Obama considered launching military strikes against Syria in retaliation
for its use of chemical weapons in September 2013, for example, many observers were surprised
the President decided to engage in a public debate at all.
10
As one prominent foreign policy
analyst noted, Obama would upend decades of precedent in unilateral Presidential military action
by seeking congressional authorization.
11
Just two years earlier he had launched a far more
extensive military campaign in Libya not only without similar authorization, but also in the face
of both public and Congressional opposition.
12
At the same time, moreover, he was single-
handedly directing drones wars in Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, and Somalia.
13

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
9
This definition relates to other prominent ones, but differs in an important way. Norrin Ripsman and
others suggest the measure of autonomy is defined by the ability of the executive to act even “when faced
with public or legislative opposition.” I agree this is the strongest test of autonomy, but suggest this
definition unnecessarily limits our understanding of how decision-makers pursue their policy preferences.
When possible, decision-makers, especially in democracies, prefer to circumvent tests of their ability to
act independently. In the area of national security, they do things like obscure their policies and resort to
using instruments of force that limit or completely evade public attention. Eric A. Nordlinger, On the
Autonomy of the Democratic State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 8, 39; John M. Hobson,
The State and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 7; Norrin M.
Ripsman, Peacemaking by Democracies: The Effect of State Autonomy on the Post-World War
Settlements (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 43.
10
Even though the President made a decision to take the question to Congress, he claimed in his speech to
the public “to possess the authority to order military strikes,” irrespective of congressional authorization.
It is not clear whether he would have ordered strikes if Congress had denied authorization.
11
Fareed Zakaria, “Crisis in Syria,” The Situation Room (CNN, September 5, 2013),
http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1309/05/sitroom.02.html.
12
Polls in early March 2011 showed that only 27% of the American public thought the United States had
a “responsibility to act in Libya,” while only 17% favored “bombing Libyan air defenses” and 13%
favored “sending troops into Libya.” Pew Research Center News Interest Index, March 10-13, 2011,
N=1,001. The Congressional response was mixed. There was more opposition to the Presidential use of
force than in recent cases, but Congress was ultimately unwilling to defund military operations in Libya.
! 5
This degree of autonomy, however, was unknown for much of American history. Before
developing the explanation further, therefore, it is necessary to compare the use of force in pre-
and post-World War II eras briefly to show just how much changed in this period. Doing so
helps elaborate the theoretical and empirical puzzles that lie at the heart of the dissertation.

Pre- and Postwar Force Projection: A Study in Contrasts
During the 1930s President Franklin Roosevelt watched with frustration as the world slid
gradually toward World War II, dragging the United States along with it. Roosevelt had some
foresight about the war to come, but the lack of capacity, organization, and flexibility within the
still embryonic American national security state prevented him from acting more decisively to
prevent the slide toward war. The United States had acquired the means to become the world’s
most powerful state decades earlier. Yet as late as September 1939 the Army ranked nineteenth
in the world—behind Portugal and only slightly ahead of Bulgaria. Its less than half-strength
divisions were scattered across 130 locations and armed with obsolete equipment.
14
The armed
forces were not only undersized but also disorganized. Decades after various reform efforts they
were still riddled with limited planning capabilities, decentralized authority structures, and at
times unclear chains of command. Cooperation between the War and Navy Departments,
moreover, was mostly absent or dysfunctional. The lack of a centralized body to coordinate their
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
See Ryan C. Hendrickson, “Libya and American War Powers: War-Making Decisions in the United
States,” Global Change, Peace & Security 25, no. 2 (2013): 179–182.
13
David Rhode, “The Drone Wars,” Reuters Magazine, January 26, 2012, http://www.reuters.com/
article/2012/01/26/us-david-rohde-drone-wars-idUSTRE80P11I20120126; Jo Becker and Scott Shane,
“Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will,” New York Times, May 29, 2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?_r=0.
14
George C. Marshall, “Biennial Report of the Chief of Staff of the United States Army to the Secretary
of War: July 1, 1943, to June 30, 1945,” in Biennial Reports of the Chief of Staff of the United States
Army to the Secretary of War: 1 July 1939 - 30 June 1945 (Washington, DC: Government Printing
Office, 1996), v, 3–4.
! 6
intelligence efforts, for example, was later widely viewed as contributing to the surprise attack
on Pearl Harbor. Equally problematic was the lack of a central organization to tie together the
views of the military departments with their counterparts engaged in diplomacy. There was in
fact no formal institution in the American state below the President himself to help plan and
direct overall national security policy.
Perhaps most disconcerting for Roosevelt was his lack of discretion to utilize what
military capabilities the country did have. Presidents had always used the armed forces
independently to protect American citizens and property in foreign countries, and since 1900
more loosely to defend and advance the country’s growing overseas interests. Such discretion
was limited, however, and in the 1930s even that was under threat of being rolled back.
Beginning in 1935, Congress passed a series of Neutrality Acts partly to check what Senator
Hiram Johnson called “the President’s sinister...grasp of the war-making power.”
15
Throughout
the decade, moreover, some congressmen proposed amending the Constitution to include the
requirement of a national referendum in the event of war. Both efforts were broadly popular with
the American public. Without the United States entering a full-scale war, therefore, Roosevelt
had few options to use the country’s military power to prevent the slide toward war or to affect
its outcome once under way in September 1939. Between 1939 and 1941, Congress began to
back greater preparedness and loosen restrictions on executive action. Importantly, however,
America remained on the sidelines until Congress declared war after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Thus on the eve of the United States’ largest foreign war, the American state was
militarily feeble and unorganized, and decision-makers were constrained from acting earlier to
prevent such an outcome. What is important to highlight is that this was all by design. The
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
15
Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1979), 140.
! 7
country’s domestic institutions had always been informed by republican ideas about the dangers
of standing armed forces, centralized military authority, and executive war-making powers.
These ideas were codified in the Constitution and embedded into the very fabric of the American
state. They also informed the country’s historical preference to avoid war for fear that prolonged
or persistent preparation for war might undermine its domestic institutional arrangement. Thus,
while America’s actions—or lack thereof—in the 1930s appear perplexing from a great power
perspective, they were perfectly in line with the country’s long-standing domestic preferences.
It is far from certain whether President Roosevelt might have averted or even contained
the magnitude of World War II if given greater militarily resources, better national security
organization, and a freer hand to employ the country’s armed forces. Regardless, the view of
practitioners and scholars was that the failure of the Untied States and other Western countries to
deter the Axis powers in the 1930s demonstrated the weakness of democracies in conducting
foreign policy.
16
A young John F. Kennedy captured the crux of the problem in 1940. He argued
that there is a “fundamental instinct of man against war,” which in representative government
trickles up and “binds the hands of democratic leaders.”
17
Like others at the time and later,
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16
The idea that America’s democratic political institutions would inhibit policymakers from acting
effectively is what Peter Gourevitch characterizes as the “insufficiency position.” Some important
scholars who articulated this view include Hans J. Morgenthau, In Defense of the National Interest: A
Critical Examination of American Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1950),
221–242; George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, Expanded Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1951), 93–100; Walter Lippmann, Essays in the Public Philosophy (Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 1955); Dean Acheson, A Citizen Looks at Congress (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), 86;
Hans J. Morgenthau, Dilemmas of Politics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958), 324–339; George
F. Kennan, The Cloud of Danger: Current Realities of American Foreign Policy (Boston: Little, Brown
and Company, 1977), 3–9; Samuel P. Huntington, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 18; Peter A. Gourevitch, “Reinventing the American
State,” in Shaped By War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development, ed. Ira
Katznelson and Martin Shefter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 304.
17
John F. Kennedy, Why England Slept (New York: W. Funk, Inc., 1940), 228, 224.
! 8
Kennedy suggested these constraints made the United States ill-suited for a new era, which
required military preparedness and the use of force as an instrument of foreign policy.
The view that the United States could not effectively build or project military power,
however, persisted even after the country prevailed in World War II and reoriented its foreign
policy to confront the Soviet Union in the Cold War. As the prominent practitioner/scholar
George Kennan later reflected, the problem in democracies was in “the machinery of
government” or “the machinery of decision-making.” He was particularly concerned about the
lack of executive autonomy under democratic government and the fact that decision-makers were
“beholden to short-term trends of public opinion.”
18
!Walter Lippmann likewise argued that!
legislatures and publics in democracies act “to devitalize, to enfeeble, and to eviscerate the
executive powers.” The problem was that no state could act decisively and effectively in
questions of war and peace, Lippmann warned, if “the executive and judicial departments...have
lost their power to decide.”
19

One area that struck observers as particularly problematic was the reluctance of
democracies to adhere to the logic of force in world politics. This belief was endemic in the
United States. Kennan, for example, lamented “the sweeping moral rejection of international
violence which bedevils so many Americans in times of peace.”
20
Lippmann meanwhile took
Kennan to task for not recognizing this very problem as the flaw in containment. He argued that
the United States could not operate a policy that required applying “counter-force” around the
world under a democratic Constitution. Even if decision-makers did pursue such a strategy,
Lippmann warned, the American public would tire of it before Soviet leaders without similar
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
18
George F. Kennan, “Diplomacy in the Modern World,” in American Diplomacy, Expanded Edition
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 93, 94, 99.
19
Lippmann, Essays in the Public Philosophy, 47–57, quotes on 27, 55.
20
Kennan, “Diplomacy in the Modern World,” 90.
! 9
domestic constraints did.
21
During the Cold War, others such as Zbigniew Brzezinski and
Samuel Huntington frequently contrasted the competitiveness of the Soviet state of war with the
“American reluctance to use force”—a reluctance they argued was “deeply rooted in the
American tradition and political beliefs.”
22
Or as Stanley Hoffmann would observe, the
dominant “liberal view of international affairs” in America “suffers from a complete
misunderstanding of the role of force in world history.” Writing two decades after World War II,
he lamented that there still remained “an instinctive inhibition in America's approach to the use
of national force.”
23

America’s pre-World War II record does provide some evidence for the notion that as a
democracy the country both resisted and struggled to build and project military power. By the
turn of the twentieth century, America’s economy was the largest in the world and its interests
extended far beyond North America. The United States easily could have afforded to build a
large and powerful military and engage in an extensive program of overseas expansion. Yet,
even as the United States rose to power, it kept a small standing army, seldom resorted to large-
scale use of force to secure or advance its interests, and in many ways under-expanded relative to
the opportunities it had to do so.
24
During the height of the age of imperialism between 1870 and
1900, when the United States made its greatest gains overseas, it seized about 125,000 square
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21
Lippmann feared that a strategy of applying counterforce at “constantly shifting geographical and
political points corresponding to the shifts in and maneuvers of Soviet policy” actually played right into
the strengths of the Soviet Union, which was much better suited to such a policy. Walter Lippmann, The
Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947), 14–17, 20.
22
Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel P. Huntington, Political Power: USA/USSR (New York: The Viking
Press, 1964), 383.
23
Stanley Hoffmann, The State of War: Essays on the Theory and Practice of International Politics (New
York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965), 174.
24
Fareed Zakaria, shows that the United States “under-expanded” at least up until the Spanish-American
War in 1898. But even after a brief bout of expansionist activity during the post-1898 years, the United
States continued to act relatively passively relative to its potential. Fareed Zakaria, From Wealth to
Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
! 10
miles of land, most of which consisted of uncharted parts of the Philippine Islands.
25
Germany in
contrast seized more than 1 million square miles during these years, while Great Britain seized
about 5 million square miles or roughly forty times as much land as the United States.
26
Many
American leaders supported a more ambitious foreign policy in the early twentieth century and
by the eve of World War I called for permanent peacetime war preparation. But even after World
War I, the United States rolled back its military and attempted to pursue a policy of diplomacy
without force.
During the Cold War, the notion that the United States—as a democracy—could not
build and project military power continued, even as it clearly no longer applied. The country had
already shown itself capable of building the military power required to win World War II and
then constructed a powerful national security state to match and eventually outlast the Soviet
Union in the Cold War. Moreover, the United States did not struggle to project military power
during the war or in the postwar period. In fact, since 1940 the country has waged six large-scale
foreign interventions, at least seventy-seven more limited interventions, and hundreds of other
covert and clandestine operations.
27
In addition, force (short of open hostilities) has been used
for political purposes in several hundred instances.
28
Barry Blechman and Stephen Kaplan
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
25
Beginning in 1916, the United States would begin the slow process of giving the Philippines self-rule
and eventual independence.
26
Walter LaFeber, “The ‘Lion in the Path’: The US Emergence as a World Power,” Political Science
Quarterly 101, no. 5 (1986): 712.
27
The number of times the United States has used force since World War II is notoriously difficult to
define and calculate. The number of limited interventions is a conservative estimate that was compiled
based on Richard F. Grimmett, “Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2010,”
CRS Report R41677, 2010.
28
All told, scholars have identified over four hundred such instances. See Barry M. Blechman and
Stephen S. Kaplan, Force Without War: U.S. Armed Forces as a Political Instrument (Washington, DC:
The Brookings Institution, 1978); Philip Zelikow, “The United States and the Use of Force: A Historical
Summary,” in Democracy, Strategy, and Vietnam: Implications for American Policymaking, ed. George
K. Osborn et al. (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1987), 31–81; Benjamin O. Fordham and
Christopher C. Sarver, “Militarized Interstate Disputes and United States Uses of Force,” International
! 11
estimate that from 1946 through the mid-1970s the United States actually used force roughly
twice as often as the Soviet Union to achieve its political goals.
29
During the decade after the
Cold War, at a time when the United States was arguably more secure, America used force even
more freely in the Persian Gulf, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and across no-fly zones in
northern and southern Iraq. And in the decade following the September 11 attacks, the country
conducted major interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with other significant military
operations.
All told, the United States was roughly four times more likely be involved in either a
militarized interstate dispute or an actual interstate war in any given year between 1941 and 2007
than between 1816 and 1940.
30
This excludes the use of covert operations, which were non-
existent previously, but are known to have exploded in the postwar period. Clearly there is a gap
between the historical expectations of practitioners and scholars about the willingness and ability
of the United States as a democracy to build and use military power. Such a view may have
applied to the prewar period, but the country’s actual record over the last seven decades suggests
something changed dramatically halfway through the twentieth century with democracy no
longer operating as quite the constraint many believed it to be.
The discontinuity between the prewar and postwar actions of the United States presents a
pair of seemingly contradictory puzzles about the relationship between international and
domestic politics that have still not been fully reckoned with by international relations scholars.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Studies Quarterly 45, no. 3 (2001): 455–66; William G. Howell and Jon C. Pevehouse, While Dangers
Gather: Congressional Checks on Presidential War Powers (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2007).
29
Blechman and Kaplan, Force Without War: U.S. Armed Forces as a Political Instrument.
30
Faten Ghosn, Glenn Palmer, and Stuart A. Bremer, “The MID3 Data Set, 1993–2001: Procedures,
Coding Rules, and Description,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 21, no. 2 (2004): 133–54;
Meredith Reid Sarkees and Frank Wayman, Resort to War: 1816-2007 (CQ Press, 2010).
! 12
Why as the most powerful country in the world in the 1930s was the United States so unprepared
and so unwilling to act more forcefully during the run-up to World War II? And why if
America’s democratic political system acted to constrain the state so much before World War II
did it not do so afterward? In the next section I explain why the prevailing views on the
democracy/foreign policy nexus in international relations theory have trouble explaining this
divergence and how I propose to resolve this gap in the literature.

The Democracy/Foreign Policy Nexus Reconsidered: International Security
Competition and a Realist Theory of the Dynamic State
At the risk of oversimplifying some important distinctions, there are roughly three
approaches to understanding the relationship between democracy and foreign policy in
international relations theory today.
31
The first comprises a variety of classical realist, liberal,
and rational choice theories, which argue that democracy acts as an important constraint on state
action in world politics.
32
In particular, they contend democratic institutions create a “policy
bias” toward the non-use of force.
33
The second consists of system-level theories, which argue
that international political pressure trumps domestic pressure and therefore states are likely to
respond to environmental factors despite constraints at home. The most notable systemic theory
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
31
I discuss these theories at greater length in chapter one.
32
Paradigmatic statements from each of these theoretical families include Morgenthau, In Defense of the
National Interest: A Critical Examination of American Foreign Policy, 221–242; Michael W. Doyle,
“Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs, Part 2,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 12, no. 4 (1983): 323–
53; Bruce Bueno De Mesquita et al., “An Institutional Explanation of the Democratic Peace,” American
Political Science Review 93, no. 4 (1999): 791–807.
33
This is particularly true of liberal and rational choice theories. As I explain in chapter one, the position
of classical realists is more complicated. Their concern is that democracy makes states reluctant to use
force as a rational instrument of policy to mitigate inter-state competition until major wars are required.
Thus, paradoxically, democracy creates a policy bias toward the non-use of force, but ultimately may
result in wars that are more destructive. On the concept “policy bias” see Ronald Rogowski, “Institutions
as Constraints on Strategic Choice,” in Strategic Choice and International Relations, ed. David A. Lake
and Robert Powell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 115–36.
! 13
is Kenneth Waltz’s structural realism in which states are conceptualized as autonomous vis-a-vis
their domestic publics and “passive military-adaptive,” meaning they are expected to adjust to
changes in the international security environment similarly—including by building military
power and using force when necessary—regardless of their domestic political constitutions.
34

These two approaches together constitute two sides of a coin where democracy is either seen as
an important factor in explaining world politics or not. This binary logic has long shaped debates
about the relationship between democracy and foreign policy.
In recent years, however, scholars working either explicitly or implicitly within a
neoclassical realist framework have elaborated a third approach in which the democracy/foreign
policy nexus is viewed in more varied terms. Neoclassical realists start from a structural realist
perspective, but look at the way states respond to systemic pressure in light of domestic factors.
35

They argue that not just regime type (i.e. democracy vs. non-democracy), but also the nature of
the state (i.e. strong vs. weak, centralized vs. decentralized, autonomous vs. constrained) matters
for explaining democracy’s actual influence on state behavior. By looking at state structure, they
find in fact that “not all democracies are alike.”
36
Of particular importance is the fact that some
democratic institutional arrangements provide decision-makers in the executive branch with
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
34
Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1979); The term “passive
military-adaptive” comes from Hobson and is discussed at greater length in chapter two. Hobson, The
State and International Relations.
35
The term “neoclassical realism” was coined by Gideon Rose, “Neoclassical Realism and Theories of
Foreign Policy,” World Politics 51, no. 1 (1998): 144–72; For other introductions to neoclassical realism
see Randall L. Schweller, “The Progressive Power of Neoclassical Realism,” in Progress in International
Relations Theory, ed. Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 144–72;
Brian C. Rathbun, “A Rose by Any Other Name: Neoclassical Realism as the Logical and Necessary
Extension of Structural Realism,” Security Studies 17, no. 2 (2008): 294–321; Jeffrey W. Taliaferro,
Steven E. Lobell, and Norrin M. Ripsman, “Introduction: Neoclassical Realism, the State, and Foreign
Policy,” in Neoclassical Realism, the State, and Foreign Policy, ed. Steven E. Lobell, Norrin M.
Ripsman, and Jeffrey W. Taliaferro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1–41.
36
Ripsman, Peacemaking by Democracies: The Effect of State Autonomy on the Post-World War
Settlements, 1.
! 14
more autonomy than others. This in turn explains variation in state behavior across a range of
issues including crisis negotiation, the use of force, and peacemaking.
37
By “bringing the state
back in,” neoclassical realists have corrected some of the gaps in the first two approaches and
shown that the constraints faced by leaders in democracies often vary in important ways.
The American case offers evidence at different times for each of these approaches. The
prewar American reluctance to pursue policies that might embroil the country in war tends to
confirm the expectations of the first. Americans for much of their history normally expected to
be at peace and the Framers of the Constitution purposefully designed the country’s institutional
arrangement to reflect that preference. Specific checks were included to make sure the
development of a vast military establishment, the concentration of military authority, and the
employment of the armed forces were all limited by cumbersome restrictions. The resilience of
these constraints can be seen in the post-1890 period (especially the interwar period). During this
time the United States became the most powerful country in the world and faced increasing
systemic pressure. Yet the American state did not pursue a traditional great power foreign policy,
contrary to what structural realism would expect.
In the postwar period, however, America’s foreign policy began to conform better with
structural realism’s expectation that states ultimately respond to increases in systemic pressure
irrespective of their domestic political constitutions. In an important yet often neglected study
Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics, Waltz found the American state no more disadvantaged
in the Cold War than the authoritarian Soviet state. He noted that after World War II both
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
37
Exemplary works include Susan Peterson, Crisis Bargaining and the State: The Domestic Politics of
International Conflict (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); David P. Auerswald, Disarmed
Democracies: Domestic Institutions and the Use of Force (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2000); Ripsman, Peacemaking by Democracies: The Effect of State Autonomy on the Post-World War
Settlements.
! 15
countries were quickly able to “extend their influence globally and compete at all levels of
power.”
38
Looking back on the Cold War years later, moreover, he pointed to the fact that the
United States and the Soviet Union behaved similarly throughout the conflict despite their
different domestic political systems.
39
America’s democratic constraints were less constraining
than others suggested, he argued.
40

Neoclassical realism can account for American foreign policy behavior both before and
after the war by looking not only at systemic pressure but also the constraints decision-makers
faced in each period. It is possible American decision-makers before the war were constrained by
tighter democratic constraints that favored non-involvement in world affairs, whereas afterward
they operated with fewer constraints. In other words, it is possible the American state of the Cold
War was no longer the same American state it was in the 1930s and that this in part explains
behavioral variation over time. The problem with this explanation is not that it is wrong. The
changing nature of the American state at this time is an obvious factor. Instead, the problem is
that neoclassical realism—indeed realism as a whole—lacks a framework for explaining why
and how the American state changed.
To account for cases like the United States and others, I propose what might be called a
realist theory of the dynamic state. At the center of the theory is the idea that states are produced,
reproduced, and often transformed by their interactions with other states in the international
system. This is particularly true with respect to their security interactions—both actual war and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
38
Kenneth N. Waltz, Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics: The American and British Experience
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967), quote on 5.
39
Kenneth N. Waltz, “America as a Model for the World? A Foreign Policy Perspective,” PS: Political
Science and Politics 24, no. 4 (1991): 667–70.
40
Waltz is often criticized for ignoring domestic politics. A careful reading of his work, however, shows
he pays attention to it but simply finds it less important a factor in determining international political
outcomes than others assume.
! 16
the need to prepare for possible war in the future. Structural realism acknowledges this state
dynamism implicitly, but simply takes it for granted. The theory assumes states will do whatever
it takes to survive, but elides the question of how they adapt internally by conceiving of them as
“black boxes” or “billiard balls” that automatically adjust their behavior in the face of systemic
pressure.
41
The problem with this explanation is that such behavioral adaptation depends on a
state’s underlying institutional ability to act accordingly. What is critically missing in this story
is what happens when states lack such ability. Neoclassical realism meanwhile takes state
dynamism for granted in a different way. Neoclassical realist theories assume that states are
institutionally heterogeneous, both across case and over time. But they treat this heterogeneity as
given and static.
To account for these shortcomings in the various strands of contemporary realist theory, I
argue, requires a more explicit and nuanced theory of the state and state-building—something
realists to this point have largely eschewed.
42
What is needed is a processual theory that marries
the functionalism of structural realism with the institutionalism of neoclassical realism to explain
how systemic pressure actually causes institutional variation at the domestic level. In chapter
two, I construct this theory by returning to the insights of Peter Gourevitch’s second image
reversed approach and particularly “bellicist” theories of state formation, which look to
international security competition as a source of domestic institutional change.
43
Drawing on this
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
41
As J. David Singer observed in his seminal article on the levels of analysis, the black box or billiard
ball assumption is necessary and common to all truly system-level theories. J. David Singer, “The Level-
of-Analysis Problem in International Relations,” World Politics 14, no. 1 (1961): 81–82.
42
Some important works that have begun this effort in recent years include Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, “State
Building for Future Wars: Neoclassical Realism and the Resource Extractive State,” Security Studies 15,
no. 3 (2006): 464–95; João Resende-Santos, Realism, States, and the Modern Mass Army (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007).
43
The term second image reversed was originally used by Peter Gourevitch to characterize theories that in
part attempt to explain domestic political transformation in light of changes at the international level.
! 17
tradition, I first develop a conception of states as institutional-functional units, which are torn
between the dual-constraints imposed by domestic institutions on the one hand, and life in the
international system on the other. I then turn to developing a theory of the dynamic state using a
macro-micro-macro model embedded with a series of mechanisms to explain how state behavior
at the system level depends on state-building efforts to carve out greater institutional capacity
and autonomy at the unit level.
The core of the theory is as follows: When international security competition is severe, it
creates systemic pressure on states and causes what I call “institutional stress” when existing
institutions do not enable the state to act. This institutional stress in turn leads policymakers to
undertake two broad sets of state-building activities to transform existing institutions and
improve the state’s ability to respond to greater systemic pressure: First, they attempt to extract
more resources from society in order to create greater military capacity. This includes raising
taxes, conscripting or hiring professional soldiers, increasing industrial production, and
developing new military technologies. Second, they attempt to carve out a greater degree of state
autonomy in order to better project military power when necessary. This includes streamlining
and centralizing national security institutions and decision-making procedures to better insulate
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Peter Gourevitch, “The Second Image Reversed: The International Sources of Domestic Politics,”
International Organization 32, no. 4 (1978): 896–900. The term “bellicist” was coined by Philip Gorski
to describe the literature on the state that focuses on “international military competition as the driving
force behind state formation.” Important works in this literature include Charles Tilly, “Reflections on the
History of European State-Making,” in The Formation of National States in Western Europe, ed. Charles
Tilly (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 3–82; Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making
as Organized Crime,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and
Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 169–91; Charles Tilly, Coercion,
Capital, and European State, AD 990-1990 (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990); Brian Downing, The
Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Thomas Ertman, The Birth of the Leviathan: Building
States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997); Philip S. Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early
Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 5–10, quote on 5.
! 18
policymakers to do things like initiate the use of force. When systemic pressure is low or
moderate, we should expect indeterminate or incremental institutional change, as existing
institutions (and their related ideational foundations) are often resistant to outside-in generated
stress. When systemic pressure is severe, we should expect institutional change that is more
episodic in nature. It is under these latter conditions in particular that we should expect states to
be constitutively adaptive—meaning they institutionally adapt to malign international security
environments—and thus dynamic.

The American Case in Comparative-Historical Perspective
To analyze the relationship between international security competition and domestic
institutional change, I study the development of American national security institutions in
comparative-historical perspective using a longitudinal research design. I periodize the country’s
development into three temporal phases—1787-1890, 1890-1941, and 1941-1960—and conduct
case studies of each period to observe the relationship between international politics and stability
and change in the state’s institutional structures and decision-making procedures over time. In
each period I pay particular attention to how policymakers thought about the international
environment in relation to the country’s domestic institutions. I show that the three periods vary
in terms of the systemic pressure faced by the United States and that this variation in turn helps
explain three distinct institutional logics: institutional formation in the first period, institutional
resistance in the second, and ultimately institutional adaptation in the third.
The United States provides fertile ground to study the relationship between international
security competition and domestic institutional change in part because it is the only modern great
power to develop in isolation from great power politics. As Aristide Zolberg explains, the United
! 19
States “did not yet exist as an actor during the global wars of the early modern era, which shaped
the structure of the major European states, and…it participated only marginally in the global war
of 1792-1815, which further stimulated the development of state structures among the European
belligerents. This allowed for a developmental pattern that diverged sharply from the European
norm.” Most relevant here is that fact that while other states “achieved [great power] status
before the age of liberal democracy, and by and large managed to insulate their externally
oriented decision-making apparatus from the pressures of accountability, the United States rose
to global leadership well after such accountability was institutionalized.”
44

The result of this distinct developmental pattern has been two-fold: first, the American
state originally—and for a long time—lacked many features of stateness, including autonomy.
45

Second, any state-building efforts to carve out greater autonomy since have generally generated
strong congressional and public resistance. This has certainly been the case in domestic affairs,
but it has also impacted the structure of state control over foreign affairs (particularly up until
World War II, as I show). As Eric Nordlinger argues, the United States’ developmental legacy
makes the American state “close to being an unquestionably least likely case” for exhibiting
autonomy.
46
Observing when and how state-building for autonomy occurred in such an adverse
institutional environment during the country’s rise to power, therefore, serves as an important
proving ground for a second image reversed approach. To be clear, the specific explanation
offered for the American case likely does not travel to other cases in exact form. As I show,
variation in domestic factors across cases ensures this is doubtful. Rather, the purpose is to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
44
Aristide R. Zolberg, “International Engagement and American Democracy: A Comparative
Perspective,” in Shaped By War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 29, 30.
45
Many have gone so far as to consider the United States stateless for much of its history. J.P. Nettl, “The
State as a Conceptual Variable,” World Politics 20, no. 4 (1968): 559–92.
46
Nordlinger, On the Autonomy of the Democratic State, 183–184.
! 20
develop a formal theoretical framework within which to examine institutional change. Focusing
on the United States as a least likely case helps develop and show the value of the framework,
but I do not presuppose that all instances of institutional change unfold the same exact way.
The distinctive origins of the American state make it necessary to return to America’s
Founding Period in order to understand both what the country’s original institutional
arrangement was with respect to executive war-making powers and why it was originally
constructed that way. The first temporal phase of American history from 1787-1890 can be
defined as a period of institutional formation. Systemic pressure at this time was relatively
weak.
47
Ideas about republican government consequently were able to play an outsized role in
determining the original design of America’s security institutions in the Constitution, as well as
the subsequent development of those institutions in the country’s early years. At a general level,
the Framers of the Constitution shared a common concern that war, or even preparation for war,
might imperil the country’s framework of limited government.
48
This general concern was
manifested in the form of more specific fears about the dangers of standing armed forces,
centralized military authority, and independent executive war-making powers. The Constitution
reflected these fears and was designed to fragment and disperse power and authority within
institutional structures and decision-making procedures related to war and peace. This
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
47
As Samuel Huntington noted, in the early years of the American Republic, “national security was a
simple given fact—the starting point of political analysis—not the end result of conscious policy.”
Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 145.
48
In this sense it is important to note that they conceived of domestic and foreign affairs powers as deeply
intertwined. If the latter grew, they feared the former would also.
! 21
arrangement worked to make “obstruction easy” and “positive action difficult” in the American
state, marking an institutional legacy that would shape its later development.
49

The second phase from 1890-1941 can be characterized as a period of institutional
resistance. By 1890, the United States was the world’s largest economy and manufacturer, and
second most populous country. At home it faced expansionary pressure in the form of a fast
growing economy and at least the perception of a closing frontier, while abroad it began to face
some competition from European countries as the second wave of imperialism (1870-1914)
peaked and threatened to endanger American interests in the Western Hemisphere and East Asia.
Near the close of the decade, the country began to conduct a more assertive foreign policy and
even flirted with outright imperialism after the Spanish-American War. America’s oceanic
barriers continued to provide an important degree of safety. But with the its growing power and
foreign commercial interests, and changes in technology, the United States faced a moderate
increase in systemic pressure, which would continue to grow in this period.
50

During this time, the United States built larger standing forces, attempted to reform and
modernize the War and Navy Departments, and provided the executive with greater discretion to
use force overseas for the protection of American citizens and property. These state-building
activities were important, but they were incremental and did not result in a fundamental break in
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
49
Stephen D. Krasner, Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.S. Foreign
Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 61.!
50
It was around this time that the “shrinking globe” theory of American foreign policy emerged, which
conceived of the world as increasingly foreshortened by technology with the United States becoming
more vulnerable. A line from the report, “Statement of a Proper Military Policy for the United States,”
produced by the Army General Staff in 1915 provides a snapshot of this view: “The safeguard of isolation
no longer exists. The oceans, once barriers, are now easy avenues of approach by reason of the number,
speed, and carrying capacity of ocean-going vessels. The increasing radii of action of the submarine, the
aeroplane, and wireless telegraphy all supplement ocean transport in placing both our Atlantic and Pacific
coasts within the sphere of hostile activities of overseas nations.” On the shrinking globe theory see
chapters four and six. Army War College, Statement of a Proper Military Policy for the United States
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1916), 1.
! 22
institutional development. If the American state acquired any of the features of a national
security state in this period, those features can at best be described as embryonic. Instead, the
traditional republican institutional arrangement of the American state demonstrated remarkable
resilience. Policymakers resisted efforts to build large standing forces in peacetime, centralize
military authority, and shift even greater war-making powers to the executive. This can be seen
most clearly after World War I, when the country’s massive military machine and the
executive’s accumulated wartime powers were all rolled back. As the case study of the period
shows, though many of the seeds of greater executive war-making autonomy were sown at this
time, they would not bear fruit until after World War II.
Finally, the third phase from 1941 to 1960 can be considered a period of institutional
transformation. Beginning with the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the United States
faced intense systemic pressure that placed a tremendous amount of institutional stress on the
American state. This pressure was driven by the rapidly changing nature of warfare technologies
and later the emerging Cold War with the Soviet Union. Together, these factors gave birth to a
new logic of force, which dictated the United States build, maintain, and project military power
in the postwar period. America’s national security institutions, however, were poorly equipped
for such a task. Resolving this gap required policymakers to transform the country’s institutions
and build what we now know today as the national security state.
At the heart of constructing a new national security state was the requirement of carving
out greater executive power and autonomy to enable the United States to act more decisively.
Thomas Bailey captured this sentiment well, arguing that Americans now had to be “willing to
give our leaders in Washington a freer hand.” He argued, “the yielding of some of our
democratic control of foreign affairs is the price that we may have to pay for greater physical
! 23
security.”
51
A “freer hand” in foreign policy largely meant shifting authority from Congress to
the executive branch, which by virtue of the fact that it was more hierarchically structured and
more insulated from popular pressures could act with greater “Decision, activity, secrecy, and
despatch.”
52
Looking back on the period, Senator J. William Fulbright, one of the most
prominent critics of executive power later, explained “it was not difficult to be persuaded that
modern realities required greater latitude for the President” at the time
53
In fact, he himself was
an important proponent of vesting greater power in the executive, arguing, “the price of
democratic survival in a world of aggressive totalitarianisms is to give up some of the democratic
luxuries of the past.”
54

The question for American policymakers in the postwar period, however, was how to
give the executive a freer hand to conduct foreign policy—which inevitably meant
compromising some of the republican principles that had long militated against such change—
without turning into the full-blown garrison state or dictatorial regime that many feared it might.
As Lasswell had warned, in a garrison state “the political élite…will find it necessary to make
certain adaptations in the fundamental practices of the state. Decisions will be more dictatorial
than democratic, and institutional practices long connected with modern democracy will
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
51
Thomas A. Bailey, The Man in the Street: The Impact of American Public Opinion on Foreign Policy
(New York: The Macmillan Company, 1948), 18; See also Hanson W. Baldwin, The Price of Power
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947); Clinton L. Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis
Government in the Modern Democracies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948).
52
This well known description of executive advantages is from Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist Number
70,” in The Federalist, ed. George W. Carey and James McClellen (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001),
363.
53
J. William Fulbright, “Forward,” in Constitutional Diplomacy, by Michael J. Glennon (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1990), xi.
54
J. William Fulbright, “American Foreign Policy in the 20th Century under an 18th-Century
Constitution,” Cornell Law Quarterly 47, no. 1 (1961): 7.
! 24
disappear.”
55
Figuring out how to provide a freer hand to the executive to project power without
“destroying the very qualities and virtues and principles we originally set about to save” was part
of the “grand dilemma” of the time, in the words of Hanson Baldwin.
56

In the dissertation, I attempt to show that American decision-makers were able to
redesign the country’s domestic political institutions and shift war-making powers to the
executive through a three-part institutional transformation that together made force a more
“usable” foreign policy tool without resulting in the consequences envisioned by Lasswell. The
first institutional transformation was the construction of significant standing forces for the first
time in the country’s history and the development of new instruments of warfare including the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1947. As I will discuss later, the construction of a large
peacetime army represented a monumental shift in institutional power to the executive branch, as
legislative acts were no longer needed to build military force on an ad hoc basis. This shifted the
initiative to project and use military power away from Congress to the President, enabling the
latter, by virtue of his newly empowered role as Commander in Chief, to send and station forces
overseas (as President Truman did in Europe in 1951) or even commit American forces to large-
scale war (as President Truman did in Korea in 1950). The construction of new instruments of
warfare such as the CIA meanwhile provided Presidents with the capacity to use force short of
committing the country to large-scale war. In cases where large-scale actions were ill-advised or
public opinion prevented them, these new organizations provided the executive with the ability
to use more discreet forms of force.
Second, and related to the first shift, not only was the military expanded and new
instruments of warfare created, but their control was better organized and centralized in the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
55
Lasswell, “The Garrison State,” 461.
56
Baldwin, The Price of Power, 19, 20.
! 25
executive branch. This reorganization was part of a much larger effort on the part of the federal
government to streamline the executive branch of government, which had grown large and
unwieldy under the Roosevelt Administration. But unlike much of the domestic state institutions
connected to New Deal programs, which Congress attempted to dismantle after the war, efforts
to reorganize the national security apparatus actually served to consolidate executive
administrative control without subjecting new agencies like the CIA to extensive congressional
control. The most important reform efforts centered on unifying the military, creating the
Department of Defense and a Secretary of Defense, and establishing the National Security
Council as a small and authoritative decision–making unit within the executive office of the
President. The effect of these efforts was to streamline the organizational structure of the
national security apparatus.
Finally, there was a shift in the procedural norms governing the country’s war powers,
which transferred the authority to initiate hostilities from Congress to the President. From the
ratification of the United States Constitution and the election of the first President in 1789
through the Korean War in 1950, war powers in the United States had remained firmly vested in
the legislative process with Presidents wielding those powers outside of established procedures
only in rare circumstances. Beginning with the Korean War, however, a clear break occurred.
Presidents began to claim inherent and often preclusive authority to make decisions about the use
of force. This did not stem from a formal Constitutional change—Congress still holds the formal
power to declare war today—but from a change in the informal procedures by which the
government initiates the use of force. Whereas the initiative previously lay with Congress and
Presidents, the development of new procedures enabled Presidents to take a range of military
actions without first seeking a declaration of war or even securing congressional authorization.
! 26
By expanding and creating new instruments of warfare, by organizing their control, and
by rebalancing the decision-making procedures for their use, American decision-makers were
effectively able to transfer the authority to project military power from the legislature to the more
insulated executive branch in a few short years. This process was riddled with organizational
difficulties and produced less than perfect results in many cases, but in sum they helped provide
the American executive with greater autonomy to use force when necessary.

Contributions
The dissertation aims to make three general contributions to the study of international
relations. First, the general purpose of the dissertation is one of theory-building/refinement. In
particular, the dissertation contributes to the ongoing debate in international relations theory
about the influence of international vs. domestic factors in determining state behavior. Since the
development of structural realism reshaped the study of world politics more than three decades
ago, international relations theorists have struggled with questions about what role systemic
pressures play in shaping state behavior and how to incorporate domestic-level factors into
realism. A variety of structural realist approaches maintain that important aspects of state
behavior can be explained by focusing solely on system-level factors.
57
Liberalism and a host of
other Innenpolitik theories meanwhile claim that domestic politics matter far more than realism
is able to account for.
58
Andrew Moravcsik, for example, provides a forceful rebuttal to realism,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
57
Waltz, Theory of International Politics; John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001); Patrick James, International Relations and Scientific
Progress: Structural Realism Reconsidered (Athens, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2002); Eric J.
Hamilton and Brian C. Rathbun, “Scarce Differences: Toward a Material and Systemic Foundation for
Offensive and Defensive Realism,” Security Studies 22, no. 3 (2013): 436–65.
58
This literature is vast. Representative examples include Richard N. Rosecrance and Arthur A. Stein,
eds., The Domestic Bases of Grand Strategy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Peter Trubowitz,
! 27
arguing, “the configuration of state preferences matters most in world politics,” not the system-
level factors favored by realists.
59

Neoclassical realists have responded to these criticisms by using the expectations of
structural realism as a baseline for state behavior but then turning to internal characteristics to
explain “the actual diplomatic, military, and foreign economic policies states select.”
60
This line
of inquiry has provided an innovative and powerful approach for explaining state behavior but
has been critiqued for diluting the theoretical value of realism by introducing unit-level variables
into its analysis.
61
As Brian Rathbun argues, however, neoclassical realism is not “degenerative”
per say. Rather, it should be viewed more properly as “a necessary and logical extension of
structural realism” that fleshes out many of the unstated assumptions of the latter and explains
why states do or do not adapt to systemic pressure.
62

My research joins the theory building/refinement efforts made by neoclassical realists to
develop structural realism by crossing the system/unit-level boundary. My effort is
complementary to those of neoclassical realists, but distinct. Instead of looking at whether
domestic institutions lead to adaptive or maladaptive state behavior, I am more interested in how
decision-makers attempt to redesign state institutions as a means of producing better policy
responses to systemic pressure. In other words, while I start from a similarly intuitionalist
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Defining the National Interest: Conflict and Change in American Foreign Policy (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998); Kevin Narizny, The Political Economy of Grand Strategy (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2007).
59
Andrew Moravcsik, “Taking Preferences Seriously: A Liberal Theory of International Politics,”
International Organization 51, no. 4 (1997): 513.
60
Taliaferro, Lobell, and Ripsman, “Introduction: Neoclassical Realism, the State, and Foreign Policy,” 4.
61
John A. Vasquez, “The Realist Paradigm and Degenerative versus Progressive Research Programs: An
Appraisal of Neotraditional Research on Waltz’s Balancing Proposition,” American Political Science
Review 91, no. 4 (1997): 899–912; Jeffrey W. Legro and Andrew Moravcsik, “Is Anybody Still a
Realist?,” International Security 24, no. 2 (1999): 5–55.
62
Rathbun, “A Rose by Any Other Name: Neoclassical Realism as the Logical and Necessary Extension
of Structural Realism.”
! 28
baseline as neoclassical realists and agree that domestic institutions often do constrain decision-
makers from pursuing optimal strategies, I do not assume that decision-makers sit by idly and
allow themselves to be constrained indefinitely. Instead, faced with increasing international
pressures, decision-makers are compelled to redesign state institutions in a way that enables them
to act more effectively. Such restructuring takes time, but can be observed longitudinally.
To explain this process I follow an alternative but equally “necessary and logical”
theoretical pathway—namely, a second image reversed approach. Given that Peter Gourevitch’s
“The Second Image Reversed: The International Sources of Domestic Politics” coincided exactly
with the publishing of Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics, it is actually surprising
in hindsight that no one married the important insights of the two together earlier. This pathway
has long been open to realist scholars, but was never explicitly followed. Doing so provides a
way to explain the important but underdeveloped assumption of domestic agency in structural
realism.
Structural realism gives primacy to the international security environment and expects
states will respond to important changes in their environment irrespective of domestic political
constraints. Innenpolitik theories and neoclassical realist theories have shown why this is often
not an appropriate expectation. Though not explicitly stated, a logical assumption in structural
realism is that with time states should adapt their domestic institutions to better meet foreign
threats and take advantage of foreign opportunities. The theory of the state as a dynamic unit that
I propose develops this assumption and shows that the ability of states to act effectively may
ultimately depend on whether or not leaders are able to redesign domestic institutions over time
to cope with international pressures. Making this move expands our conception of “balancing”
! 29
and offers the opportunity to create a more robust theory of “omnibalancing” for developed
democratic states.
63

Second, the dissertation joins a well-developed but still growing body of work that
“unpacks” our understanding of democratic foreign policy and helps to blur the distinction
between democracies and non-democracies by looking at variation in factors like state structure
and decision-making procedures within regime type categories.
64
Most relevant to the
dissertation, a strand of this literature finds that the fewer the institutional constraints placed on a
country’s executive, the more capable they are of initiating the use of force.
65
Much of this
literature looks at the variation in institutional constraints on executive war-making, but does not
consider the origins of such variation. My research in part contributes to explaining that variation
by showing why, when, and how those constraints may be relaxed over time in democratic
countries.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
63
David’s theory originally applied to the external and internal factors of balancing to better explain the
foreign politics of third world countries. Steven R. David, “Explaining Third World Alignment,” World
Politics 43, no. 2 (1991): 233–56.
64
Thomas Risse-Kappen, “Public Opinion, Domestic Structure, and Foreign Policy in Liberal
Democracies,” World Politics 43, no. 4 (1991): 479–512; Peterson, Crisis Bargaining and the State: The
Domestic Politics of International Conflict; Auerswald, Disarmed Democracies: Domestic Institutions
and the Use of Force; Miriam Fendius Elman, “Unpacking Democracy: Presidentialism, Parliamentarism,
and Theories of Democratic Peace,” Security Studies 9, no. 4 (2000): 91–126; Ripsman, Peacemaking by
Democracies: The Effect of State Autonomy on the Post-World War Settlements; Tom Dyson,
“Convergence and Divergence in Post-Cold War British, French, and German Military Reforms: Between
International Structure and Executive Autonomy,” Security Studies 17, no. 4 (2008): 725–74.
65
This finding, moreover, appears to hold for both democracies and non-democracies alike. T. Clifton
Morgan and Sally Howard Campbell, “Domestic Structure, Decisional Constraints, and War So Why
Kant Democracies Fight?,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 35, no. 2 (1991): 187–211; Dan Reiter and
Erik R. Tillman, “Public, Legislative, and Executive Constraints on the Democratic Initiation of
Conflict,” Journal of Politics 64, no. 3 (2002): 810–26; David Leblang and Steve Chan, “Explaining
Wars Fought by Established Democracies: Do Institutional Constraints Matter?,” Political Research
Quarterly 56, no. 4 (2003): 385–400; John Ferejohn and Frances McCall Rosenbluth, “Warlike
Democracies,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 52, no. 1 (2008): 3–38; Jessica L. Weeks, “Strongmen and
Straw Men: Authoritarian Regimes and the Initiation of International Conflict,” American Political
Science Review 106, no. 2 (2012): 326–47.
! 30
Third, and more concretely, the dissertation helps to broaden and deepen the study of
what Aaron Friedberg calls “the interior dimensions of American grand strategy.”
66
The issue of
American state-building in the postwar period and how policymakers attempted to grapple with
Baldwin’s dilemma is not entirely new and there is a rich body of scholarship that has been
produced on the subject in recent years. Several books in this line of research deserve specific
mention including Michael Hogan’s A Cross of Iron, Aaron Friedberg’s In the Shadow of the
Garrison State, Amy Zegart’s Flawed By Design, and Douglas Stuart’s Creating the National
Security State.
67
These works, in related but separate ways, all focus on the construction of the
American national security state during and after World War II. Hogan and Friedberg both seek
to explain how policymakers attempted to build greater state capacity without becoming a
garrison state. Zegart and Stuart meanwhile focus on the debates over the 1947 National Security
Act and in Zegart’s case the subsequent development of the institutions created by it.
My research is informed by the works of these scholars and in many ways builds on their
scholarship. It departs from them, however, in several ways. First, I am interested in the process
of institutional resistance and change in the United States over a much larger period of time. I
contend that to explain why and how the American state changed in the postwar period requires
understanding the roots of the country’s prewar institutional arrangement. Second, when I turn to
the postwar period, I look specifically at the state-building efforts that provided greater
autonomy to the executive branch to conduct American foreign policy. In particular, I focus on
efforts to shift greater war-making capacity to the executive and the subsequent implications of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
66
Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand
Strategy, 3.
67
Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State; Friedberg, In
the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy; Zegart,
Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC; Stuart, Creating the National Security State:
A History of the Law That Transformed America.
! 31
those efforts. Third, in contrast to the Zegart’s conclusions in particular, I argue that decision-
makers have demonstrated a reasonable degree of success in their ability to design and redesign
state institutions when forced to. It is in this sense that the American state must be viewed in
functional terms, as well as institutional terms, and seen as constitutively adaptive and dynamic.

Plan of the Manuscript
The dissertation has seven substantive chapters and a brief conclusion. The first chapter
serves as the literature review of the dissertation and focuses on how democracy is thought to
constrain state decision-makers from acting autonomously in foreign policy. I distinguish three
different approaches to the relationship between democracy and the state: 1) Liberals,
rationalists, and classical realists all see the state as an “arena” of sorts in which domestic
political actors struggle for political office and societal preferences are aggregated as a means of
determining policy. 2) Structural realists see the state as a largely autonomous and functionally
adaptive unit that responds to opportunities and threats in the international environment
regardless of domestic institutions. 3) Neoclassical realists see the state as a differentiated-
institutional unit that is more or less capable of responding to opportunities and threats in the
international environment based on the extent to which decision-makers are granted domestic
agential power to shape policy. I argue that neoclassical realism offers an improvement over the
other two, but is incomplete. While it accounts for institutional variation across different states, it
does not account for institutional variation over time within states.
The second chapter elaborates a second-image reversed theory of institutional adaptation
to account for the gap identified in the first chapter. I first provide a conception of the state as an
institutional-functional unit; in others words states are sets of institutions that can (sometimes
! 32
with great difficulty) be adapted to new purposes. I then draw on the works of Otto Hintze and
other continental theorists to explain why and how decision-makers attempt to redesign state
institutions when interstate security competition increases. By using a macro-micro-macro model
embedded with a series of mechanisms, the theory explains how state behavior at the system
level depends on state-building efforts to carve out greater institutional capacity and autonomy at
the unit level. In democracies, this entails building and streamlining national security decision-
making organizations and processes, and centralizing decision-making authority in the executive.
The remaining five chapters of the dissertation then focus on three empirical questions: 1)
What are the domestic institutional constraints in the United States that prevent decision-makers
from acting autonomously? 2) Given the country’s powerful domestic constraints on executive
war-making powers, why did decision-makers ultimately choose to reimagine and transform the
office in the post-World War II period to provide it with greater autonomy? 3) Equally puzzling,
why did they not do so earlier when the country began its ascent to power beginning in the
1890s? The third chapter focuses on the first period described above from 1787-1890 and
specifically on the first question. It provides an overview of three important domestic constraints
during the Founding Period and how they were institutionalized in the American structure of
government. The chapter then turns to explain how these institutions remained relatively stable
over the first century and a half of American history.
The next two chapters then focus on the second period from 1890-1941. The fourth
chapter looks at America’s rise to world power beginning in the 1890s and why the United States
did not build a national security state after it became a great power. The analysis shows that there
was an increase in the degree of systemic pressure faced by the United States that required
decision-makers to consider reconstituting some of the basic institutional arrangements that to
! 33
that point were largely stable. In particular, the Spanish-American War followed by World War I
forced the country to consider building a large standing army for the first time in its history and
reorganizing its military establishment to centralize authority. The chapter shows that while
some important reforms did take place in this period, greater institutional change was thwarted
by the continuing strength of the constraints discussed in chapter three.
While chapter four focuses on the attempt to develop the country’s military institutions in
a way that would have shifted greater war-makers powers to the executive, chapter five focuses
on specific claims during this period for such powers. It looks at how beginning in the 1890s
decision-makers began to recognize that for the country to project its growing power overseas it
would need more flexibility to do so. This meant challenging what Alfred Mahan called “the
Constitutional lion in the path,” or the constraints on executive war-making. I show how certain
Presidents sought to make this challenge. Importantly, however, they did so by personalizing the
Presidency, not by institutionalizing the means to make war. This enabled Presidents to use
limited forms of force more frequently, but did not fundamentally alter the institutional
arrangement put in place at the Founding. Instead, Congress pushed back against such
usurpations of power and attempted to hem in the executive, particularly in the 1930s precisely
when greater executive action was required.
The next two chapters then focus on the final period from 1941 to 1960. In chapter six I
focus on why the United State’s domestic institutions were finally transformed in a substantial
way after World War II to provide the executive with greater war-making powers. I focus first on
why systemic pressure was perceived to be so intense at this time and the institutional stress this
pressure placed on the country’s national security institutions. In chapter seven I then show that
three institutional shifts were initiated to better enable the U.S. to project force: 1) the creation of
! 34
new organizations and instruments of warfare, 2) the reorganization of national security
institutions, and 3) a shift in the procedural norms governing the country’s war powers from
Congress to the President.
The conclusion then summarizes the key takeaways of the dissertation, suggests new
potential avenues of research based on my findings, and concludes by discussing the
contemporary consequences of executive war-making autonomy in the United States since
September 11.
! 35
Chapter One

Democracy, the State, and War

Foreign policy poses a unique set of challenges for democracies. The conduct of foreign
policy throughout history has mostly been the purview of a small autonomous group of
statesmen with specialized knowledge and access to privileged information. The ideal type
decision-making unit operates largely in secret and makes calculated decisions about war and
peace on behalf of the country they govern. Moreover, by virtue of their position atop the state,
decision-makers’ preferences are shaped to a great extent by the responsibility to ensure the
general security and prosperity of their nation in an often-dangerous world. Their decisions,
therefore, are often guided by a distinctive realpolitik logic, or what realists call ‘reasons of
state’—the idea that “the state”, or more specifically statesmen atop the state, have a particular
set of interests, defined in terms of national power and security, that “should predominate over
all other interests and values” in foreign policy decision-making.
1

At the heart of democratic government, in contrast, lies the idea of popular sovereignty.
Central to popular sovereignty is the notion that elected and appointed state decision-makers are
ultimately responsible to and therefore must be responsive to the preferences of the broader
public. In other words, leaders cannot, or at least in theory should not, make decisions
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
Jonathan Haslam, No Virtue Like Necessity: Realist Thought in International Relations Since Machiavelli
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 17–88, 17.
! 36
autonomously from the preferences of the members of the societies they govern. The decision-
making environment in a democracy, moreover, is one in which transparency and public debate
are valued, and where all citizens are thought to have an equal voice in the formation and
practices of government. Unlike statesmen, however, ordinary citizens lack foreign policy
expertise and access to state secrets. Furthermore, they are less informed about and habituated to
thinking in terms of broader national security questions.
The challenge for democracies in conducting foreign policy, therefore, stems from the
tension that often exists between the need for exclusivity and autonomy in statecraft and the
principles of open debate and responsiveness to public preferences that are fundamental to
democratic government. The significance of this “tension” created by differences in international
and democratic domestic decision-making environments has not been lost on international
relations scholars. In fact, it has been at the crux of the larger debate in international relations
about the relative importance of domestic vs. international factors in explaining state behavior.
As I discuss below, the extent to which this tension is thought to matter has tremendous
significance for expectations about foreign policy conduct, particularly in matters of war and
peace, and has raised important questions for international relations scholars: What exactly is the
relationship between democracy and foreign policy? To what extent are democratic decision-
makers constrained by their domestic publics? What if anything mitigates the tension between
democracy and foreign policy decision-making?
This chapter explores how international relations scholars have answered these questions.
The chapter begins by first providing a definition and discussion of the concept democracy. I
then explore the primary explanations of the relationship between democracy and foreign policy
with a particular emphasis on the use of force. I suggest that what distinguishes these approaches
! 37
is the conception of the state they hold and ultimately whether or not they assume decision-
makers have domestic agential power. The debate has traditionally been defined by two broad
arguments about the relationship between democracy and foreign policy. First, the prevailing
conventional wisdom holds that democratic political institutions serve to fundamentally constrain
political leaders in foreign policy. The various theories that take this approach hold what can be
characterized as a “state as arena” conception in which societal interests and the domestic
political process are thought to determine state behavior. Second, a less conventional argument
contends that systemic pressures at the international level are more decisive than domestic level
pressures and that domestic factors are less important than commonly believed. This second
approach relies an under-developed but nonetheless extant functional theory of state, which
contains an implicit autonomous state assumption. After reviewing the content and stakes of this
important debate, I then proceed to discuss how neoclassical realism has sought to push the
international-domestic distinction forward by returning a greater focus to the state and taking a
more interactionist approach that bridges the international-domestic divide. Neoclassical realists
have taken what I characterize as an differentiated-institutionalist approach toward the state in
which domestic agential power varies based on the structural autonomy enjoyed by decision-
makers.
After reviewing and summarizing these three approaches, I return to the literature on the
state and state formation in the last part of the chapter as a means of pushing forward the
argument made by neoclassical realists and filling what I contend is a gap in the prevailing
approaches to the state—the idea that state are often adaptive over time.

! 38
Democracy
One reason why it is important to foreground the chapter with a discussion of the concept
democracy is that, as Norrin Ripsman points out, international relations scholars often use terms
such as “democratic,” “liberal,” “liberal/democratic,” and “republican” interchangeably.
2
This
usage can sometimes lead to conceptual confusion; specifically the conflation of democracy as a
set of governing institutions with a preference for compromise and nonviolence that may or may
not be endogenous to democratic government. This is reflected most importantly in the divide
between institutional and normative explanations of the democratic peace.
3

The confusion over conceptualizing democracy is not just a specific problem for
international relations theorists. To some extent it has been imported into the study of
international relations through the work of democratic theorists who themselves are divided over
how to delimit and define the concept.
4
The main axis that divides democratic theorists can be
characterized in terms of ‘minimalist’ versus ‘maximalist’ conceptions of democracy.
5
Purely
minimalist definitions focus almost exclusively on democracy as a set of procedures that ensure
universal suffrage and regular competitive elections. They are based on Schumpeter’s narrow
conception of democracy as “a political method” for choosing leaders where democracy is
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2
Norrin M. Ripsman, Peacemaking by Democracies: The Effect of State Autonomy on the Post-World
War Settlements (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 28.
3
“Institutional” or “structural” explanations of the democratic peace focus on the way formal and
informal institutions in a democracy act to constrain leaders from pursuing an aggressive foreign policy,
while “normative” explanations focus on the way liberal norms act to guide democratic leaders to pursue
a more peaceful foreign policy. See David L. Rousseau, Democracy and War: Institutions, Norms, and
the Evolution of International Conflict (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005), 20–28.
4
As Collier and Levitsky highlight, democracy is one of Gallie’s classic “essentially contested concepts.”
In a review of recently published books and articles in the mid-1990s, they found more than 550 different
subtypes of democracy. See David Collier and Steven Levitsky, “Democracy with Adjectives,” World
Politics 49, no. 3 (1997): 430–51.
5
Gerardo L. Munck and Jay Verkuilen, “Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy Evaluating
Alternative Indices,” Comparative Political Studies 35, no. 1 (2002): 7–14.
! 39
defined specifically as an “institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which
individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s
vote.”
6
Maximalist definitions, on the other hand, accept the minimalist version but criticize it
for focusing too much on elections at the expense of other important characteristics of
government that are needed to assess the quality of democracy. Maximalist definitions, therefore,
also define democracy in terms of the norms, values, and rights that have come to be associated
with contemporary Western liberal democracies.
7

A host of scholars, building on the work of Robert Dahl, have staked out a middle ground
in this debate and elaborated an expanded procedural conception of democracy.
8
These scholars
have built on the work of Schumpeter, but have moved beyond his narrow focus on basic
political rights and elections to include additional aspects of democratic governance such as the
rule of law, government responsiveness to citizen preferences, and other mechanisms of
government accountability besides elections. An important part of this move has been a greater
focus on decision-making and implementation, not just government formation. As Gerardo
Munck, following Dahl, explains, “democracy is all about guaranteeing a political process in
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
6
Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1942); Adam
Przeworski, “Minimalist Conception of Democracy: A Defense,” in Democracy’s Values, ed. Ian Shapiro
and Casiano Hacker-Cordsn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 23–55.
7
The maximalist definition is most visible in the indicators used to measure democracy in Freedom
House’s annual Freedom in the World report. See also Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy: Toward
Consolidation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 10–13; Larry Diamond and
Leonardo Morlino, eds., Assessing the Quality of Democracy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2005).
8
See Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1971), 4–6; Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 218–
223; Philippe C. Schmitter and Terry Lynn Karl, “What Democracy Is...and Is Not,” Journal of
Democracy 2, no. 3 (1991): 75–88; Robert A. Dahl, On Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1998); Guillermo A. O’Donnell, “Democracy, Law, and Comparative Politics,” Studies in Comparative
International Development 36, no. 1 (2001): 7–36; Charles Tilly, Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007). In this section I am mainly following the work of Gerardo Munck who has
synthesized these views in Gerardo L. Munck, Measuring Democracy: A Bridge between Scholarship and
Politics (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 120–132.
! 40
which no outcomes are placed beyond the reach of the people.”
9
Or as Charles Tilly contends,
the “fundamental standard of democracy is the extent to which the state behaves in conformity to
the expressed demands of its citizens.”
10
What is important about this view is that democratic
government is not seen just as a political method for selecting leaders, but also as a broader set of
institutionalized procedures that ensure popular preferences are considered in the decision-
making process once leaders assume office. This does not necessarily ensure that decision-
makers will follow public preferences, but at least means that “when they deviate from such a
policy, say on grounds of ‘reason of state’ or ‘overriding national interest,’ they must ultimately
be held accountable for their actions through regular and fair processes.”
11

Based on these insights, Munck provides a conception of democracy as “a set of rules
regarding the political process, extending from the formation of government through public
decision making all the way to the implementation of binding decisions, which reflects the
principle that voter preferences are weighed equally.”
12
For the purposes of the dissertation, I
adopt this expanded procedural definition and focus on the institutional dimensions of
democracy that constrain leaders, while excluding from consideration what types of norms may
or may not be socialized into them. To be clear therefore, I conceive of democracy specifically as
a set of basic political rights and institutionalized procedures for determining how a government
is formed and reaches decisions. Political rights include inclusive suffrage, alternative sources of
information, freedom of expression, and associational autonomy, while procedures include
regular elections that are conducted freely and fairly. This definition captures the fundamental
essence of democracy, which is the idea that the government’s authority should ultimately be
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
9
Munck, Measuring Democracy: A Bridge between Scholarship and Politics, 124.
10
Tilly, Democracy, 13, 140.
11
Schmitter and Karl, “What Democracy Is...and Is Not,” 84.
12
Munck, Measuring Democracy: A Bridge between Scholarship and Politics, 128.
! 41
derived from the people and that state decisions should be either directly or indirectly held
accountable by popular mechanisms.

Domestic, International, and Interactionist Theories of the
Democracy/Foreign Policy Nexus
International relations scholars hold a diverse range of views on the relationship between
democracy and foreign policy. Again, while acknowledging that doing so risks overly
simplifying these perspectives, they have historically been grouped into two overarching views
about the effect democratic institutions have on the ability of decision-makers to conduct foreign
policy.
13
One perspective sees democracy—for better or worse—as a constraint on foreign
policy, while the other sees regime type as less determinative. A third perspective, however, has
emerged in recent years, which shows that there are in fact considerable differences among the
world’s democracies and that these differences help explain importation aspects of variation in
states’ foreign policy behavior. In this section I review these views as a means of situating my
own work.
The State as Foreign Policy “Arena”
The first view, which today remains the prevailing conventional wisdom, holds that
democratic political institutions serve to fundamentally constrain state leaders in foreign policy,
as they are designed to. The “democracy as a constraint” view is rooted in the works of
republican theorists stretching from Montesquieu through Kant and Paine to Tocqueville.
14
This
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
13
This distinction similar to the one made by Ripsman, Peacemaking by Democracies: The Effect of State
Autonomy on the Post-World War Settlements, 30–42; See also John M. Hobson, The State and
International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
14
Charles de Secondat baron de Montesquieu, Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws, ed. Anne M. Cohler,
Basia C. Miller, and Harold S. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Immanuel Kant,
“Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” ed. H.S. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
! 42
perspective is informed by the idea that when a broad base of citizens participate either directly
or indirectly in government, they will look to their own interests (as opposed to leader or national
interests) and act to constrain decision-makers from undertaking foreign policies that are risky
and costly, particularly ones that involve war or the prospect of war.
15
This tradition diverges in
answering the question of whether such a domestic constraint is positive (Kant) or negative
(Tocqueville), but nonetheless agreed it had a restraining affect on a state’s foreign policy.
Among international relations theorists in recent years, classical realists, liberals, and
rational choice theorists alike have articulated variations of the “democracy as a constraint”
argument. Scholars associated with classical realism in the postwar period such as Hans
Morgenthau, George Kennan, and Walter Lippmann, for example, warned that democracy
undermined the ability of Western leaders to craft effective foreign policies in the face of
authoritarian states.
16
Recognizing that the ability for decision-makers to act independently has
varied historically based on a state’s domestic political institutions, they contended that whereas
leaders in absolutist and aristocratic states previously had the autonomy required to conduct
diplomacy and use force when necessary, the introduction of popular sovereignty and mass
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2003), 93–130; Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (London: Watts & Co., 1906); Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America and Two Essays on America (New York: Penguin, 2003).
15
The quintessential statement of this logic was penned by Kant who argued that when “the consent of
the subjects is required to decide whether or not war is to be declared, it is very natural that they will have
great hesitation in embarking on so dangerous an enterprise. For this would mean calling down on
themselves all the miseries of war, such as doing the fighting themselves, supplying the costs of war from
their own resources, painfully making good the ensuing devastation, and, as the crowning evil, having to
take upon themselves a debt of burden which embitter peace itself and which can never be paid off on
account of the constant threat of new wars.” Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” 100.
16
Hans J. Morgenthau, In Defense of the National Interest: A Critical Examination of American Foreign
Policy (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1950), 221–242; George F. Kennan, American
Diplomacy, Expanded Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 93–100; Walter Lippmann,
Essays in the Public Philosophy (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1955); Hans J. Morgenthau,
Dilemmas of Politics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958), 324–339; George F. Kennan, The Cloud
of Danger: Current Realities of American Foreign Policy (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977), 3–
9.
! 43
public opinion in the twentieth century ushered in an era where decision-makers were now
subject to greater social forces. As Lippmann argued, this transformation had led to a
“derangement in powers,” dangerously shifting decision-making capacities from executives to
elected assemblies and voters.
17
According to classical realists, the result was that democratic
statesmen have low domestic agential power and therefore have greater difficulty responding to
international pressures than their non-democratic counterparts, particularly with respect to using
military force.
Liberals, on the other hand, agree with classical realism’s assessment of the constraints
imposed by democratic political institutions on state leaders. Importantly, however, liberals
depart from classical realists in their belief that democratic constraints have a positive effect on
foreign policy, not a negative one. This view is most evident in the literature on the democratic
or liberal peace, where the capacity of democratic institutions to restrain leaders is one of the
primary mechanisms thought to prevent conflict between democracies.
18
Though less well
established, some scholars argue that democracy not only has a dyadic effect, reducing conflict
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
17
Lippmann explained, the “devitalization of the governing power is the malady of democratic states. As
the malady grows, the executive becomes highly susceptible to encroachment and usurpation by elected
assemblies; they are pressed and harassed by the haggling of parties, by the agents of organized interests,
and by the spokesmen of sectarians and ideologues. The malady can be fatal. It can be deadly to the very
survival of the state as a free society if, when the great and hard issues of war and peace, of security and
solvency, of revolution and order are up for decision, the executive and judicial departments, with their
civil servants and technicians, have lost their power to decide.” Lippmann, Essays in the Public
Philosophy, 26.
18
Michael W. Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 12, no.
3 (1983): 205–35; Michael W. Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs, Part 2,” Philosophy
& Public Affairs 12, no. 4 (1983): 323–53; Michael W. Doyle, “Liberalism and World Politics,”
American Political Science Review 80, no. 4 (1986): 1151–69; Bruce Russett, Controlling the Sword: The
Democratic Governance of National Security (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Bruce
Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War World (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1993); Michael W. Doyle, Ways of War and Peace (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 1997); Bruce Russett and John Oneal, Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and
International Organizations (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001); Michael W. Doyle, “Three
Pillars of the Liberal Peace,” American Political Science Review, 2005, 463–66.
! 44
between democracies, but also that it has a monadic effect, reducing the incentives for
democracies to use force against non-democracies as well.
19

Rational choice theorists, moreover, have further developed the structural-institutional
arguments made by liberals using formal models. One strand of this literature focuses on how the
costs of potentially losing office deters democratic political leaders from undertaking risky
foreign policy initiatives—most importantly by initiating a war they might lose.
20
A second
strand emphasizes the fact that higher audience costs in democracies makes them more likely to
signal resolve to potential adversaries and therefore less likely to bluff by threatening to use
force. These “audience costs,” in turn, are thought to reduce uncertainty about the willingness of
a democracy to fight, which increases the probability an adversary backs down in a crisis.
21

Common to classical realist, liberal, and rational choice logics is a conception of the state
as an “arena” for political competition among societal actors. Within this arena, democratic
decision-makers are thought to have little autonomy vis-à-vis their domestic publics to conduct
foreign policy, particularly to use of force. Given the expected preferences of the public (i.e.
more pacific) and the institutional mechanisms that give the public a voice, democratic states are
considered more likely to have a “policy bias” toward pacifism.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
19
The monadic argument is more tenuous and has been argued to be null by some scholars. For a
systematic argument that details the monadic effect see Rousseau, Democracy and War: Institutions,
Norms, and the Evolution of International Conflict.
20
Bruce Bueno De Mesquita and David Lalman, War and Reason: Domestic and International
Imperatives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Bruce Bueno De Mesquita and Randolph M.
Siverson, “War and the Survival of Political Leaders: A Comparative Study of Regime Types and
Political Accountability,” American Political Science Review 89, no. 4 (1995): 841–55; Bruce Bueno De
Mesquita et al., “An Institutional Explanation of the Democratic Peace,” American Political Science
Review 93, no. 4 (1999): 791–807.
21
James D. Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes,”
American Political Science Review 88, no. 3 (1994): 577–92; Kenneth A. Schultz, “Domestic Opposition
and Signaling in International Crises,” American Political Science Review 92, no. 4 (1998): 829–44;
Kenneth A. Schultz, “Do Democratic Institutions Constrain or Inform? Contrasting Two Institutional
Perspectives on Democracy and War,” International Organization 53, no. 2 (1999): 233–66.
! 45
The State as Functional “Passive Military-Adaptive” Unit
The second view, espoused mainly by structural realists, holds that democracy poses less
of a constraint on state behavior than is widely believed. Structural realism, as elaborated by
Kenneth Waltz, marked a significant departure from both classical realist and liberal theories of
international relations by placing the anarchic structure of the international system at the center
of explaining international political outcomes.
22
Because survival can never be guaranteed under
anarchy, Waltz argued all states by necessity must pursue their security-related interests
irrespective of domestic constraints. In other words, he argued the constraints of international
politics should and mostly do trump those of domestic politics and that therefore democracy
should be thought of as less limiting than either classical realists or liberals believe.
According to Waltz, because decision-makers are constantly confronted by the problem
of state survival in a competitive international system, they must be guided by the dictates of
Realpolitik rather than domestic political considerations when devising state policy. As Waltz
explains in Theory of International Politics:
The elements of Realpolitik, exhaustively listed, are these: The ruler’s, and later the
state’s, interest provides the spring of action; the necessities of policy arise from the
unregulated competition of states; calculation based on these necessities can discover the
policies that will best serve a state’s interests; success is the ultimate test of policy, and
success is defined as preserving and strengthening the state…Realpolitik indicates the
methods by which foreign policy is conducted and provides a rationale for them.
Structural constraints explain why the methods are repeatedly used despite differences in
the persons and states who use them.
23

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
22
See Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1979). For more
developed discussions on the implicit or implied view of the state in structural realism see Michael
Mastanduno, David A. Lake, and G. John Ikenberry, “Toward a Realist Theory of State Action,”
International Studies Quarterly 33, no. 4 (1989): 457–74; Barry Buzan, Charles A. Jones, and Richard
Little, The Logic of Anarchy: Neorealism to Structural Realism (New York: Columbia University Press,
1993), 116–119; Hobson, The State and International Relations, 17–44.
23
Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 117.
! 46
To be clear, Waltz does not argue that domestic factors do not intervene at all in state decision-
making processes. Rather, he infers that because such considerations can lead to suboptimal
policies that are penalized by other states, decision-makers tend to (or at least are wise to) ignore
them.
24
Realpolitik policies based on considerations of power and security, therefore, are thought
to predominate.
Because system-level factors are so important, according to Waltz, he assumes all states
take the same functional form and therefore can be considered “functionally undifferentiated.”
Where domestic political institutional factors do enter into structural realism, they are viewed in
instrumental terms as a means of balancing effectively—or not— against other states. As Waltz
explains, when faced with changes in the international security environment that makes them
more vulnerable to aggression, states must pursue one or more of several strategies against
potential adversaries, most importantly balancing.
25
He draws an important distinction between
external and internal balancing strategies.
26
External balancing strategies seek to increase a
state’s relative power capabilities (i.e. security) through either temporary coalitions or more
permanent alliances with other states. Conversely, internal balancing strategies seek to increase
state power by generating greater domestic capabilities. The latter is more important, according
to Waltz. Oddly, however, he simply assumes it occurs and instead devotes his attention to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
24
Similar to other defensive realists Waltz attributes the problems of miscalculation and overreaction to a
variety of “domestic pathologies.” Kenneth N. Waltz, “The Origins of War in Neorealist Theory,”
Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18, no. 4 (1988): 615–28; Jack Snyder, “Tensions Within Realism:
1954 and After,” in The Invention of International Relations Theory: Realism, the Rockefeller
Foundation, and the 1954 Conference on Theory, ed. Nicholas S. Guilhot (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2011), 68–72.
25
When faced with a potential aggressor upsetting the balance of power, Mearsheimer suggests the two
principal strategies employed by states are balancing and buck-passing. Appeasement and bandwagoning
are other options, but are considered less effective. See John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great
Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), chapter 5.
26
Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 168.
! 47
developing the implications of his theory for external balancing. Part of the reason Waltz seems
to avoid the question of internal balancing is that it dips down to the unit level and requires a
theory about the relationship between international security competition and state structure and
decision-making procedures, which inevitably invites the question of domestic politics back into
a model he aims to keep entirely systemic.
Instead, as Waltz explains, it is sufficient to expect, given the competitive nature of the
international system, that states’ behaviors and to a lesser degree their attributes will be “selected
for their consequence.” Successful states (i.e. those that manage to survive), therefore, will end
up sharing similar characteristics, by which he seems to refer nearly exclusively to military-
security imitation in weapons and strategies.
27
Thus, contrary to the critiques of some scholars,
structural realism does have at the least a minimalist conception of the state. But it is solely
functional.
28
As John Hobson explains, in structural realism the state essentially “functions as a
factor of anarchic systemic cohesion.” It is assumed to be nearly absolute in its domestic agential
power (i.e. autonomous from society), but is merely a “victim” of the international security
environment where it must be “passive military-adaptive”—emulating others’ security attributes
and behaviors—in order to survive.
29
Waltz does not develop the logic and implications of this
conception of the state further, but it is consistent with his earlier work Foreign Policy and
Democratic Politics where he argues that domestic political institutions in democratic states such
as the United States and Great Britain are more flexible and adaptive (and conversely that
authoritarian states are more constraining) than commonly assumed. This explains why,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
27
Ibid., 74–77, 127; It is clear that Waltz believes state behavior will be produced by the system, but the
extent to which this applies to state attributes is less clear as Wendt points out. Alexander Wendt, Social
Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 100–101.
28
Buzan, Jones, and Little, The Logic of Anarchy: Neorealism to Structural Realism, 116–119; Hobson,
The State and International Relations, 24–30.
29
Hobson, The State and International Relations, 24–30, quotes on 24, 30.
! 48
according to Waltz, and contrary to the beliefs of critics of democratic foreign policy, the United
States was able to compete with the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
30
Others, particularly João
Resende-Santos, have built on Waltz’s work to build a theory of emulation to explain why and
when states are more likely to emulate the military-security practices of leading states.
31

In structural realism, therefore, war and the use of force are explained largely by the
constraints inherent in the very nature of international politics. Great powers—irrespective of
their domestic political constitution—especially are thought to be prone to use force frequently.
As Waltz explains, great powers are “’Gullivers’, more or less tightly tied” and usually
condemned to “lead troubled lives” in which they “fight more wars than lesser states do.”
32
In
the postwar period, Waltz acknowledges that there has been less direct military action between
great powers because of the increased costs of war. Nonetheless, he maintains they continued to
use force frequently, arguing “Seldom if ever has force been more variously, more persistently,
and more widely applied; and seldom has it been more consciously used as an instrument of
national policy.”
33
Again, as evidence that regime type explains less variation in the use of force
than believed, Waltz cites the case of the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
30
Kenneth N. Waltz, Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics: The American and British Experience
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967), see especially 306–311; As Michael Desch points out, the
biggest problem for what he calls “democratic defeatists” is the fact that “over the past 200 hundred years,
democracies have been on the winning side of most of their wars.” Michael C. Desch, Power and Military
Effectiveness: The Fallacy of Democratic Triumphalism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
2008), 169.
31
João Resende-Santos, Realism, States, and the Modern Mass Army (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007).
32
Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 187.
33
Ibid., 188–189, quote on 189.
! 49
War, when, as he points out, they behaved similarly despite the presumably dissimilar domestic
decision making environments of each.
34

Structural realism provides a stark counterpoint to “the state as arena” approaches and
helps show why decision-makers may be less constrained by domestic politics than commonly
believed. But if the problem with the previous approaches was that they failed to account for the
possibility that democratic institutions need not always constrain decision-makers, the problem
with structural realism is that it makes an overly homogenous assumption about the domestic
agential power of decision-makers. As the next section shows, this homogeneity assumption has
caused structural realism to overlook the variation in the capacity of states to respond to systemic
pressure.
The State as Differentiated-Institutional Unit
A third view has emerged in recent years, as a growing body of international relations
scholars have begun to show that the extent to which democratic foreign policy makers are
constrained varies.
35
As Norrin Ripsman explains, this literature begins with the premise that
“not all democracies are alike.”
36
Democracies differ, for example, in whether or not they are
large or small countries; have presidential or parliamentary systems; proportional representation
or single-member districts; ‘strong’ or ‘weak’ states; and autonomous or constrained
executives.
37
This literature argues that these differences can translate into substantially different
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
34
Kenneth N. Waltz, “America as a Model for the World? A Foreign Policy Perspective,” PS: Political
Science and Politics 24, no. 4 (1991): 667–70.
35
As was pointed out in the introduction, this move has been mirrored more recently in the literature on
autocracies as well.
36
Ripsman, Peacemaking by Democracies: The Effect of State Autonomy on the Post-World War
Settlements, quote on 1.
37
Thomas Risse-Kappen, “Public Opinion, Domestic Structure, and Foreign Policy in Liberal
Democracies,” World Politics 43, no. 4 (1991): 479–512; T. Clifton Morgan and Sally Howard Campbell,
“Domestic Structure, Decisional Constraints, and War So Why Kant Democracies Fight?,” Journal of
! 50
policy outcomes and therefore should merit theoretical concern. Ripsman, for example,
demonstrates how the ability to negotiate postwar treaties has varied across democratic states in
different periods. He uses these differences to help explain the negotiations and ultimate success
of the two respective post-World War settlements. He does so by showing that institutional
differences and the subsequent degree of structural autonomy enjoyed by executives in the
United States, Britain, and France mapped nearly perfectly onto the degree to which each was
beholden to or sanctioned by their respective domestic political environments. In the United
States case, for example, he finds that President Truman enjoyed a considerably greater amount
of autonomy than previous presidents, which explains why he was able to negotiate and get a
deal accepted after World War II unlike President Wilson who failed to do so after World War I.
In Wilson’s case, he was able to pursue policy independence during negotiations in Paris, but
was later defeated decisively back at home in the United States Senate. Truman, on the other
hand, not only had greater leeway during negotiations, but was also able to push through policies
like early German rearmament despite domestic opposition.
38

What is important about the scholarship in this third group of literature is that it
incorporates in many ways the insights of the first two. Like structural realists, these scholars
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Conflict Resolution 35, no. 2 (1991): 187–211; Susan Peterson, “How Democracies Differ: Public
Opinion, State Structure, and the Lessons of the Fashoda Crisis,” Security Studies 5, no. 1 (1995): 3–37;
Susan Peterson, Crisis Bargaining and the State: The Domestic Politics of International Conflict (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); David P. Auerswald, Disarmed Democracies: Domestic
Institutions and the Use of Force (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000); Miriam Fendius
Elman, “Unpacking Democracy: Presidentialism, Parliamentarism, and Theories of Democratic Peace,”
Security Studies 9, no. 4 (2000): 91–126; Dan Reiter and Erik R. Tillman, “Public, Legislative, and
Executive Constraints on the Democratic Initiation of Conflict,” Journal of Politics 64, no. 3 (2002):
810–26; Ripsman, Peacemaking by Democracies: The Effect of State Autonomy on the Post-World War
Settlements, quote on 1; Tom Dyson, “Convergence and Divergence in Post-Cold War British, French,
and German Military Reforms: Between International Structure and Executive Autonomy,” Security
Studies 17, no. 4 (2008): 725–74.
38
Ripsman, Peacemaking by Democracies: The Effect of State Autonomy on the Post-World War
Settlements.
! 51
acknowledge that democratic states are constrained by international security competition, just as
all states are. Thus in questions of war and peace, they assume decision-makers are likely to look
first at the international security context when making decisions.
39
But like classical realists,
liberals, and rational choice theorists, they acknowledge that democratic political institutions also
shape the possibility for state action. In other words, domestic constraints determine the
boundaries for what types of strategies leaders can actually pursue given the requirement of some
level of domestic public support in democracies.
40

Jennifer Sterling-Folker nicely sums up the potential contribution of a greater focus on
domestic institutional variables for structural realism in the following way:
The differences between domestic processes obviously matter to [international] outcomes
because they encourage or prevent actors from recognizing and addressing external threat
in an effective manner. While the anarchic environment encourages the goal of survival
and the comparative assessments of process, it is domestic process that is responsible for
the ability of states to emulate the processes of others. Thus it is domestic process that
acts as the final arbiter for state survival within the anarchic environment.
41

This insight does not so much negate structural realism as it advances an implicit but under-
developed part of the theory. While clearly privileging system level factors, Waltz also
acknowledges “Structure…does not by any means explain everything…To explain outcomes one
must look at the capabilities, actions, and the interactions of states, as well as at the structure of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
39
This is particularly true of those scholars writing explicitly under the banner of neoclassical realism.
40
This is consistent with Key’s observation that democratic public opinion serves as a “system of dikes,”
channeling the policy options open to leaders within limits that are acceptable to the public. V.O. Key,
Public Opinion and American Democracy (New York: Knopf, 1961); James N. Rosenau, Public Opinion
and Foreign Policy: An Operational Formulation (New York: Random House, 1961); Russett,
Controlling the Sword: The Democratic Governance of National Security; Richard Sobel, The Impact of
Public Opinion on U.S. Foreign Policy Since Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); John
H. Aldrich et al., “Foreign Policy and the Electoral Connection,” Annual Review of Political Science 9
(2006): 477–502.
41
Jennifer Sterling-Folker, “Realist Environment, Liberal Process, and Domestic-Level Variables,”
International Studies Quarterly 41, no. 1 (1997): 19.
! 52
their systems.”
42
This third group of institutionalist scholars, therefore, in many ways builds on
this latter insight and explores questions about how much domestic institutions constrain leaders,
and when they more or less likely to do so.
The development of neoclassical realism has gained perhaps the most traction within this
larger body of work. Neoclassical realism is best thought of as a theoretical approach to
international relations that begins from a structural realist perspective, but analyzes how
effectively decision-makers are able to respond to systemic pressures given the domestic
constraints they face.
43
Neoclassical realism, therefore, begins with many of the same
assumptions as structural realism, but opens up the “black box” of the state to examine the
domestic conditions in which state leaders make decisions. By doing so, neoclassical realists
have shown, for example, that domestic level factors like leaders’ perceptions, status quo vs.
revisionist state interests, state capacity, risk aversion/acceptance, culture, economic interests,
and elite and social cohesion alter foreign policy decision-making in important ways that cannot
be explained by focusing solely on system level factors.
44

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
42
Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 174 (italics added).
43
The term “neoclassical realism” was coined by Gideon Rose, “Neoclassical Realism and Theories of
Foreign Policy,” World Politics 51, no. 1 (1998): 144–72. For other introductions to neoclassical realism
see Randall L. Schweller, “The Progressive Power of Neoclassical Realism,” in Progress in International
Relations Theory, ed. Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 144–72;
Brian C. Rathbun, “A Rose by Any Other Name: Neoclassical Realism as the Logical and Necessary
Extension of Structural Realism,” Security Studies 17, no. 2 (2008): 294–321; Steven E. Lobell, Norrin
M. Ripsman, and Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, eds., Neoclassical Realism, the State, and Foreign Policy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
44
William C. Wohlforth, The Elusive Balance: Power and Perceptions during the Cold War (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1993); Randall L. Schweller, Deadly Imbalances: Tripolarity and Hitler’s
Strategy of World Conquest (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Fareed Zakaria, From Wealth
to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999);
Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, Balancing Risks: Great Power Intervention in the Periphery (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2004); Colin Dueck, Reluctant Crusaders: Power, Culture, and Change in American
Grand Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Christopher Layne, The Peace of Illusions:
American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); Randall L.
! 53
One of the central insights of neoclassical realists, according to Gideon Rose, has been to
appreciate the fact that “leaders and elites do not always have complete freedom to extract and
direct national resources as they wish.”
45
As a result, neoclassical realists have recognized the
need to “examine the strength and structure of states relative to their societies” in order to
understand whether decision-makers can actually respond to systemic pressure in the way
structural realism expects they should.
46
Scholars have built on this insight to conceptualize the
state in more institutional terms. Specifically, they have focused on the foreign policy
executive—the individuals and institutions in the executive branch responsible for formulating
and executing national security policy—and conceptualized it as semi-autonomous but also
potentially constrained by other branches of government, interest groups, and the public.
47
This
places state decision-makers more appropriately at the nexus of international and domestic
political constraints, engaged in something akin to what Robert Putnam refers to as a “two-level
game.”
48

This conception of the state highlights the fact that the capacity of decision-makers to
respond to changes in the international security environment often hinges on the relative
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Schweller, Unanswered Threats: Political Constraints on the Balance of Power (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2006).
45
Rose, “Neoclassical Realism and Theories of Foreign Policy,” 147.
46
Ibid.
47
The foreign policy executive comprises “the high ranking bureaucrats and elected officials charged
with overall conduct of defense and foreign affairs,” and is distinctly different from the representative
(legislature) and constituent agencies of the state. The foreign policy executive is the core of “the state”
and for the purposes of this research the two are used interchangeably as I explain at the beginning of
chapter two. David A. Lake, “The State and American Trade Strategy in the Pre-Hegemonic Era,”
International Organization 42, no. 1 (1988): 36–37. See also Ripsman, Peacemaking by Democracies:
The Effect of State Autonomy on the Post-World War Settlements, 43–44; Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, Steven E.
Lobell, and Norrin M. Ripsman, “Introduction: Neoclassical Realism, the State, and Foreign Policy,” in
Neoclassical Realism, the State, and Foreign Policy, ed. Steven E. Lobell, Norrin M. Ripsman, and
Jeffrey W. Taliaferro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 23–28.
48
Robert D. Putnam, “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games,” International
Organization 42, no. 3 (1988): 427–60.
! 54
autonomy they enjoy from the societies they govern. Indeed, a substantial body of scholarship
demonstrates that variations in state autonomy across cases can explain different outcomes for a
range of foreign security policy issue areas.
49
One particular expectation is that in states where
the structure of government provides greater autonomy to executive decision-makers, the state is
more easily able to employ force when necessary.
50

Thus neoclassical realists and other scholars who take a similar research approach
conceive of the state as an “imperfect transmission belt,” which, depending on domestic factors,
is sometimes adaptive and at other times maladaptive to systemic pressure.
51
One of the most
important factors, as explained above, is the extent to which the foreign policy executive is
autonomous from societal pressures. Neoclassical realists find that the state is “potentially
autonomous,” but not necessarily if domestic institutions “compel it to bargain with domestic
actors in order to enact policy and extract resources to implement policy choices.”
52
In this sense,
the state must be seen as a differentiated-institutional unit, in which decision-makers are more or
less capable of practicing the Realpolitik expected by structural realism based partly on the
institutional autonomy they enjoy in the domestic political arena.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
49
See, for example, Stephen D. Krasner, Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and
U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); Risse-Kappen, “Public Opinion,
Domestic Structure, and Foreign Policy in Liberal Democracies”; Peterson, “How Democracies Differ:
Public Opinion, State Structure, and the Lessons of the Fashoda Crisis”; Peterson, Crisis Bargaining and
the State: The Domestic Politics of International Conflict; Ripsman, Peacemaking by Democracies: The
Effect of State Autonomy on the Post-World War Settlements; Dyson, “Convergence and Divergence in
Post-Cold War British, French, and German Military Reforms: Between International Structure and
Executive Autonomy.”
50
Auerswald, Disarmed Democracies: Domestic Institutions and the Use of Force.
51
Taliaferro, Lobell, and Ripsman, “Introduction: Neoclassical Realism, the State, and Foreign Policy,” 4.
52
Ibid., 23–28, quote on 25.
! 55
The State of the State in International Relations
In contemporary international relations theory, there are roughly four views on the
relationship between democracy and foreign policy based on a matrix of where decision-maker
preferences are derived from; whether or not democratic political institutions are thought to
constrain them from acting according to their preferences; and whether or not the state provides
an autonomous institutional platform from which to enact policies. Table 1.1 highlights the
differences between these approaches.

Figure 1.1: The State of Democratic State Autonomy

In sum, the state can be conceived of as operating in three ways in international relations
theories: First, as an arena in which domestic political actors struggle for political office and
societal preferences are aggregated as a means of determining policy. Second, as a largely
autonomous and functional passive-military adaptive unit that responds to opportunities and
threats in the international environment based on state interests. Third, as a differentiated-

Research
Program

Decision-Maker
Preferences
Derived From?

Democracy
Constrains?

State
Autonomous?

Liberalism/ Rational
Choice

Domestic

Yes

No

Classical Realism

International

Yes

No

Neorealism

International

No

Yes

Neoclassical Realism

International

Sometimes

Variable
! 56
institutional unit that is more less capable of responding to opportunities and threats in the
international environment based on the extent to which decision-makers are granted domestic
agential power to shape policy.
The conception of the state as a differentiated-institutional unit, provides what I would
argue is an important conceptual advancement in international relations theory. The neoclassical
realist articulation of a “top-down” systemically-driven conception of state behavior where
domestic forces sometimes exert a “bottom-up” constraint on the preferred policies of decision-
makers serves several important purposes.
53
First, it helps flesh out the assumed but under-
developed importance of the state and state autonomy in structural realism. Second, it serves to
better specify the conditions under which the foreign policies expected by the theory are more or
less likely to be pursued by states. As neoclassical realists have shown, we should expect and
often do see different foreign policies from states where decision-makers are more or less
insulated from societal pressures such as public opinion, nationalism, or parochial interests.
What is less developed in this conception, however, is the specific institutional nature of the
state, why state autonomy changes over time, and why it varies from case to case. To provide a
truly “top-down” conception of the state, we should also expect, as structural realism assumes,
that the state is also a functional unit capable of adapting to its environment. In response to
systemic pressures, we should expect that decision-makers will attempt to redesign domestic
institutions to insulate the national security policy-making process better, and that variations in
state autonomy across cases should be linked to such pressures. This expectation is implicit in
structural realism but cannot be accounted for in a purely functional theory of state. It requires a
theory of state that accounts for both the functional and institutional dimensions of the state.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
53
Ibid., 25.
! 57
The dissertation ultimately seeks to contribute to this turn toward viewing the state as a
differentiated-institutional unit by addressing the latter gap. It does so by reconceptualizing the
realist state in institutional-functional terms or as a constitutively adaptive and dynamic unit. In
other words, we should expect states’ domestic institutional arrangements to be constituted and
reconstituted by systemic pressure over time. This approach by default requires focusing on the
variable of time and within-case variation as depicted in figure 1.2 below. Thus, instead of
studying the impact of variation of state autonomy across cases while holding time constant, I
attempt to explain why and how state autonomy varies over time within case. The crux of this
argument builds on many of the same concepts and theories that have informed the neoclassical
realist conception of the state. I revisit this broader state literature next, both as a means of
showing why a greater focus on the state is necessary to building better theories of international
relations and as a means of laying a foundation for the theory of the dynamic state outlined in the
next chapter.

Figure 1.2: The State as a Dynamic Unit

International!
Environment!
!
The!State!as!
Constitutively
5Adaptive!!
State!Action!
Domestic!
Politics!
Time!
State!at!ti,!ti+1,!ti+2,!ti+3…!
! 58
Revisiting State Formation and Transformation
As described in the previous section, international relations scholars have made a
concerted effort in recent years to rethink the role of the state and state autonomy in explanations
of foreign policy. This effort stems from a larger research program that began in the 1970s
among social theorists who argued on behalf of “bringing the state back in” to the study of
political sociology and comparative politics.
54
One of the main critiques leveled by this literature
against social scientists of the preceding generation was that they had veered too far in their
focus on pluralist and society-centered explanations of government decision-making.
55
State-
centered theorists argued that these scholars had begun to view the state simply as an “arena” for
translating societal preferences into policy, while ignoring the often considerable capacity of the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
54
The main body of scholarship in this literature has tried to reincorporate ideas from continental social
theory—mainly the works of Otto Hintze, Max Weber, and to a lesser extent Carl Schmitt— about the
state as an actor back into contemporary political sociology and comparative politics. For Hintze, Weber,
and Schmitt see Otto Hintze, “The Formation of States and Constitutional Development: A Study in
History and Politics,” in The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze, ed. Felix Gilbert (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1975), 159–77; Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in The Vocation Lectures, ed.
David S. Owen and Tracy B. Strong, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2004),
32–94; Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and
Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the
Political, trans. George Schwab, Expanded Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). The
seminal works in the political sociology/comparative politics literature include Charles Tilly, The
Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975);
Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction (Palo Alto:
Stanford University Press, 1978); Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis
of France, Russia and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Eric A. Nordlinger, On the
Autonomy of the Democratic State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); Michael Mann, “The
Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results,” European Journal of Sociology
25, no. 2 (1984): 185–213; Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, Bringing the
State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Michael Mann, The Sources of Social
Power, vol. I, A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986). Almond argues that the state-centered focus of this literature is less novel than claimed, but
others refute him fairly convincingly. For this debate see Gabriel A. Almond, “The Return to the State,”
The American Political Science Review 82, no. 3 (1988): 853–74; Eric A. Nordlinger, Theodore J. Lowi,
and Sergio Fabbrini, “The Return to the State: Critiques,” The American Political Science Review 82, no.
3 (1988): 875–901.
55
For a review of the differences between pluralists and statist approaches to government decision-
making see Stephen D. Krasner, “Approaches to the State: Alternative Conceptions and Historical
Dynamics,” Comparative Politics 16, no. 2 (1984): 226–230.
! 59
state both to structure relations within society and to make and authoritative decisions without
necessarily heeding societal preferences.
56

Scholars within the new state-centered literature helped to reorient the focus of social
scientists in two ways that are particularly important for the development of a theory of state-
building for executive war-making autonomy. First, they viewed the state as potentially more
than just the sum of its parts and asked to what extent can and does the state pursue its own
preferences? Central to this line of inquiry was a rethinking of the notion of state autonomy,
which had been all but absent in political and sociological studies for some time. If autonomy is
high, the state can be considered an independent actor with agential power to formulate and enact
policies based on the preferences of decision-makers; whereas if autonomy is low, the state is
more akin to a passive medium for aggregating and translating societal preferences into policy.
Scholars in this line of research, for example, showed that political leaders can and do use the
state to actively reshape society and/or pursue independent domestic and foreign policies.
57

Second, they viewed “the state” itself as an object of analysis to be explained. They
asked, for example, how aspects of the state (strength, scope, and autonomy) are adjusted over
time in response to changing domestic and international political environments, and how these
changes then reverberate back to those same environments. Central to this analysis was a
reconceptualization of the state as a permanent—albeit variable—set of institutions for rule.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
56
The “state-as-political-arena” comes from Theda Skocpol who criticized extant theories for viewing the
state “as nothing but an arena in which conflicts over basic social and economic interests are fought.”
Scholars such Skocpol and Stephen Krasner claimed this was true of both liberal theories of state, which
in their purest form see the government as a “cash register that totals up and then averages the preferences
and political power of societal actors,” and Marxist theories of state, which view the government as a
proxy in one form or another for the ruling class. Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative
Analysis of France, Russia and China, 25; Krasner, “Approaches to the State: Alternative Conceptions
and Historical Dynamics,” quote on 226.
57
See, for example, Ellen Kay Trimberger, Revolutions from Above: Military Bureaucrats and
Development in Japan, Turkey, Egypt, and Peru (New York: Transaction Publishers, 1978); Krasner,
Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy.
! 60
State-centered scholars focused mostly on the historical development of state institutions,
seeking to explain the origins of the modern state and its different variants in relation to factors
such as war, trade, and class conflict.
58
Moreover, they looked at how changes at the domestic
level later affected their foreign economic and security policies; the most well known being
Charles Tilly’s pithy summary of international security based explanations of state formation:
“War made the state and the state made war.”
59

The treatment of the state as a variable set of institutions with its own interests forced
international relations scholars to rethink the importance of state structure as an explanatory
variable in foreign policy. Much of the initial progress in reincorporating the state into
international relations was in the study of foreign economic policy, where in many ways the state
had never left.
60
Progress in international security studies was much slower, but later developed
in part because of the dissatisfaction with structural realism, which failed to explain important
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
58
Much of this work fell within the bellicist tradition and focused on the origins of the state in early
modern Europe. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European State, AD 990-1990 (Cambridge: Basil
Blackwell, 1990); Brian Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy
and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Hendrik Spruyt,
The Sovereign State and Its Competitors (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Thomas Ertman,
The Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). For a comparison with state formation in Asia see
Victoria Tin-bor Hui, War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2005). For more strictly economic explanations of state formation see
Douglass C. North, Structure and Change in Economic History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
1982); Margaret Levi, Of Rule and Revenue (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1988). Finally, according to some Marxist explanations of state formation, the state arose as an instrument
to ease class tensions and protect and advance the rule of the dominant class. See Perry Anderson,
Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1974).
59
Charles Tilly, “Reflections on the History of European State-Making,” in The Formation of National
States in Western Europe, ed. Charles Tilly (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 42.
60
Robert Gilpin, US Power and the Multinational Corporation (New York: Basic Books, 1975); Stephen
D. Krasner, “State Power and the Structure of International Trade,” World Politics 28 (1976): 317–47;
Peter Katzenstein, ed., Between Power and Plenty (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977);
Krasner, Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy; G. John
Ikenberry, David A. Lake, and Michael Mastanduno, The State and American Foreign Economic Policy
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).
! 61
outcomes without reference to unit level attributes. Again, this effort has been made most
prominently by scholars who study the domestic politics of foreign security policy and more
recently by neoclassical realists.
International security scholars have focused mostly on the first insight pointed to by the
state-centered literature about the potential autonomy of the state. As cited in the previous
section, an impressive body of work has developed, which shows that important variations in
foreign security policy can be explained by studying variation in state autonomy across cases,
while holding other factors relatively constant. This includes, for example, differences in the use
of force
61
, diversionary war
62
, approaches to crisis negotiation
63
, postwar settlements
64
, military
reform policies
65
, the impact of public opinion on state responses to the conventional and nuclear
arms buildup by the Soviet Union in the 1970s,
66
and the ability to extract resources from society
for national security purposes.
67
These works have shown that state structure matters in
explaining these outcomes not just across democracies and non-democracies, but also across just
democracies.
Some scholars, moreover, have looked specifically at how executive autonomy varies
across issue areas even within the same country. Much of this research has focused on
differences between domestic and foreign policy in the United States. While the United States is
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
61
Auerswald, Disarmed Democracies: Domestic Institutions and the Use of Force.
62
Ross A. Miller, “Domestic Structures and the Diversionary Use of Force,” American Journal of
Political Science 39, no. 3 (1995): 760–85.
63
Peterson, “How Democracies Differ: Public Opinion, State Structure, and the Lessons of the Fashoda
Crisis”; Peterson, Crisis Bargaining and the State: The Domestic Politics of International Conflict.
64
Ripsman, Peacemaking by Democracies: The Effect of State Autonomy on the Post-World War
Settlements.
65
Dyson, “Convergence and Divergence in Post-Cold War British, French, and German Military
Reforms: Between International Structure and Executive Autonomy.”
66
Risse-Kappen, “Public Opinion, Domestic Structure, and Foreign Policy in Liberal Democracies.”
67
Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, “State Building for Future Wars: Neoclassical Realism and the Resource
Extractive State,” Security Studies 15, no. 3 (2006): 464–95.
! 62
often thought to have a weak state, which provides little independence to policymakers in
domestic policy, Stephen Krasner showed that this is not true in foreign policy where they are
more independent.
68
There is in fact an entire literature in American Politics that argues this
independence is so distinct that the American executive is better off being characterized as
consisting of “two Presidencies”—one for domestic affairs, the other for foreign affairs.
69
Others
meanwhile have disaggregated foreign policy even further and shown that while the two
Presidencies notion may apply to some areas of foreign policy such as national security, it does
not apply to other areas that cross the foreign-domestic boundary more clearly such as trade or
foreign aid where Presidents are powerfully constrained by Congress.
70

Common to all of this scholarship is the argument that state autonomy varies across cases
and issue areas in ways that are important for explaining outcomes of interest in foreign security
policy. The general finding is that where states have greater autonomy, they are able to act on
behalf of leader preferences more authoritatively. What has been studied less systematically in
this literature, however, is why state structure and aspects like state strength, scope, and
autonomy in foreign security policy vary across cases in the first place and how they change over
time. This is the second insight pointed to by the state-centered literature that I mention above,
but one that international security scholars have given less attention.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
68
Krasner, Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy.
69
The notion of the “two Presidencies” comes from Aaron Wildavsky who argued in 1966 that “in the
realm of foreign policy, there has not been a single major issue on which presidents, when they were
serious determined, have failed.” Aaron Wildavsky, “The Two Presidencies,” Trans-Action 4 (1966): 7–
14, quote on 7. For a recent review of this literature see Brandice Canes-Wrone, William G. Howell, and
David E. Lewis, “Toward a Broader Understanding of Presidential Power: A Reevaluation of the Two
Presidencies Thesis,” The Journal of Politics 70, no. 1 (2008): 1–16.
70
Gordon Silverstein, Imbalance of Power: Constitutional Interpretation and the Making of American
Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 139–168; Helen V. Milner and Dustin
Tingley, Sailing the Water’s Edge: Where Domestic Politics Meets Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2015).
! 63
Where scholars have turned to this question, they have generally drawn on three theories
of state-building. The first is modernization theory, which attributes state-building efforts to the
need to deal with the pressures created by industrialization.
71
Fareed Zakaria, for example, draws
on this work and develops a state-centered theory of realism to explain the flurry of expansionist
behavior pursued by the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
72
The
second is the crisis and growth model, which holds that state-building occurs in punctuated
episodes during wars and socio-economic crises, creating a “ratchet effect” in which state
institutions are created wholesale or scaled up and then becoming permanent fixtures
thereafter.
73
The third is the second-image reversed argument put forward by Peter Gourevitch,
which stresses the role that the international state system plays in determining which types of
state structures will ultimately enable states to survive in a dangerous world.
The first two theories suffer from several limitations in explaining state building for
national security in the United States following World War II. First, modernization theory does
help explain important bouts of state-building in the United States including during the
Progressive era, the New Deal, and the Great Society. However, these episodes in state-building
largely focused on areas of domestic policy and do not coincide with the main periods of national
security institution building in the early Cold War period (and later the post-9/11 period).
Moreover, while the crisis and growth model helps explain the general growth of government
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
71
See, for example, Stephen Skowronek’s important study of the steady growth of national administrative
capacities in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Stephen Skowronek,
Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
72
Zakaria, From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role.
73
On the “ratchet effect” see Alan T. Peacock and Jack Wiseman, The Growth of Public Expenditure in
the United Kingdom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961); Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan:
Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987);
Bruce D. Porter, War and the Rise of the State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics (New York:
The Free Press, 1994).
! 64
across American history, it has more difficulty accounting for the specific growth in the
country’s national security institutions.
74
As Aaron Friedberg argues, crises are important for
explaining state growth, but for every “ratchet effect” of institution building during wars in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was an equally large “rollback effect” afterward.
75

Nowhere was this rollback larger than in the military and the country’s national security
institutions. Following World War II, there was also a period of rollback in the first few years.
Only after several years of rollback was a large-scale program of national security institution
building and reorganization initiated. Thus, while wars do appear to play in integral part of state-
building in certain periods, their effects have often been epiphenomenal.
The problem with the second-image reversed idea developed by Gourevitch meanwhile is
not so much that it is wrong, but that it remains under-developed as I explain in the next chapter.
It is more a recognition of the importance of international factors in explaining domestic political
outcomes, and less a theory about how state structure does and does not change. As I will discuss
in the next chapter, a second-image reversed explanation is largely implicit in structural realist
and other prominent security-based theories of international relations. What is needed is for this
theory to be made more explicit and for a specific theory of the national security state and how it
changes over time.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
74
Bensel, Eisner, and Sparrow write about the relationships between war and state growth in the cases of
the Civil War, World War I, and World War II, respectively. Saldin provides a more general analysis of
the relationship from the Spanish American War in 1898 through the Vietnam War in 1975. Richard
Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Marc Allen Eisner, From Warfare State to Welfare
State: World War I, Compensatory State Building, and the Limits of the Modern Order (University Park:
The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); Bartholomew H. Sparrow, From the Outside In: World
War II and the American State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Robert P. Saldin, War, the
American State, and Politics Since 1898 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
75
Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War
Grand Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 30–32.
! 65
Chapter Two

A Realist Theory of the Dynamic State: State-Building for Executive
War-Making Autonomy

The contemporary international state system was in large part born of geopolitical
competition and war. As scholars since at least Machiavelli and Hobbes have recognized, the
shifting and often dangerous nature of the international security environment has played a central
role in the formation and subsequent transformation of modern states, privileging certain paths of
development and obstructing others. Central to this story have been the decisions made by rulers
in response to international pressure: as they faced war or the prospect of war, they worked to
better organize their states for survival by rearranging domestic political structures. In particular,
they organized these structures in ways that enabled them to extract resources from society and
in turn mobilize those resources to protect and expand their territories. Without such adaptation,
states risked being attacked, conquered, or worse—annihilated. Thus states were transformed
from the “outside-in” through security competition and war. This “bellicist” line of argument
was first made explicit in the works of late nineteenth and early twentieth century continental
thinkers including Leopold von Ranke, Max Weber, Otto Hintze, and Carl Schmitt. More
recently, scholars—foremost Charles Tilly, Brian Downing, Thomas Ertman, and Victoria Tin-
bor Hui—have built on this explanatory framework to further develop arguments about the
specific timing and form of alternative pathways of state development in Europe and Asia.
! 66
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, geopolitical competition and war have
continued to exert a profound influence on domestic political development; reproducing some
features of states, while transforming others. Thus when Peter Gourevitch wrote his seminal
article in 1978, he did so believing that an outside-in, or what he called a second image reversed,
approach had much to offer international relations scholars for explaining not just the historical
development of the international state system, but also more recent and contemporary state-
building processes. With few exceptions, however, this potentially fruitful line of explanation
remains an “underdeveloped” approach in contemporary international relations theory, as Ja Ian
Chong has noted.
1
In many ways, therefore, Gourevitch’s original critique, that international
relations scholars too often treat domestic political structures and processes as “an independent
or intervening variable and sometimes an irrelevant one,” still stands.
2
A great deal of attention
continues to be paid to the impact of domestic institutions on international political behavior, and
much less to the impact of international politics on domestic institutions.
There are important reasons for this lack of sustained attention. As Elizabeth Kier and
Ronald Krebs explain in a recent volume on war and democracy: “Scholars routinely allude to
war’s transformative power, but studies of war’s effects on democratic institutions and politics
are rare.” They contend the dearth of such studies stems from the fact that because international
relations scholars have largely been “Consumed with avoiding the destruction of world war and
the potential devastation of a nuclear war, [they] have focused on the causes of war, not its
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
Ja Ian Chong, External Intervention and the Politics of State Formation: China, Indonesia, and
Thailand, 1893-1952 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 3.
2
Peter Gourevitch, “The Second Image Reversed: The International Sources of Domestic Politics,”
International Organization 32, no. 4 (1978): 881. For important exceptions see Chong, External
Intervention and the Politics of State Formation: China, Indonesia, and Thailand, 1893-1952; Miriam
Fendius Elman, “Deciding Democracy: External Security Threats and Domestic Regime Choices,” in
Existential Threats and Civil-Security Relations (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2009), 81–117.
! 67
consequences.”
3
In many ways, the focus on causes over consequences stems directly from the
central question that has oriented so much of the study of international relations: why war? As
was discussed in the last chapter, reasoning from the bottom-up and focusing on the effects
domestic institutions have on state behavior has provided an important approach to answering
this question. One of the central insights of bellicists’ work on war and state-making, however,
has been to point out that explaining why states have certain domestic institutions that are more
or less prone to war is directly tied back to the nature of the international system and the problem
of war itself. In other words, the causes and consequences of war cannot be separated so easily;
the two often have a co-constitutive effect and therefore must be analyzed not separately but
“simultaneously as wholes.”
4
As Gourevitch explains, “The international system is not only a
consequence of domestic politics and structures, but rather a cause of them.”
5
Again, Charles
Tilly’s oft-repeated but penetrating claim that “War made the state, and the state made war”
captures the fact that the relationship between the international system and the structure of the
units that populate it is a two-way street.
6

International relations scholars, however, are not alone in their lack of attention to this
issue area. Over the last three plus decades, the American politics subfield of American political
development (APD) has blossomed.
7
But it has to some extent ignored the impact of war and the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
3
Elizabeth Kier and Ronald R. Krebs, “War and Democracy in Comparative Perspective,” in In War’s
Wake: International Conflict and the Fate of Liberal Democracy (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2010), 1.
4
Gourevitch, “The Second Image Reversed: The International Sources of Domestic Politics,” 911.
5
Ibid.
6
Charles Tilly, The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1975), 42.
7
The subfield of APD grew out of the work Stephen Skowronek and others who questioned the widely
held view that the United States lacked a formal and substantial state apparatus. Skowronek’s work shed
light on the American state and helped orient Americanists to study episodes of American state-building
efforts since the country’s founding. Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion
! 68
threat of war on American domestic political institutions.
8
In a 2002 volume on the international
influence on American political development, Ira Katznelson laments that such studies still
remain “conspicuously absent.” He explains that “more than two decades since Gourevitch
called for a new research perspective stressing the [international sources of domestic politics or
the mutual constitution of international relations and domestic affairs], the degree and character
of influence exercised by international factors on American political development remains
remarkably unprobed.”
9
Robert Saldin suggests APD should provide "a natural home” for the
study of the domestic effects of international politics. Like Gourevtich and others, however, he
explains the traditional segmentation between American politics and international relations has
prevented this type of boundary-crossing theorizing and empirical research.
10
Though several of
the cited works above have begun to bridge this gap, the fact is that “high walls continue to
separate studies by Americanists of US politics at home from their studies of “foreign”
affairs.”
11

Explaining domestic institutional change as a consequence of international politics,
therefore, requires moving past two obstacles that have traditionally limited such an approach.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); On
the subfield of APD see Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Search for American Political
Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
8
For important exceptions see Bartholomew H. Sparrow, From the Outside In: World War II and the
American State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the
Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2000); Ira Katznelson and Martin Shefter, eds., Shaped By War and Trade:
International Influences on American Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2002); Robert P. Saldin, War, the American State, and Politics Since 1898 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011); James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big
Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
9
Ira Katznelson, “Rewriting the Epic of America,” in Shaped By War and Trade: International Influences
on American Political Development, ed. Ira Katznelson and Martin Shefter (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2002), 4.
10
Saldin, War, the American State, and Politics Since 1898, 3–6, quote on 3.
11
Katznelson, “Rewriting the Epic of America,” 4.
! 69
On the one hand, it requires expanding international relations’ conception of the causes of war to
include not just particular domestic political institutions but also their origins. If certain
arrangements are more prone to war, then understanding why those arrangements exist today
helps answer the question: why war? On the other hand, it requires crossing disciplinary divides,
not just between American politics and international relations, but also comparative politics.
There are good theoretical and disciplinary reasons for the existence of these divides, but they
have discouraged scholars from studying the mutual constitution of domestic and international
politics. A greater effort must be made to try to transcend them if we are to explain outcomes
that require multi-level explanations. This is not the first study that attempts to make both of
these moves, but given the lack of studies that do so it is important to be clear that these
obstacles remain.
This chapter forms the theoretical core of the dissertation. In it I aim to build on the
aforementioned “bellicist” explanations of state formation and extend their insights to explain
important aspects of the phenomenon of state transformation. As was discussed earlier, the
theory proposed here is essentially an elaborated realist argument about internal balancing that
uses a second image reversed approach to explain state-building for executive war-making
autonomy in democratic states. The purpose is to explain the transformation of democratic
decision-making processes and procedures about the use of force as an adaptive response to a
shifting international security environment.
This specific argument, however, is embedded in a larger realist theory of state, which
today remains underspecified. As the last chapter described, realists have come a long way since
Michael Desch noted almost two decades ago, “we do not yet have a realist theory of the state
! 70
and domestic politics, merely simplifying assumptions about them.”
12
This is particularly true of
neoclassical realism. Nonetheless, observations by Desch and others that realists must still
develop a better understanding of the relationship between realism and domestic politics remains
an important gap in the literature yet to be filled. Stephen Walt, for example, suggests realists
should turn to developing the implications of realism for domestic politics and goes so far as to
suggest they might even inquire into “the origins of the state system itself.
13
” Such a goal is
likely beyond the reach (and probably the need) of realism. Certainly, it is beyond the reach of
this study. Rather, the question more central to the research here is: given the state system that
does exist today, why and how do states adapt their domestic structures and procedures to better
enable survival? Answering this question requires a partial theory of state—one that at least
accounts for important aspects of state transformation. In what follows, therefore, I construct this
partial theory first before developing a specific argument about state-building for executive war-
making autonomy.

Essential Concepts
Several key concepts related to the state lie at the heart of the theory. Because “the state”
itself and other related concepts are abstract and contested, it is important first to define each
separately before explaining their relationship to international security competition.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
12
Michael C. Desch, “War and Strong States, Peace and Weak States?,” International Organization 50,
no. 2 (1996): 238.
13
Walt suggests “A realist approach to state formation would emphasize the imposition of sovereign
authority in order to mobilize power and create security for ruler and ruled alike, as opposed to
approaches that regard the state as a voluntary contract between sovereign and subject or between free
and equal citizens.” Stephen M. Walt, “The Enduring Relevance of the Realist Tradition,” in Political
Science: The State of the Discipline, ed. Ira Katznelson and Helen V. Milner (New York: W. W. Norton
& Company, 2002), 227; For a related but more general theory of political cohesion see Ioannis D.
Evrigenis, Fear of Enemies and Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
! 71
An Institutional-Functional Definition of the State
The institutional-functional conception of the state that I adopt builds on scholarship that
traces its roots to Max Weber.
14
In what is now a widely used definition, Weber conceived of the
state as a “coercive,” “ruling apparatus” engaged in “continuous administration” and which
“(successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence within a particular
territory.”
15
Central to this definition is a conception of the state as a “ruling apparatus” or what
he referred to elsewhere as an “institutional order” for rule.
16
This apparatus is not by definition a
unitary entity—like an “individual person” in Weber’s words—but rather is a collective set of
offices and modes of organization, which together are wielded by political leaders who exercise
control over the physical violence used within a given territory and used on its behalf
externally.
17
According to Weber, the “modern state” as such has several “primary formal
characteristics” that makes it distinct from earlier modes of rule:
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
14
I use the term state solely to refer to the modern territorial state that emerged in the fourteenth century
in Europe and became nearly ubiquitous by the middle of the twentieth century. I delimit my use of the
term because I am interested in developing a concept and theory of state relevant to contemporary cases,
unlike some scholars who also use the term to refer to a range of historical political units including tribes,
city-states, feudal principalities, urban leagues, and universal empires. Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, “State
Building for Future Wars: Neoclassical Realism and the Resource Extractive State,” Security Studies 15,
no. 3 (2006): 470; Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, Steven E. Lobell, and Norrin M. Ripsman, “Introduction:
Neoclassical Realism, the State, and Foreign Policy,” in Neoclassical Realism, the State, and Foreign
Policy, ed. Steven E. Lobell, Norrin M. Ripsman, and Jeffrey W. Taliaferro (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009), 26.
15
Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in The Vocation Lectures, ed. David S. Owen and Tracy B.
Strong, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2004), 32–38, 35, 33; Max Weber,
Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 56, 901–910, 908.
16
Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, 905.
17
To be clear this is a fundamentally methodological individualist perspective. As Weber describes, it
might be convenient “to treat social collectivities such as states, associations, business corporations,
foundations, as if they were individual persons…[but] these collectivities must be treated as solely the
resultants and modes of organization of the particular acts of individual persons, since these alone can be
treated as agents in a course of subjectively understandable action.” Ibid., 13; On Weber’s methodological
individualism see Gianfranco Poggi, Weber: A Short Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006).
! 72
It possesses an administrative and legal order subject to change by legislation, to which
the organized activities of the administrative staff, which are also controlled by
regulations, are oriented. This system of orders claims binding authority, not only over
the members of the state, the citizen…but also to a very large extent over all action taking
place in the area of its jurisdiction.
18

States, moreover, fulfill a basic number of functions, according to Weber, including:
…the enactment of law (legislative function); the protection of personal safety and public
order (police); the protection of vested rights (administration of justice); the cultivation of
hygienic, educational, social-welfare, and other cultural interests (the various branches of
administration; and last but not least, the organized armed protection against outside
attack (military administration).
19

Though Weber stresses that states mostly fulfill similar functions (i.e. legal, social, security-
oriented), he is clear not to define the state solely “in terms of the end to which its actions is
devoted.
20
” In other words, Weber explicitly eschews a functional definition of the state. Rather,
for Weber the state comprises a set of institutions that are headed by individuals and are designed
to enable them to rule a given territory.
Building on Weber’s important but incomplete conceptualization of the state, scholars
have more recently developed his ideas to construct a more explicit institutional definition of the
state.
21
Synthesizing this work, Michael Mann identifies four components that together provide a
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
18
Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, 56.
19
Weber is clear, however, to avoid a functional definition of state. He argues that while most states
pursue these basic functions, they alone cannot define the state because not all states pursue the same
functions. Ibid., 905.
20
Ibid., 55.
21
Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. II, The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760–
1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 50–56. See also Tilly, The Formation of National
States in Western Europe, 27; Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological
Introduction (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1978), 1; Theda Skocpol, States and Social
Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1979), 29; Peter B. Evans and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, “The State and Economic Transformation:
Toward an Analysis of the Conditions Underlying Effective Intervention,” in Bringing the State Back In,
ed. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985), 46–47; Gianfranco Poggi, The State: Its Nature, Development, and Prospects (Palo Alto:
Stanford University Press, 1990), chapter 2.
! 73
working definition of the state. I adopt these four components to capture the “institutional”
dimension of an institutional–functional definition of the state:
1. The state is a differentiated set of institutions and personnel
2. embodying centrality, in the sense that political relations radiate to and from a center,
to cover a
3. territorially demarcated area over which it exercises
4. some degree of authoritative, binding rule making, backed up by some organized
physical force
22

To these four institutional components, however, I add a fifth and purely functional one—
namely, security as an end—to capture the “functional” dimensions of my institutional-
functional definition of the state.
5. and which pursues security vis-à-vis other states as a means of ensuring its survival
and prosperity.
This final dimension might be implicit in the territoriality of the state, but must be made explicit
and prominent in any definition principally concerned with national security.
This definition is worth unpacking to show how an institutional-functional definition
differs from the other prominent definitions that international relations scholars have adopted,
implicitly or explicitly. First, the institutional component of this definition has several
implications that make it distinct from pluralist approaches, which more abstractly conceive of
the state as an arena, and structural realism, which conceives of the state in almost purely
functional terms. Both ignore the institutional power of the state and suggest instead that it is an
empty medium of sorts; either an arena where domestic political conflict varies but the basic
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
22
One dimension here on which Mann departs from some scholars is that he allows for the fact that states
have a high degree of both authoritative rule making ability and control over the use of physical violence,
but he does not assume either is absolute. Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 1993, II, The Rise of
Classes and Nation-States, 1760–1914:55.
! 74
structure of the state remains unchanged and in any case has little independent impact on state
behavior, or as a unit that is considered only in terms of its material power capabilities and where
various institutional arrangements are thought to exert only ancillary influence on its likelihood
or capacity to respond to international pressures.
The fact that the state is conceptualized as a set of semi-permanent institutions of rule in
this definition means “the state” can be conceived of abstractly as a distinct and authoritative
actor. This has two implications for a theory of state. On the one hand, it means the state is more
than just the sum of its transient office holders’ views. In other words, state interests cannot
solely be reduced to the interests of its office holders or the societal actors that empower them,
directly or indirectly, through election or the appointment process. Thus, as an institutional actor,
the state can have distinct interests separate from society and can even be thought to have long-
term “national interests,” however formulated, which carry over from administration to
administration.
23
On the other hand, the fact that the state is distinct from society means that it
may have some degree of autonomy to pursue its distinct interests. As Mann explains, this
autonomy is not absolute, as some institutional scholars have implied, but nonetheless decision-
makers often do have a high degree of independent and authoritative policy making capacity.
What is implicit but important to highlight in this definition is that state action can occur
only as a result of the extent to which individuals, operating through their formal positions, are
able to direct national resources. How effectively these individuals are able to act in turn depends
on how state structures empower or constrain them. Conceptualizing the state as a set of
institutions, therefore, is important not just because it accounts for why states often have distinct
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
23
The point is not to suggest there is “one” enduring conception of the national interest, but that
institutional orders can make particular formulations of the national interest stable. On the inherent
ambiguity of “national security” and “national interest” see Arnold Wolfers, “‘ National Security’ as an
Ambiguous Symbol,” Political Science Quarterly 67, no. 4 (1952): 481–502.
! 75
interests, but also because it is necessary for explaining why and when decision-makers’ are able
to pursue those interests. This is critical because different institutional structures privilege certain
actors (hence certain outcomes), and handicap other actors (hence other outcomes). Thus certain
arrangements may enable decision-makers to act irrespective of variations in domestic political
conflict, meaning the state is often more than just an arena. Others, conversely, may make
material power capabilities more or less usable, meaning state structure matters even though all
states similarly seek to survive.
Second, the functional component of this definition helps correct solely institutional
definitions of the state by incorporating the insights of both bellicist and realist scholars who
argue the nature of the state cannot be separated from the nature of the state-system itself. In an
uncertain and often dangerous world the state must be a security-seeking unit first and foremost.
This makes explicit the fact that the state is by definition a geopolitical actor engaged in security
competition with other states at all times, which helps account for the fact that a large part of the
state apparatus is often geared toward the pursuit of national security. This of course does not
mean that security is the only end pursued by states; just that the goal of survival foregrounds the
other ends states might pursue. Again, however, this functional component of the definition does
not override the fact that states are still composed of institutions that may or may not enable
decision-makers to pursue security effectively. Thus it is distinct from neorealist conceptions that
assume states are unitary rational actors. States may be functionally undifferentiated, but the fact
that they are institutionally differentiated matters tremendously. This allows for the fact that
security imperatives may cause states to adapt to their environment and act in an authoritative
manner that resembles the behavior of a unitary rational actor, but does not mean this assumption
! 76
should be made a priori. As I explain below, such functional adaptation requires an analogous
process of institutional adaptation.
Finally, an institutional-functional definition of the state leaves open the possibility for
analyzing variation in state structure across cases and changes in state structure within-case over
time. In this formulation, the state must be considered what Mann calls a “polymorphous”
structure. He explains: “In chemistry a polymorph is a substance that crystallizes in two or more
different forms, usually belonging to different systems.” In this context he uses the term to
convey “the way states crystallize as the center – but in each case as a different center – of a
number of power networks [ideological, economic, military, political].”
24
In other words, states
facing dissimilar circumstances, where concerns about different issue areas or policy domains
predominate over others, have incentives to favor different institutional arrangements. This
environmental variation in turns causes them to crystallize in different ways. According to Mann,
this explains why European states crystallized variously as “capitalist,” “dynastic,” “party
democratic,” “militarist,” “confederal,” “Lutheran,” etc. The fundamental importance of this
“polymorphous” nature of the state will become evident in the theory elaborated below.
State Centralization and State Autonomy
Given this institutional–functional definition of the state, it is now possible to focus
precisely on the institutional design and organization of national security structures and decision-
making procedures. Specifically, I am interested in the extent to which such institutions provide
decision-makers with more or less autonomy to use force.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
24
Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 1993, II, The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760–1914:75–
76. For an introduction to Mann’s IEMP (Ideological, Economic, Military, Political) power network
framework see Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. I, A History of Power from the
Beginning to A.D. 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), chapter one.
! 77
Broadly speaking, states can be characterized as having more centralized versus more
decentralized arrangements of decision-making. In more centralized arrangements, authority is
located in one or a few formal offices where a relatively small number of officials are
responsible for formulating and executing policy. The foundation of this centralization is an
institutional design that funnels decision-making processes and procedures to this individual or
group, and a streamlined national security machinery that is responsive to their initiatives. With a
more decentralized form of structure, authority over national security decisions is spread out
across a host of institutional sites, giving a larger number of officials a formal say in formulating
and executing policy. Such decentralization can occur either when there are multiple formal
offices that can initiate or block national security policy, or when the machinery of national
security, either purposefully or unintentionally, provides lower offices with decision-making
authority. In a democracy, a centralized structure usually means decision-making is localized in
the executive where the key decision-making unit comprises the chief executive and a small
group of other officials. Conversely, a decentralized structure in a democracy usually means the
legislative branch has an ex ante and decisive voice in matters of national security.
Fully centralized and fully decentralized state structures do not exist as binary types in
reality. Rather, a spectrum exists across which different organizational schemes create either
more or less centralization. In the language of an important line of institutional scholarship, the
spectrum can be conceived of in terms of “veto players.” Veto players are defined as “individual
or collective actors whose agreement is necessary for a change in the status quo.
25
” In other
words, veto players are those actors whose support is required for a policy to be pursued. In the
specific issue area under consideration here, a veto player is one who can block ex ante a state
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
25
George Tsebelis, Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2002), 19.
! 78
from using force. These types of veto players can be either formal (i.e. written into a state’s
constitution or other binding piece of legislation or regulation) or informal (i.e. exerting authority
through a widely recognized norm).
Centralized decision-making authority is critical for explaining state behavior under any
type of regime. In a state structure where authority is more centralized and there are fewer formal
veto players, core decision-makers will have less need to bargain with the public and other actors
in the state. Conversely, in a state structure where authority is more decentralized and where
there are more formal veto players, the policy making process is likely to be contested by
multiple sources of authority that may have competing interests. This can be expected to result in
more bargaining and a greater need for compromise over policy outcomes. The result is that such
structures can be subject to long and tortured decision-making processes that result in diluted or
fragmented policy outcomes. In more centralized structures, therefore, we can expect greater
coherence and decisiveness in state policy, as fewer compromises need to be made with the
additional actors invested in the process where decision-making authority is decentralized.
Centralized decision-making authority, however, is especially critical for explaining
state behavior under democratic government. As mentioned above, centralization in national
security decision-making in democracies usually entails concentrating formal and/or informal
authority in the executive and a small body of executive officials.
26
The effect of such
concentration is not only to limit the number of veto players, but also to exclude certain veto
players; namely, legislators. The tradeoff between centralized and decentralized state structure in
a democracy, therefore, has important consequences for the way democratic governments reach
decisions. As I will explain below, the efficient conduct of national security is seen as stemming
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
26
This is the “foreign policy executive” mentioned earlier.
! 79
from the executive end of the spectrum. In a democracy, however, legislative participation and
approval are central to ensuring the democratic legitimacy of national security decision-
making.
27
The legislature in effect serves as a proxy for public involvement in decisions of war
and peace.
28
Thus a centralized structure, advertently or inadvertently, can serve to insulate state
decision-making processes and procedures from public scrutiny and provide decision-makers
with a degree of autonomy. To be clear, this does not necessarily mean state policy will be better,
only that leaders will enjoy greater flexibility.
Again, I define state autonomy as the degree to which state structure and decision-
making procedures provide executive officials with the ability to translate their preferences into
policy outcomes notwithstanding societal preferences. To be specific, this is what I would call
“institutional autonomy,” which simply means that the autonomy enjoyed by decision-makers is
derived from the institutional design and resources of the state and not some other source.
29
Two
other types of autonomy can exist independently or in tandem with institutional autonomy. The
first is what I would call “situational autonomy.” Situational autonomy occurs when a country is
faced with an obvious and significant international challenge, which creates a strong rally effect
among the public. The result is a surge in public opinion for action of some type, which gives
decision-makers greater latitude to act in the face of a threat. The clearest example is when a
country is attacked. The second is what I would call “personal autonomy.” Personal autonomy
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
27
Dirk Peters and Wolfgang Wagner, “Between Military Efficiency and Democratic Legitimacy:
Mapping Parliamentary War Powers in Contemporary Democracies, 1989–2004,” Parliamentary Affairs
64, no. 1 (2011): 175–92.
28
A question remains about whether legislative opinion and public opinion can or should be conflated.
Here I adopt the traditional interpretation of the two and assume they overlap to the extent that the
legislature at least serves as a reasonable representation of public opinion. On this point see Norrin M.
Ripsman, Peacemaking by Democracies: The Effect of State Autonomy on the Post-World War
Settlements (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 42, N 47.
29
This is similar to what Ripsman calls “structural autonomy,” but as I explain below differs in important
ways. See introduction. Ibid., 42–43.
! 80
stems from the charisma or sheer will of a particular leader. Though all three sources of
autonomy can provide decision-makers with important leeway, institutional autonomy should be
preferred because it is more enduring. Here I am focused exclusively on the institutional sources
of autonomy and use the concept to refer solely to that idea.
Three institutional aspects together help centralize state structure and decision-making
procedures and provide decision-makers with autonomy to use force: resources (military forces
in being), organization (a streamlined national security apparatus), and control (concentrated
decision-making authority to initiate action). The role of these components will become clearer
in the American case, but for now it is necessary to note their significance. Resources provide
ready-made forces available to be used without the need to debate their construction. In the
United States, the lack of a standing army historically provided the legislature with its most
important veto opportunity in decisions about large-scale war. Executives could not effectively
wage war in the pre-World War II period without Congress first agreeing to raise the necessary
forces. Nor could they resort to covert and/or other clandestine operations because such forces
did not exist. Organization both increases the effectiveness of available forces and enables
officials to direct their activities in a coordinated manner. Control over the actual use of armed
force in the form of concentrated decision-making procedures shifts the initiative to the
executive. In the American case, once the initiative shifted from Congress to the President, it
became very difficult for the former to act as a veto player ex poste facto.
Finally, it is important to note that autonomy is not just derived from the relative strength
these institutional aspects provide the executive vis-à-vis the legislature and the public, but also
from the resources institutions make available to the executive to act out of sight of legislative
and public scrutiny. Thus while I agree with others who argue the true test of autonomy is when
! 81
decision-makers in the executive are able to pursue an independent set of policies even in the
face of legislative and public disapproval, I disagree that this is the only measure of autonomy.
When possible, decision-makers, especially in democracies, have an incentive to circumvent
tests of their ability to act independently. In the area of national security, they do things like
obscure their policies and resort to using instruments of force that limit or completely evade
public attention. By focusing only on the ability of executives to act in the face of opposition
(which might actually be a measure of state strength), we miss the true scope of state autonomy.

International Security Competition and Political Organization: Toward a
Realist Theory of State Transformation
Why do some states have more autonomy than others? Why at certain points in time do
decision-makers decide to redesign state structures and decision-making procedures to make
them more centralized? The answers to these questions I argue lie in the nature of the
international state system itself and require a second-image reversed, bellicist explanation, which
I elaborate in the remainder of this chapter. In this section I begin this task by first situating the
argument in the realist tradition and then discuss the historical lineage of the theory as it runs
from the work of Otto Hintze through Peter Gourevitch’s second image reversed approach. Then
I outline a basic theory of state before turning to the more specific explanation of state-building
for executive autonomy in the next section.
Lineages of a Realist Theory of State
Realists have long recognized that the competitive and conflictual nature of international
politics exerts a tremendous amount of pressure on the units that populate the international
! 82
system.
30
States must either respond to this pressure or suffer the consequences. Structural
realists explain the operation of system level pressure as follows: as security competition waxes
and wanes, states are “socialized” into adopting certain modes (i.e. survival–oriented) of
behavior. Again, as explained earlier, for Kenneth Waltz socialization generally refers to the
adoption of a combination of external and internal strategies designed to balance against
potential threats. These include forming temporary alliances and emulating the military practices
of leading states by adopting similar technologies and strategies.
31
John Mearsheimer,
meanwhile, takes a similar approach, but expands Waltz’s perspective on both external and
internal balancing. In terms of the former, he acknowledges that while sometimes states balance
they also pursue a variety of other strategies including buck-passing. In terms of the latter, he
highlights the fact that states not only imitate others; they also “innovate” by “developing new
weapons, innovative military doctrines, or clever strategies.”
32

The nature of international security competition, however, does not just compel states to
alter their external behavior or attempt to imitate other states military practices or innovate new
ones; it also causes them to alter their domestic political constitutions by adopting new
institutions and adjusting old ones. This important insight can be seen in the works of an older
line of political theorists that realists traditionally claim lineage from including Machiavelli and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
30
Offensive and defensive variants of realism disagree on the extent to which international politics is
conflictual, but all agree that it is competition/conflict-prone. As Stephen Walt explains, all modern
variants of realism share the premise that “the presence of multiple states in anarchy renders the security
of each of them problematic and encourages them to compete with each other for power and/or security.”
Walt, “The Enduring Relevance of the Realist Tradition.” For different realist statements on the
essentially conflictual nature of international politics see Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International
Politics (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1979); Robert G. Gilpin, “The Richness of the Tradition of Political
Realism,” International Organization 38, no. 2 (1984): 287–304; John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of
Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001); Taliaferro, Lobell, and Ripsman,
“Introduction: Neoclassical Realism, the State, and Foreign Policy.”
31
Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 74–77, 127, 168.
32
Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 166–167.
! 83
Hobbes.
33
The modern variant relevant here, however, was articulated by a group of continental
theorists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The historian Leopold Ranke
outlined the early contours of this line of thought, explaining “the primacy of foreign policy”
does and should drive considerations of political organization and activity. Ranke argued that the
pursuit of other societal interests is founded on “the position” of a state vis-à-vis other states and
“the degree of independence” it has to conduct its own affairs. Thus states are “obliged…to
organize all of [their] internal resources for the purpose of self-preservation.” This “supreme law
of the state,” he contended, has a tremendous impact on domestic political arrangements.
34

Though less pronounced, Weber also held the view that there is a close relationship between
external relations and internal politics. Weber’s theory of internal politics is “surprisingly
obscure,” according to Randall Collins. Nonetheless, it is clear for Weber that “politics works
from the outside in, and that the external military relations of states are crucial determinants of
their internal politics.”
35

The leading continental thinker who most fully theorized an explicit and fundamental
relationship between international security competition and political organization and whose
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
33
Andreas Anter, for example, suggests that though Machiavelli did not have a concept of state that
resembles ours today, maintaining the state as a supreme form of rule is inherent in his writings. Andreas
Anter, Max Weber’s Theory of the Modern State: Origins, Structure and Significance, trans. Keith Tribe
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 108. On Machiavelli and Hobbes see also Evrigenis, Fear of
Enemies and Collective Action, chapters 3 and 5.
34
Ranke was careful not to suggest all “internal political organization” stems from “war,” broadly
conceived. Rather, he argued that “the primacy of foreign policy” necessitated constant “modification” of
the state. Leopold Ranke, “A Dialogue on Politics,” in Leopold Ranke: The Formative Years, by
Theodore H. Von Laue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), 166–167.
35
Randall Collins, Weberian Sociological Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986),
chapter 6, quotes on 145. See also Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 1993, II, The Rise of Classes and
Nation-States, 1760–1914:56; Brendan Simms, “The Return of the Primacy of Foreign Policy,” German
History 21, no. 3 (2003): 277.
! 84
work serves as an important point of departure for my own theory was Otto Hintze.
36
In a series
of essays in the early twentieth century, Hintze explored the historical formation of European
states as a means of explaining contemporary changes in Germany and elsewhere.
37
Hintze
recognized that two separate but related historical processes required explanation. The first was
the continuing divide between the development of parliamentarism in Great Britain and the more
military-oriented absolutism that reigned on the continent.
38
The second was a larger process of
state development stemming from transformations taking place in the international state system.
As Hintze observed, “The old European system of states [was being] replaced by a new world-
system of states.” By looking at Europe’s historical experience, he sought to understand how
both European and other states would “arrange themselves” as the extent of the state system
spread around the globe.
39

Many other scholars at the time were focused on similar questions, but sought to explain
the internal development of states as a consequence of their national histories, national
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
36
Hintze was in many ways the heir to Ranke’s Primat der Aussenpolitik school, but was also deeply
influenced by Weber’s work, which was contemporary to his own. Weber’s influence can be seen
especially in Hintze’s later work.
37
Though he touched on these topics elsewhere, Hintze’s theory can be gleaned from the essays “Power
Politics and Political Organization (1913)” and “Imperialism and World Policy (1907),” which I reference
through secondary sources, and the essays “The Formation of States and Constitutional Development: A
Study in History and Politics (1902),” “Military Organization and the Organization of the State (1906),”
and “The Preconditions of Representative Government in the Context of World History (1931)” in Felix
Gilbert, ed., The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), chapters
four, five, and eight.
38
In “Power Politics and Political Organization,” he contrasts the difference as follows: “The different
systems of government and administration found among the large European states can be traced back in
the main to two types, one of which can be called the English and the other the continental… [The
principal difference between them] consists in the fact that on the continent military absolutism with a
bureaucratic administration develops, while in England… the older line of development continues… and
leads to what we usually term parliamentarism and self-government.” Quoted in Thomas Ertman,
“Explaining Variation in Early Modern State Structure: The Cases of England and the German Territorial
States,” in Rethinking Leviathan: The Eighteenth-Century State in Britain and Germany, ed. John Brewer
and Eckhart Hellmuth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 24–25.
39
Qutoed in Felix Gilbert, “Introduction: Otto Hintze, 1861-1940,” in The Historical Essays of Otto
Hintze, ed. Felix Gilbert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 18.
! 85
characters, or economic relations. Hintze, however, thought internal structural development
could not be explained by internal factors alone and was interested instead in the extent to which
the “peculiar character [of the state was] co-determined by its relation to its surroundings.” He
hypothesized that a state’s “internal structure” or “constitution” was directly related to
“alterations in [its] external existence.” Indeed a comparative view of history, according to
Hintze, showed that a state’s “internal constitution adjusts itself to the conditions of [its] external
political existence.”
40
The comparative development of Great Britain and Germany was the most
prominent example that made clear the importance of this line of explanation for Hintze. After
pointing out the distinct institutional differences between the two states noted above, he asked,
“What then is the cause of this pronounced institutional differentiation?” According to Hintze:
It was above all geographic position…[I]n order to pursue its goals, England required no
large land force, only a navy…and a force which swims [sic] on the ocean is less suited
to influencing and changing the inner structure of a state than a great army… [the
situation was] completely different on the continent, where at that time the great standing
armies and with them the absolutist, bureaucratic state arose…Great historical necessity
led to this [outcome], and this [historical necessity] was the constant state of war which
reigned on the continent, where no nation and no state was protected by a powerful
border which England possessed in the sea which surrounded it.
41

Located in this answer is the kernel of Hintze’s larger theory of state formation and
transformation. As this example makes clear, the most important factor in the process of state
development for him was organization for war. He explained that war was so central to the
development of a state’s internal constitution because “All state organization was originally
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
40
Otto Hintze, “The Formation of States and Constitutional Development: A Study in History and
Politics,” in The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze, ed. Felix Gilbert (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1975), 159, 160, 162.
41
“Power Politics and Political Organization,” quoted in Ertman, “Explaining Variation in Early Modern
State Structure: The Cases of England and the German Territorial States,” 25–26.
! 86
military organization for war.”
42
Throughout history conflict and the potential for conflict had
exerted a powerful influence on the internal structure of states. This influence, furthermore,
“increased in strength the more frequently wars were waged.
43
” For Hintze, therefore, the
internal structure of Europe’s states and the continent’s military geography and its “constant state
of war” could not be separated from one another. As states faced greater potential danger in their
environment, they had to rearrange themselves in order to better survive. The pressure of
international competition of course varied for different states at different times; it was less severe
for Great Britain than it was for Germany. Nonetheless, in one form or another, all states had
been subject to the forces of “power politics and balance-of-power politics,” which according to
Hintze “created the foundations of modern Europe.”
44

For Hintze, however, these external factors were not just operative in some distant
period; they continued to influence political life on the continent. In other words, security
competition did not only affect states’ development at their inception. Yes, there was some
degree of what institutional scholars today call a “lock-in” effect whereby certain institutional
arrangements, once adopted, become more difficult to change over time.
45
But states were also
continuously being reproduced and transformed by their external environments. Hintze argued
this was particularly true of Germany in the early twentieth century. Faced with “constant
competition…states were prompted toward increasing rationalization and consolidation of their
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
42
Otto Hintze, “Military Organization and the Organization of the State,” in The Historical Essays of Otto
Hintze, ed. Felix Gilbert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 181.
43
Ibid., 183, 181.
44
Ibid., 199.
45
For an introduction to the ideas of “lock-in” and “path dependence” see James Mahoney, “Path
Dependence in Historical Sociology,” Theory and Society 29, no. 4 (2000): 507–48.
! 87
political machine,” he explained.
46
In this context, “rationalization and consolidation” involved
creating, developing and altering a state’s domestic institutions so as to enable statesmen to more
effectively respond to their external security environment. Here it is important to note that
Weber’s influence, particularly his conception of the state as an apparatus or set of institutions,
came to be more recognizable in Hintze’s work. Though less well developed, Hintze likewise
defined the political dimension of the state in institutional terms as “a system of institutions for
the protection, domination, and governance of the entire human and territorial complex.”
47

Unlike Weber, however, he more explicitly linked the institutional nature of the state to its
external environment and developed an argument about what was for him an unambiguous and
ongoing relationship between international security competition and domestic institutional
change.
Though he privileged the role played by external factors in explaining the state-building
process, Hintze also recognized that external factors interacted with internal ones in important
ways. As he explained, “The impact of the outside world must pass through an intellectual
medium; and the only question is how strong is its refraction, to what extent it possesses
independent vigor and can exert a counterweight.
48
” The “intellectual medium” he referred to
comprised the ideas and values associated with a country’s national character (Volksgeist).
According to Hintze, they are formative elements of a country’s domestic institutions and are
often manifest in its Constitution and laws. What is important, however, is the strength of these
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
46
Otto Hintze, “The Preconditions of Representative Government in the Context of World History,” in
The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze, ed. Felix Gilbert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 308.
47
Otto Hintze, “The State in Historical Perspective,” in State and Society: A Reader in Comparative
Political Sociology, ed. Reinhard Bendix (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1968), 155.
48
Hintze, “The Formation of States and Constitutional Development: A Study in History and Politics,”
162 (italics added).
! 88
internal factors and how they interact with a state’s external situation. The combination of the
two—what Hintze calls “a constant collaboration and interaction of the inner and the outer
world”—shapes state development. For example, in the American case, the country’s historical
anti-statism and its bias against a standing army and executive war powers have served as an
important intellectual medium that shaped both the country’s constitution and subsequent state
development. As will be shown, explaining the impact of external factors in the American case,
therefore, requires studying how they were reflected through this medium.
Hinzte’s theory of the state and state transformation had relatively little impact on
international relations until comparativists and others rediscovered his ideas in the 1970s. An
important strand of this research focused on the role war and military competition played in the
alternative pathways of European state development.
49
While this literature provided important
insights into the historical formation of nation-states in Europe and later Asia, what remains less
developed is the continuing impact these factors have in the contemporary world. A research
agenda for international security scholars along these lines was laid out in a few short pages by
Gourevitch in his article on the second image reversed. There he summarized the core of an
essentially realist theory of the state and state development based directly on the insights of
Hintze more than half a century earlier:
The anarchy of the international environment poses a threat to states within it: the threat
of being conquered, occupied, annihilated, made subservient. The obverse of threat is
opportunity: power, dominion, empire, glory, “total” security. This state of war induces
states to organize themselves internally so as to meet these external challenges. War is
like the market: it punishes some forms of organization and rewards others. The
vulnerability of states to such pressures is not uniform since some occupy a more exposed
position than others. Hence, the pressure for certain organizational forms differs. The
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
49
Again, this bellicist line of research can be traced through the work of Tilly and others. See footnote
above.
! 89
explanation for differential political development in this line of reasoning is found by
pointing to differing external environments concerning national security.
50

Like Hintze, Gourevitch encouraged security scholars to develop this line of reasoning and look
at the interaction between a changing external security environment and internal political factors
to explain why domestic political institutions develop the way they do.
Given that Gourevitch’s work coincided exactly with the publishing of Kenneth Waltz’s
Theory of International Politics, it is again surprising in hindsight that no one combined the
important insights of the two together. For a variety of reasons, Waltz and others aimed to keep
structural realism a purely system-level theory and therefore eschewed theorizing its implications
for domestic politics. Meanwhile, the group of realist scholars who later coalesced under the
banner of neoclassical realism made important strides in developing the implications of domestic
institutions for international politics, but did not turn around and develop the implications of
international politics for the design of those very same institutions. As stated before, this latter
alternative was and remains an open and potentially fruitful pathway for realist security scholars
to pursue. I begin that task here.
A Second Image Reversed Approach to State Transformation
The realist theory of state proposed here builds on these lineages. It begins with the
institutional–functional conception of the state described above. In this conception, the state is
conceived of as a set of institutions, which, when required, are capable of being functionally
adapted to changes in the external security environment. The theory, therefore, provides an
elaborated explanation of internal balancing. Unlike structural realism, however, which is
concerned mainly with internal balancing insofar as it relates to behavioral adaption, I open the
“black box” of the state and seek to explain internal balancing as a process of institutional state-
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
50
Gourevitch, “The Second Image Reversed: The International Sources of Domestic Politics,” 896.
! 90
building for national security. Thus, I focus on the types and arrangments of institutions that state
leaders attempt to construct within the “black box” in order to better respond to challenges
outside of it. This is a view of the state as a dynamic unit.
In the theory, the independent variable is what Hintze called a state’s “external
situation” or what I would refer to more specifically as international security competition. States
can be affected by international security competition in several different ways. The most direct
impact occurs during major war, when a state must pour as many resources as are needed into
winning, or when a state is conducting a military intervention or facing one from another more
powerful state. The latter can result in consequences ranging from foreign meddling in internal
affairs to occupation and formal control over domestic politics, or, in a worst-case scenario, to
dismemberment and annihilation, which is the most severe form of outside-in pressure. Short of
engaging in full-fledged war, however, more diffuse changes in the international security
environment can also affect states’ domestic constitutions. These include system-level changes in
factors such as the distribution of power, opportunities for expansion, and developments in
technology, as well as unit-level variation in the threat posed by potential competitors. These
factors may require states to increase their security positions in order to defend their territory,
and protect and advance their interests. It is important to highlight that although anarchy is a
constant feature of the system, its effects tend to vary across both space and time depending on
variations in the factors listed above. This variation can lead to international security competition
that is more or less intense for different states in different periods. When this competition
increases in intensity, states can be said to face greater systemic pressure.
The dependent variable is state structure and decision-making procedures. Here I am
specifically interested in state structure as it relates to the national security apparatus.
! 91
Importantly, I draw a distinction between two dimensions in which policymakers focus their
state-building efforts for national security: state capacity and state autonomy. The first concerns
extracting resources (labor + capital) from society mainly to build military capabilities, while the
second concerns the ability to use that power once created to take authoritative actions such as
responding to crises, projecting military power into foreign areas, using force, or negotiating
postwar settlements. When faced with greater international security competition, the theory
expects state leaders to undertake two broad sets of state-building activities: First, they are likely
to attempt to extract more resources from society in order to create greater military capabilities.
This generally includes passing laws and other regulations to do things like raise taxes, conscript
or hire professional soldiers, increase industrial production, and develop new military
technologies. Second, they are likely to attempt to carve out a greater degree of state autonomy
in order to better project military power when necessary. This includes constructing and
reorganizing national security institutions and adjusting procedural norms to centralize and
insulate foreign policy decision-making authority. The second is the primary focus of the
dissertation and will be elaborated on in the next section.
Finally, domestic political factors act as a mediating variable—or what Hintze called the
“intellectual medium”—that helps regulate and shape state-building efforts in the face of
international security competition. Though the international system can place a tremendous
amount of pressure on states, it is ultimately “undetermining.” “The environment may exert
strong pulls,” Gourevitch explains, “but short of actual occupation, some leeway in the response
to that environment remains. A country can face up to that competition or fail. Frequently more
than one way to be successful exists.
51
” Because there are various possible responses to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
51
Ibid., 900.
! 92
international security competition, it is necessary to look at variation in domestic factors to
explain how states will actually respond. In the theory, therefore, systemic pressure is expected
to encourage certain types of institutional solutions; i.e. ones that make decision-makers more
capable of responding to security competition by providing greater state capacity and autonomy.
But the exact institutional solutions states arrive at will be shaped by domestic political factors.
When systemic pressure is low or moderate, we should expect these factors to play a larger role
than when it is severe.
Particularly important are the ideas that are embedded, both formally and informally, into
state structure and decision-making procedures. In all democratic countries, general ideas about
popular sovereignty and accountability are built into domestic political arrangements. In some
democracies ideas about limited government and state restraint are also important. In the case of
the United States, for example, we will see that the country’s domestic institutions have always
been informed by republican ideas about the dangers of standing armed forces, centralized
military authority, and executive war-making powers. These ideas were codified in the
Constitution and embedded into the very fabric of the American state. During later episodes of
state-building these ideas continued to exert an independent effect both through their being
embedded in existing institutions and in shaping the possibilities of change in debates about
institutional transformation. Finally, it is important to note that domestic political factors do not
only impact the form but also the effectiveness of institutional adaption. It is for this reason that a
functional theory of state alone does not suffice.

! 93
The Dynamic State and Executive War-Making Autonomy
In the previous section I began to outline a general realist theory of state in which we
should expect states to adapt to their international security environment by creating greater
military capacity and carving out greater autonomy to project military power when faced with
increasing systemic pressure. Undertaking these tasks requires altering state structure and
decision-making procedures in particular ways. In this section, I focus on the dimension of
autonomy more specifically and elaborate a theory of democratic state-building for executive
war-making autonomy.
Mapping Transformation: Systemic Pressure, Institutional Stress, and State-Building for
Executive Autonomy
The basic theory can be mapped out using a variation of the macro-micro-macro model or
what is also referred to as a Coleman-Boudon diagram after the sociologists James Coleman and
Raymond Boudon.
52
The model in its most basic form is sketched below in Figure 2.1.

Figure 2.1: Basic Macro-Micro-Macro Model

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
52
James S. Coleman, “Social Theory, Social Research, and a Theory of Action,” American Journal of
Sociology 91, no. 6 (1986): 1309–35; James S. Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1990); Raymond Boudon, Theories of Social Change: A Critical Appraisal,
trans. J.C. Whitehouse (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991); Mario Bunge, Finding Philosophy in Social
Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
!
Macro!Level!
(System!of!Action)!
!!
!
Micro!Level!
(Actors!&!Resources)!
!!
!!!X!
!!!!!x! !y!
!Y!
! 94
The model sketches out the relationships between observed macro level variables (X and
Y) and underlying micro variables (x and y), providing what Coleman calls “a formal framework
within which theoretical issues…can be examined.”
53
Located at the macro level is what he calls
a “system of action.” Here the system of action we are interested in is security competition
within the international system (X) and its impact on state behavior (Y). At the micro level are
“actors and resources.” Again, we are interested here in state structure and decision-making
procedures as a set of existing institutions (x) and the activities policymakers undertake to
transform existing institutions (y) in order to facilitate more strategic behavior when faced with
systemic pressure. Peter Hedström and Richard Swedberg, moreover, have built on this approach
to explain the relationships between the variables using three mechanisms: situational (Xx),
action-formation (xy) and transformational (yY).
54

Here I combine these various efforts and create a framework within which to study how
the observed relationship that structural realism focuses on between the international system and
adaptive state behavior at the macro level is actually dependent on a process of institutional
adaptation that occurs at the micro level. The diagram is depicted in Figure 2.2 below.
At the macro level, we can see there is an observed macro-macro level association
between international security competition and adaptive state behavior; here I am particularly
interested in the ability of states to project military power when required. When we move from
the macro to the micro level, however, the model shows that there is a process occurring within
the state, which then feeds back up into the explanation at the macro level.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
53
Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory, 701. For an example of the model’s applicability in
international relations theory see Patrick James, International Relations and Scientific Progress:
Structural Realism Reconsidered (Athens, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2002).
54
Peter Hedström and Richard Swedberg, “Social Mechanisms: An Introductory Essay,” in Social
Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory, ed. Peter Hedström and Richard Swedberg
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 21–23.
! 95!
!
!
Figure'2.2:'Boudon/Coleman'Diagram'of'State'Adaptation
55
'
'
'
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
55
!Coleman, “Social Theory, Social Research, and a Theory of Action,” 1322; Bunge, Finding Philosophy in Social Science, 149; Hedström et al.,
“Social Mechanisms: An Introductory Essay,” 22.!
Macro!Level!
Micro!Level!
International!Security!
Competition!
Existing!State!
Structure!
State!Behavior!
State=Building!
1. Increasing!systemic!pressure!(situational!mechanism)!
2. Institutional!stress!(action=formation!mechanism)!
3. Greater!executive!autonomy!(transformational!mechanism)!
4. Adaptive!state!behavior!(observed!macro=level!association)!
!
!1! 3!
2!
4!
96
As the diagram depicts, this process begins at the macro level (or in international
relations theory terms at the system level). At this level, international security competition
pushes down on existing state structure and decision-making procedures as it increases, creating
what I have been referring to as systemic pressure. Again, this pressure can stem from actual
war-fighting or from more diffuse factors such as changes in the distribution of power,
opportunities for expansion, and developments in technology, as well as unit-level variation in
the threat posed by potential competitors. Systemic pressure in turn acts as what Hedström and
Swedberg call a situational mechanism. Situational mechanisms link the macro level to the micro
level and show how an actor’s exposure to a specific “social” situation causes them to respond in
a particular way. In this case, the social situation is security competition with other states. As this
competition increases, decision-makers must use the existing institutions of the state to respond
with security-seeking measures such as projecting military power.
When existing state structure and decision-making procedures provide an inadequate
institutional basis for responding to systemic pressure effectively, this can give rise to
“institutional stress.”
1
Institutional stress occurs when there is tension between existing domestic
institutions and decision-makers preferences for how state structure and decision-making
procedures should enable them to act. This tension can stem from three different problems. The
first problem is when there is a lack of organizational resources required to pursue what
decision-makers believe is in a state’s best interest. This can occur as a result of existing national
security organizations being inadequate or from not having the right organizations in the first

1
Aristide Zolberg uses the term to refer specifically to the tension that can exist between the executive
and legislative branch. Here I develop his concept and use it more expansively to refer to other sources of
tension as well. Aristide R. Zolberg, “International Engagement and American Democracy: A
Comparative Perspective,” in Shaped By War and Trade: International Influences on American Political
Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 30.
97
place. The second problem is when existing national security organizations are not arranged
properly in a way that enables decision-makers to mobilize state resources. This can stem from
decentralization and/or dysfunction in the national security apparatus whereby decision-makers
are not able to use the resources they have at their disposal effectively. Finally, democracies in
particular can suffer from a third problem when there is institutional tension between legitimacy
and efficiency in the formulation and execution of policy. As mentioned earlier, this tension is
often manifest in legislative-executive relations. It is most pronounced when the legislative
branch has significant authority over decisions of war and peace and can exercise a veto over
national security decision makers in the executive branch. This can help legitimate any policies
that are pursued, but also can cause the decision-making process to be inefficient.
Institutional stress acts as what Hedström and Swedberg call an action-formation
mechanism. Action-formation mechanisms link the micro to the micro and show how actors’
beliefs and preferences, and the action opportunities that exist in a given situation, combine to
generate a specific action response. In this case, when institutional stress is severe it acts to
prompt decision-makers to alter the underlying structural sources of inefficient action. More
specifically, it generates state-building efforts by national security decision-makers to create
greater institutional capacity, to streamline organizational structures, and to rebalance decision-
making processes and procedures toward more efficient offices of authority. As the next section
highlights, these types of activities are likely to be particularly pronounced when international
security competition is intense.
When these types of state-building activities occur, we should expect state structure and
decision-making procedures to “crystalize” in an altered form. In particular, we should expect
these activities to combine and create greater executive—hence state—autonomy for projecting
98
military power. This increased autonomy is the final mechanism that links institutional
adaptation at the micro level to behavioral adaptation at the macro level. Executive autonomy
thus acts as what Hedström and Swedberg call a transformational mechanism. Transformational
mechanisms link the micro to the macro and show how the collective actions of actors combine
and are transformed into collective outcomes. In this case, the collective efforts of national
security policymakers across the state apparatus and government combine to enable states to
respond more effectively to the systemic pressure caused by enhanced international security
competition.
2

Variation in State-Building Activity
The type and amount of state-building activity, moreover, should vary according to the
intensity of international security competition faced by a state. As explained above, intensity
varies based on factors like the presence or threat of war and other more diffuse forms of
geopolitical struggle. As Figure 2.3 below shows, we should expect different outcomes based on
different levels of intensity.
When international security competition is particularly severe, we should expect
institutional change to be “episodic.” As Andrew Cortell and Susan Peterson explain,
institutional change that is epidodic tends to span across multiple institutional arenas and be of a
degree that “radically restructures” domestic institutions. Thus, the result of episodic change will

2
This explanation is consistent with Hintze’s point that policymakers may or may not be aware of the
larger and longer-term causes and consequences of their efforts to respond to more immediate security
needs. As he explains, “It is not necessary that those who are active in creating a constitution—whether
they are individuals, or groups, or peoples—are conscious of the connection between the internal structure
and the external formation of the state, and that this connection can be documented. Those involved in
action usually are aware only of immediate needs but not of more remote basic facts which have produced
these needs.” Hintze, “The Formation of States and Constitutional Development: A Study in History and
Politics,” 163.
99
Figure 2.3: Theoretical Expectations

Intensity(of(
International(
Security(
Competition(
Type(of(Institutional(
Change(Expected(
State:Building((
Activities(Expected(
Effect(on(State((
Autonomy(Expected(
!
!
!
High/Severe!
!
!
!
!
!
Episodic!
!
!
!
!
! Massive!expansion!of!existing!national!security!
institutions!
! Creation!of!new!national!security!institutions!
! Major!efforts!to!redesign!and!restructure!national!
security!organizations!
! Rebalancing!of!war!powers!toward!executive!
branch!of!government,!if!not!already!the!case!
!
Greater!state!capacity!and!
rebalancing!of!war!powers!
toward!executive!leads!to!
expanded!state!autonomy!!
!
!
!
Moderate!
!
!
!
!
!
!
Incremental!
!
! Gradual!efforts!to!grow!existing!national!security!
institutions!
! Minor!efforts!to!reform!and!streamline!national!
security!organizations!
! Consolidation!of!war!powers!in!the!executive!
branch!of!government!!
Environment!favorable!to!
maintaining!or!slightly!
expanding!state!autonomy!
!
!
!
Low!
!
!
!
!
!
!
Indeterminate!
! Few!if!any!efforts!to!make!major!overhauls!to!
national!security!organizations!
! Opportunity!to!rebalance!war!powers!away!from!
executive!to!legislature!
Possibility!to!reduce!state!
autonomy!by!rebalancing!
away!from!executive!branch!to!
legislature,!but!institutional!
stasis!likely!
! 100
be to “[reinvent] institutional patterns so as to break with prevailing customs and procedures.
58
”
In the national security arena, when international security competition is severe, we should
expect episodic change as decision-makers attempt to massively expand existing national
security institutions, create new ones, rearrange and streamline the organizational structure of the
national security apparatus, and further centralize authority over decisions of war and peace in
the executive branch of government. The result of these state-building activities will lead
considerably greater state autonomy for executive decision makers.
When international security competition is moderate, on the other hand, we should expect
institutional change to be more “incremental.” Again, as Cortell and Peterson explain,
institutional change that is incremental is limited to affecting only particular institutional sites
and should lead to efforts to reform or streamline institutions rather than restructure them.
Importantly, the tendency with incremental change is to “build on existing institutional
patterns.
59
” In the national security arena, when international security competition is moderate,
we should expect incremental change as decision-makers make gradual efforts to reform or
streamline existing national security organizations. Massive growth in these organizations or the
creation of new ones altogether is unlikely, if not impossible. Finally, we should expect decision-
makers to attempt to consolidate war powers in the executive, but not make sizable new grants of
those powers. The result of state building activities in a moderately intense security environment
will at a minimum maintain and possibly expand state autonomy.
Lastly, when international security competition is low, we should expect the effect of
systemic pressure on existing institutions to be indeterminate. In this environment, therefore,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
58
Andrew P. Cortell and Susan Peterson, “Agents, Structures, and Domestic Institutional Change,” in
Altered States: International Relations, Domestic Politics, and Institutional Change, ed. Andrew P.
Cortell and Susan Peterson (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2002), 8.
59
Ibid., 8–9.
! 101
institutional development is likely to be static. Where change occurs, the explanation is most
likely to lie in domestic politics rather than international politics. In the national security arena,
when international security competition is low, we should expect state-building activities
centered on carving out state autonomy to be absent. In fact, this is the security environment in
which we might expect efforts to shift war-making powers from the executive and to the
legislative branch of government (though institutional theories of path dependence explain why
might this not occur without some kind of exogenous shock).

Conclusion
In the chapters that follow, I use the framework developed above to examine the process
of domestic institutional change in the United States. Before turning to that task, however, a few
caveats about the theory are required. First, there is no expectation that institutional adaptation
will necessarily be efficient. It is important to highlight in this regard that institutions are not
auto correcting. In other words, there is nothing necessarily determinative from a structural
perspective in this argument about how effectively national security institutions will be
restructured. Severe international security competition often requires domestic institutional
change in democracies. But institutional change requires agents of change. In the explanations
here, the agents are decision-makers that sit atop the foreign-policy executive of the state. It is
expected that these decision-makers will be attentive to their international environment and will
attempt to respond to changes in international security competition in the way described. For a
variety of reasons, however, they may not be able to do so effectively. On the one hand, the state
building activities foreseen in the theory require a tremendous amount of institutional capacity,
which democratic decision-makers may or may not have. On the other hand, restructuring old
! 102
institutions is extremely challenging. As Amy Zegart shows in her very good study of the
development the American national security state, the institutional pathologies of the country’s
military branches caused the national security system that emerged to develop in often inefficient
and dysfunctional ways.
60
The fact that these institutions were adapted inefficiently, however,
does not undermine the great changes that were initiated and enacted.
Second, there is no underlying assumption that institutional adaptation will necessarily
be positive for a democratic country. For example, many scholars lament the tremendous
changes that occurred with the development of the American national security state. They
acknowledge that its construction may have enabled decision-makers to respond more decisively
and effectively to the challenges it faced during the Cold War in the international arena. But
these successes came at the expense of long established political arrangements that were rooted
in the country’s Constitution.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
60
Amy Zegart, Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC (Palo Alto: Stanford
University Press, 2000).
103
Chapter Three

Executive War-Making Autonomy in Historical Perspective, 1787-
1890

In order to appreciate fully the problem and nature of state-building in the United States
in the twentieth century, it is first important to put the problem of executive war-making
autonomy into historical perspective. In this chapter, I begin that task by looking at America’s
Founding era as a period of institutional formation. Foremost, I focus on the ideas that militated
against the development of extensive executive war-making powers in the country’s early
history, how they were institutionalized in America’s state structure and decision-making
procedures, and the subsequent impact this had on later state-building efforts.
The purpose of the chapter, therefore, is two-fold: First, it explains the formation of
America’s early national security ideas and institutions, focusing on the factors that gave rise to
them. Specifically, it elaborates three ideas that came to constrain the country’s military
establishment and related political institutions: 1) apprehension of a standing army, 2) a
preference for fragmented military authority, and 3) distrust of executive war powers. The
chapter shows how these ideas were institutionalized in the Constitution and America’s state
structure and decision-making procedures. Second, the chapter looks at the subsequent impact of
104
these constraints on American foreign policy behavior after the Founding Period.
1
Though there
were some important changes, I show that overall the institutional arrangement designed to limit
war and the use of the force at the Founding remained relatively stable, certainly through 1890,
and even up until World War II. In the following two chapters I then turn to the macro-micro-
macro model to consider more specifically why these institutions remained stable even as the
United States rose to world power beginning in 1890.

Executive War-Making Powers at the Founding
Though today we tend to think of the United States Constitution as a compact for limited
government, it was actually designed at the time to expand the powers of the federal government
and create the core of a traditional state. As Max Edling shows, the Constitution represented “a
revolution in favor of government.”
2
Under the Articles of Confederation (1781-1789), Congress
had acted as both legislature and executive, and was little more than an assembly of
representatives from the thirteen states. There was in effect no federal government and certainly
no state. This proved particularly problematic for the country’s efforts to conduct foreign policy
and secure its newfound independence, and led many leading Americans to rethink the extremely
limited form of government they had established. As Walter LaFeber explains, “nothing
contributed more directly to the calling of the 1787 Constitutional Convention than did the

1
The terms “Founding,” “Founding Period,” or “Founders” in the chapter refer to the period—and
individuals associated with it—from the convening of the First Continental Congress in 1774 to the
Ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791. The term “Framers” refers to individuals who participated in the
writing and ratification of the Constitution, and related debates, from 1787-1789.
2
Max M. Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making
of the American State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
105
spreading belief that under the Articles of Confederation Congress could not effectively and
safely conduct foreign policy.”
3

Thus during the debates over the writing and ratification of the Constitution there was
widespread agreement that the central government needed more power to conduct the nation’s
affairs. But at the same time there also existed what Richard Beeman, describing the mindset of
one of the delegates, portrays as “a nearly pathological fear of the misuse of power.”
4
As will
become clear below, the fear of the misuse of power was the same as the fear of executive
power. Balancing between the need to build a state with a more authoritative executive at its
helm and at the same time constrain it, therefore, was central to the debates. This balancing act
was particularly relevant to the two central questions that animated discussions about national
security: How can force be directed under republican government? And, what, if any, type of
permanent military establishment is consistent with republican government? The answers the
Framers of the Constitution provided to these questions were important. They established what
was at the time a new architecture for national security, which in turn exerted tremendous
influence on the development and trajectory America’s military establishment and its conduct for
the following century and a half.
War Powers in a Republic
At the time of America’s founding, political theorists, legal scholars, and the leading
states in the international system all considered the powers to make war, with the exception of

3
Or as Michael Ramsey explains, the Constitutional Convention was “called in large part to give the
national government more textual foreign affairs powers.” Walter LaFeber, “The Constitution and United
States Foreign Policy: An Interpretation,” The Journal of American History 74, no. 3 (1987): 697;
Michael D. Ramsey, The Constitution’s Text in Foreign Affairs (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2007), 35–46, quote on 40.
4
Richard Beeman, Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (New York: Random
House, 2009), 113.
106
the funding of the armed forces, an executive function. Importantly, this was a view articulated
by three of the most important authorities for the Framers of the Constitution—John Locke,
Montesquieu, and William Blackstone.
5
Locke was the first to articulate this view, arguing that
in addition to executive power there was also what he called “federative power” over “war and
peace, leagues and alliances, and all the transactions, with all persons and communities without
the common-wealth.”
6
The division for Locke was what we think of today as the division
between domestic and foreign policy.
7

Locke argued that though in practice the federative power was usually united with
executive power, it was crucial to distinguish between the two. This was because whereas
“antecedent, standing, and positive Laws” could guide domestic policy, relations with other
states were subject to the laws of “the state of nature” alone.
8
Importantly, because the federative
power required discretion, flexibility, and speed, it could not be constrained by law. Self-
preservation, therefore, required that such power be located—without constraint—in the
executive. Montesquieu and Blackstone wrote in a similar vein, but dropped Locke’s conception
of a separate federative power. Montesquieu argued instead that there were two types of
executive power—one “over the things depending on the right of nations” and the other “over
the things depending on civil right.” Blackstone meanwhile maintained that all “foreign

5
On the influence of these and other Enlightenment thinkers on the Founders see Bernard Bailyn, The
Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967); Forrest
McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (Lawrence, KS:
University Press of Kansas, 1985); Ramsey, The Constitution’s Text in Foreign Affairs, 63–64.
6
John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C.B. Macpherson (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing,
1980), 76.
7
Specifically, the executive power encompasses “the execution of the municipal laws of the society
within itself, upon all that are parts of it,” whereas federative power encompasses “the management of the
security and interest of the public without, with all those that it may receive benefit or damage from.”
Ibid., 77.
8
Ibid.
107
concerns” were inherently part of the executive power of government, including “the [s]ole
prerogative of making war and peace” and “the power of issuing letters of marque and reprisal.”
9

Thus the established view when the Constitution’s Framers met in Philadelphia in 1787
was that the powers of war and peace were exclusively executive powers. It is important to be
clear that the Framers turned this view on its head. As Neal Devins and Louis Fisher explain,
they instead “deliberately transferred the power to initiate war from the executive to the
legislature.”
10
Under the Articles of Confederation (which lacked an executive separate from the
Continental Congress altogether) this transfer had been complete. It remained a core element of
government, however, even once a separate executive was created under the new Constitution
signed in 1789. Some scholars today contest the nature of this “transfer” and argue the
Constitution was more or less in line with the British model in assigning war powers to the
executive.
11
But this argument lacks historical grounding and is a minority view. As Supreme
Court Justice Robert Jackson later explained: “The example of such unlimited executive power
that must have most impressed the forefathers was the prerogative exercised by King George III.
The description of its evils in the Declaration of Independence leads me to doubt that they were
creating their new Executive in his image. Continental European examples were no more
appealing.”
12
Instead, as Louis Fisher argues “The American structure of government owes its

9
Charles de Secondat baron de Montesquieu, Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws, ed. Anne M. Cohler,
Basia C. Miller, and Harold S. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 156; William
Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Fourteenth Edition, vol. I (London: A. Strahan,
1803), 252, 257, 258.
10
Neal Devins and Louis Fisher, The Democratic Constitution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004),
103. See also Louis Fisher, Presidential War Power, Third Edition, Revised (Lawrence, KS: University
Press of Kansas, 2013), 3–6.
11
John Yoo, The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2008).
12
Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952)
108
existence to the experiences of the framers, not the theory of Montesquieu or precedents
borrowed from England.
13
”
Based on their experiences with executive tyranny, the Framers vested a large sum of the
war-making powers in the legislative branch of government. Article I, Section 8 of the
Constitution provides the legislative branch with the sole authority to initiate the use of force. It
says specifically:
The Congress shall have Power…To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal,
and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water…To define and punish Piracies
and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations.
14

Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution vests the executive, on the other hand, with control of the
armed forces of the United States once hostilities have been initiated.
The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States,
and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United
States.
To be clear, the Commander in Chief clause has come to be understood quite differently today
than it was then.
15
But as Alexander Hamilton explained, it was meant at the time to “amount to
nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces, as first
general and admiral of the Confederacy.” He contrasted this arrangement with the British king’s
power, which “extends to the declaring of war and the raising and regulating of fleets and armies,

13
Louis Fisher, Constitutional Conflicts Between Congress and the President, Fifth Edition, Revised
(Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 6–7.
14
Other war powers that pertain to appropriations, organizations, and the militias are discussed below.
15
Presidents today routinely point to their role as Commander in Chief as an inherent and often
preclusive source of war-making authority. But there is no evidence that anyone in the founding era
viewed that responsibility as a source of power to make decisions about when and why to use force
outside of repelling attacks. Rather, it was a title conferring on the President the primary role in directing
a war once Congress declared it. Even then, Congress could still legislate wartime policy if it so desired.
As I show later, the more expansive view of the Commander in Chief clause did not exist until the
twentieth century. See David J. Barron and Martin S. Lederman, “The Commander in Chief at the Lowest
Ebb: Framing the Problem, Doctrine, and Original Understanding,” Harvard Law Review 121, no. 3
(2008): 772–799.
109
all which, by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the legislature.”
16

Additionally, though not explicitly located in the text, legal scholars agree that as Commander in
Chief, the Framers of the Constitution likewise expected “the Executive to repel sudden attacks”
against the country, which were considered in effect a declaration of war.
17

Thus the Constitution formally split the war powers between the legislature and the
executive. The former was given the responsibility to build and maintain the county’s armed
forces and make decisions about initiating war. The latter was given the responsibility “to repel
sudden attacks” and to make war once it was declared.
This distribution of war powers was clear to both the Constitution’s Framers and later
authorities as well. James Madison stated during the debates, for example, “executive powers ex
vi termini, do not include the Rights of war & peace.” Those powers instead were to be
“confined and defined” by the Constitution.
18
This suggests there were no inherent or residual
executive powers; only enumerated powers.
19
Thomas Jefferson likewise explained, “We have
already given…one effectual check to the dog of war by transferring the power of letting him
loose, from the executive to the legislative body, from those who are to spend to those who are to

16
Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist Number 69,” in The Federalist, ed. George W. Carey and James
McClellen (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), 357.
17
This quote comes from the official records of the Constitutional Convention. James Madison and
Elbridge Gerry, “Records of the Federal Convention,” August 17, 1787 in Phillip B. Kurland and Ralph
Lerner, eds., The Founder’s Constitution, vol. 3 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), Article I,
Section 8, Clause 11, Document 4; See also Francis D. Wormuth and Edwin B. Firmage, To Chain the
Dog of War: The War Power of Congress in History and Law (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 1989), 17–31; John Hart Ely, War and Responsibility: Constitutional Lessons of Vietnam and Its
Aftermath (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 6–7; Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash, “Unleashing
the Dogs of War: What the Constitution Means by ‘Declare War,’” Cornell Law Review 93, no. 1 (2007):
45–121; Fisher, Presidential War Power, 8–10.
18
James Madison, “Records of the Federal Convention,” June 1, 1787 in Kurland and Lerner, The
Founder’s Constitution, 1987, 3:Article II, Section 1, Clause 1, Document 4.
19
On this point see Curtis A. Bradley and Martin S. Flaherty, “Executive Power Essentialism and Foreign
Affairs,” Michigan Law Review 102, no. 4 (2004): 545–688; Ramsey, The Constitution’s Text in Foreign
Affairs.
110
pay.”
20
Later in the Pacificus-Helvidius debate, Madison (writing as Helvidius) explained that
“In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause that confides the
question of war and peace to the legislature, and not the executive department.”
21
Even
Alexander Hamilton, the most pro-executive of the framers, affirmed this point even while
arguing for a more forceful response against Tripoli in 1801. He stated: “it is the peculiar and
exclusive province of Congress, when the nation is at peace, to change that state into a state of
war; whether from calculations of policy or from provocations or injuries received: in other
words, it belongs to Congress only, to go to War.”
22

The legislative power over initiating war, moreover, was of a general kind and thought to
include both general wars and limited military actions.
23
This fact was made explicit by the
inclusion of the power to grant letters of marque and reprisal, which as Michael Ramsey explains
was essentially an “eighteenth-century version of limited conflict.
24
” That Congress’s war
powers were of a general kind was upheld by series of early Supreme Court rulings. In Bas v.

20
“Letter to James Madison, September 6, 1789,” in Thomas Jefferson, The Works of Thomas Jefferson,
vol. VI: Correspondence 1789–1792 (New York: Cosimo, 2009), 11.
21
James Madison, “Helvidius Number IV, September 14, 1793,” in The Pacificus-Helvidius Debates of
1793-94: Toward the Completion of the American Founding, ed. Morton J. Frisch (Indianapolis: Liberty
Fund, 2007), 87.
22
Alexander Hamilton, “The Examination, no. 1,” December 17, 1801 in Kurland and Lerner, The
Founder’s Constitution, 1987, 3:Article I, Section 8, Clause 11, Document 11.
23
On this point see Wormuth and Firmage, To Chain the Dog of War: The War Power of Congress in
History and Law, 17–53; Ely, War and Responsibility: Constitutional Lessons of Vietnam and Its
Aftermath, 66–67; Jules Lobel, “Little Wars and the Constitution,” University of Miami Law Review 50,
no. 1 (1995): 61–80; Fisher, Presidential War Power, 6–8. For an alternative view see Yoo, The Powers
of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11, 22, 34, 100, 104.
24
As Ramsey explains “war had a broad meaning, encompassing most sovereign uses of force against
another sovereign or quasi-sovereign entity.” Ramsey, The Constitution’s Text in Foreign Affairs, 221,
246; Jules Lobel likewise argues the marque and reprisal clause was “probably intended to cover all
reprisals or uses of force against other nations short of war.” Lobel, “Little Wars and the Constitution,”
70; For the minority view which sees the Constitutional view of war in much narrower terms as only
referring to “total, absolute war” see Yoo, The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign
Affairs after 9/11, 98.
111
Tingy in 1800, for example, Justice Samuel Chase wrote that “Congress is empowered to declare
a general war, or congress may wage a limited war; limited in place, in objects, and in time.”
25

One year later, Chief Justice John Marshall argued similarly in Talbot v. Seeman that “The whole
power of war being, by the constitution of the United States vested in congress, the acts of that
body can alone be resorted to as our guides in this inquiry… Congress may authorize general
hostilities…or partial war.”
26

The Military Establishment in a Republic
The question about what type of peacetime military establishment the United States
would maintain was also a central question in the founding period. Following the Revolutionary
War, several strong-government proponents advocated establishing small but permanent military
forces under Congress. In 1783, a committee was assembled to study the issue. Most prominent
among these proponents was George Washington who suggested in his Sentiments on a Peace
Establishment (1783), that Congress should take several measures to establish a defense
infrastructure: 1) develop and maintain a small standing army (in addition to nationalizing the
state militias), as well as arsenals and military academies, 2) promote a nascent arms
manufacturing industry, and 3) consider building coastal fortifications and a navy in the future.
27

Still strongly averse to any efforts to centralize military—or for that matter, any—power,
however, Congress rejected the committee’s plans and instead called up state militiamen to serve
one and later three-year enlistments after the Continental Army was disbanded in 1783.
28

25
Bas v. Tingy, 4 U.S. 37 (1800).
26
Talbot v. Seeman, 5 U.S. 1 (1801).
27
George Washington, “Sentiments on a Peace Establishment,” May 2, 1783 in Kurland and Lerner, The
Founder’s Constitution, 1987, 3:Article I, Section 8, Clause 12, Document 6.
28
Russell F. Weigley, History of the United States Army (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 79–84; Allan R.
Millett, Peter Maslowski, and William B. Feis, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the
United States from 1607 to 2012, 3rd ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012), 79–81.
112
By the time of the Constitutional Convention, however, the pendulum had begun to
swing in the direction of greater military preparedness. Nonetheless, delegates were divided
about the creation of a national military establishment. A strong popular faction remained in the
country, which believed that only state militias were consistent with republican government.
29

Even among those who favored some type of military establishment, there was still strong
skepticism about the prospect of a standing army. In fact, according to Richard Kohn the term
“standing army” became “a catch-phrase that automatically invoked a series of preconfigured
images and definitions” associated with tyranny.
30
Extensive standing armies were considered
antithetical to liberty and as Edmund Randolph told the Virginia Ratification Convention “there
was not a member in the federal Convention, who did not feel indignation at such an
institution.”
31
Even Hamilton, a strong proponent of a military establishment, felt compelled to
warn “STANDING ARMIES, and the correspondent appendages of military establishment” are
“institutions, which have a tendency to destroy [nations’] civil and political rights.”
32

Nonetheless, a majority of delegates to the Convention understood that though a military
establishment might be “dangerous,” it was also a “necessary provision,” in the words of James
Madison.
33
The militias were neither nationalized nor standardized, and could not be depended
on alone to secure the country. A small standing army, which could be scaled up with the militias

29
See in particular various opponents collectively known as anti-federalists who wrote pamphlets and
gave speeches opposing the writings of Hamilton, Madison, and Jay. Herbert J. Storing, ed., The
Complete Anti-Federalist (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981).
30
Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in
America, 1783-1802 (New York: The Free Press, 1975), 2–6, quote on 6.
31
Edmund Randolph, “Debate in Virginia Ratifying Convention,” June 14, 1788 in Kurland and Lerner,
The Founder’s Constitution, 1987, 3:Article I, Section 8, Clause 12, Document 27.
32
Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist Number 8,” in The Federalist, ed. George W. Carey and James
McClellen (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), 33.
33
James Madison, “Federalist Number 41,” in The Federalist, ed. George W. Carey and James McClellen
(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), 209.
113
in the event of war was required at a minimum. Some federalists held grander ideas, believing
“that no nation-state could exist without a powerful military.”
34
Holding the most ambitious
state-building aims among the Founders, Federalists like Hamilton hoped eventually to build “a
strong central bureaucratic government directing the economy and reaching to all parts of a
united and integrated nation and possessing a powerful army and navy that commanded the
respect of the whole world.”
35

The Constitutional arrangement that emerged was based on a compromise between
opponents and proponents of a military establishment. The power to raise, organize, and train
military forces was vested in the legislature. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution says
specifically:
The Congress shall have Power…To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of
Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years…To provide and maintain a
Navy…To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces.
Placing Congress in control of military appropriations was consistent with the relevant clauses in
Article I, Sections 8 and 9, which stipulated that government funds could only be appropriated
and spent by acts of law. This arrangement was particularly important in this instance because it
enabled Congress to maintain lateral links with the military establishment at all times, thereby
decentralizing and fragmenting authority over the armed forces even during wartime.
This arrangement, however, also served an additional purpose in this specific instance by
separating the capacities to raise funds for war from the ability to wage it. The Framers believed
that the two together would serve as an engine of despotism. Madison explained the logic of this
separation as follows:

34
Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009), 95–115, quote on 111.
35
Ibid., 104.
114
Those who are to conduct a war cannot in the nature of things, be proper or safe judges,
whether a war ought to be commenced, continued, or concluded. They are barred from
the latter functions by a great principle in free government, analogous to that which
separates the sword from the purse, or the power of executing from the power of enacting
laws.
36

Thus when the War Department (and later the Navy Department) was established, it was created
as an executive department, but one whose authority was weakened by the fact that it was so
heavily dependent on Congress. Additionally, by limiting appropriations to two years, the
Constitution forced Congress frequently to deliberate and regulate the country’s peacetime
military requirements. Importantly, this ensured that an extensive military establishment could
not be maintained without Congress’s explicit and recurring assent.
The Framers, however, not only divided control over the military establishment
horizontally between the executive and legislative branches of the federal government, but also
vertically between the federal government and the states by retaining the state militias and
creating a structure of dual authority to govern them. In the Constitution, Congress was given the
power:
To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress
Insurrections and repel Invasions
37
…To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining,
the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the
United States…
But at the same time it:
…reserve[ed] to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the
Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress.

36
Madison, “Helvidius Number IV, September 14, 1793,” 62.
37
The Calling Forth Act of 1792 effectively amended this by authorizing the President to call up the
militia “whenever the United States shall be invaded, or be in imminent danger of invasion from any
foreign nation or Indian tribe” or “whenever the laws of the United States shall be opposed or the
execution thereof obstructed, in any state, by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary
course of judicial proceedings, or by the powers vested in the marshals by this act.” Millett, Maslowski,
and Feis, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States from 1607 to 2012, 83.
115
Dividing the responsibility to raise, regulate, and employ the militias in this way ensured that a
substantial component of the United States’ military power would remain at least under partial
control of the states. This led to the development of “two armies”—one professional and national
and the other citizen-based and located at the state level—which helped to further stymie
development of the country’s armed forces and fragmented authority over them.
38

Why Executive War-Making Powers Were Constrained
The effect of this arrangement was to divide powers over the use of force and limit the
development of an extensive set of peacetime national security institutions. Importantly, the
Framers broke with traditional arrangements and deliberately designed the country’s domestic
institutions to explicitly give the legislative branch the upper hand in making decisions about
initiating why, when, and how the country would use force, except in cases where the United
States was attacked.
39
This choice was reinforced by that fact that as long as the country

38
Weigley, History of the United States Army, xi.
39
This is the dominant view among legal scholars today. John Hart Ely makes the point as follows: “One
of the recurrent discoveries of academic writing about constitutional law—an all but certain ticket to
tenure—is that from the standpoint of twentieth-century observers, the ‘original understanding’ of the
document’s framers and ratifiers can be obscure to the point of inscrutability. Often this is true. In this
case, however, it isn’t. The power to declare war was constitutionally vested in Congress.”Ely, War and
Responsibility: Constitutional Lessons of Vietnam and Its Aftermath; Charles A. Lofgren, “War-Making
Under the Constitution: The Original Understanding,” Yale Law Journal 81, no. 4 (1972): 672–702;
David Gray Adler, “The Constitution and Presidential Warmaking: The Enduring Debate,” Political
Science Quarterly 103, no. 1 (1988): 1–36; Wormuth and Firmage, To Chain the Dog of War: The War
Power of Congress in History and Law; Harold H. Koh, The National Security Constitution: Sharing
Power after the Iran-contra Affair (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Michael J. Glennon,
Constitutional Diplomacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Louis Henkin, Foreign Affairs
and the US Constitution, Second Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Gordon Silverstein,
Imbalance of Power: Constitutional Interpretation and the Making of American Foreign Policy (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997); William Michael Treanor, “Fame, the Founding, and the Power to
Declare War,” Cornell Law Review 82, no. 4 (1997): 695–772; Prakash, “Unleashing the Dogs of War:
What the Constitution Means by ‘Declare War’”; Ramsey, The Constitution’s Text in Foreign Affairs;
Fisher, Presidential War Power. Again, for an alternative pro-President perspective that remains a
minority view see Yoo, The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11.
116
maintained a small military establishment, Presidents had little capacity to initiate large-scale
uses of force autonomously even if they could somehow bypass the set of procedures to do so
that ran through Congress. All substantial acts of war essentially had to be funded ex ante.
Therefore, Congress not only had to declare/authorize the use of force but also fund it first. This
arrangement did not give the legislature a monopoly on war-making powers. The President could
in practice undertake some acts to try to force the hand of Congress, or conversely could always
refuse to execute congressionally authorized and funded wars.
40
But it did serve to constrain
tremendously the war powers of the executive by making the legislature a co-equal partner
especially in initiating the use of force.
There were two reasons for constraining the executive in this way that are crucial for
understanding the aims of the Founding generation, the subsequent development of the country's
national security institutions and practices, and why those institutions and practices were so
dramatically transformed in the middle of the twentieth century to provide the executive with
greater war-making autonomy. The first was entirely domestic and helps explains why such a
powerful set of constraints on executive war-making were developed in the United States in the
first place. The second was geopolitical and helps to explain why these domestic constraints
were so dominant at the Founding and in subsequent years, but then became more relaxed later.

40
Though the latter scenario seems far-fetched, Louis Fischer describes an incident in 1896 when this
almost occurred. He explains that when Spain rejected a congressional offer to recognize an independent
Cuba in that year, “Some members of Congress itched for war. An associate of President Cleveland was
once present when a delegation from Congress arrived at the White House to announce: ‘We have about
decided to declare war against Spain over the Cuban question. Conditions are intolerable.’ Cleveland
responded bluntly: ‘There will be no war with Spain over Cuba while I am President.’ A member of
Congress protested that the Constitution gave Congress the right to declare war, but Cleveland countered
by saying that the Constitution also made him Commander in Chief and ‘I will not mobilize the army.’
Cleveland said that the United States could buy Cuba from Spain for $100 million, whereas a war ‘will
cost vastly more than that and will entail another long list of pensioners. It would be an outrage to declare
war.’” Fisher, Presidential War Power, 52.
117
Domestic Politics
To understand the domestic reasoning behind the constraints on executive war-making, it
is important to stress that, due to America’s colonial past under the British monarchy, many in
the Founding Period were stricken by what Beeman characterizes as a “pervasive fear of
excessive executive power.”
41
The separation of powers and checks and balances of the
Constitution, both within the federal government and between the federal government and the
states, were designed in large part to guard against an accumulation of power in this office.
Particularly relevant here is the fact that war was thought to correlate closely with executive
power and therefore the problem of how to mitigate the risk of war warranted considerable
attention. On the one hand, war was thought to be “the true nurse of executive aggrandizement,”
according to Madison. He explained:
In war a physical force is to be created, and it is the executive will which is to direct it. In
war the public treasures are to be unlocked, and it is the executive hand which is to
dispense them. In war the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is
the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that
laurels are to be gathered, and it is the executive brow they are to encircle.
42

Madison explained that it was not just “actual war,” but “Constant apprehension of War” which
threatened to give “great discretionary powers…to the executive.”
43

The possibility of executive aggrandizement through war or the constant threat of war
was particularly problematic for the institutional arrangement envisioned by the Constitution. As
Hamilton warned, war has a tendency to “increase the executive at the expense of the legislative
authority.”
44
Thus it would serve to distort the relationship between the branches of government.

41
Beeman, Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution, 233.
42
Madison, “Helvidius Number IV, September 14, 1793,” 87.
43
James Madison, “Records of the Federal Convention,” May 30, 1787 in Kurland and Lerner, The
Founder’s Constitution, 1987, 3:Article I, Section 2, Clause 3, Document 2.
44
Hamilton, “Federalist Number 8,” 34.
118
Minimizing war, therefore, was not just an objective in itself but was also crucial for preventing
the balance among the country’s domestic institutions from being jeopardized.
45
As C. Perry
Patterson would explain when this arrangement was being rethought following World War II,
“almost the sole object” of America’s historical interest in non-involvement overseas was “to
escape not only a temporary but a permanent presidential dictatorship.”
46
Thus while those like
Locke thought the domestic and foreign dimensions of the executive had to be separated, the
Founders did not believe such a separation was possible in practice.
The Founders, however, also believed that the relationship between war and executive
power flowed the other direction as well; that war not only increased executive power but also
that executives were more prone to war. Madison explained that, for all the reasons he cites in
the paragraph above, “it has grown into an axiom that the executive is the department of power
most distinguished by its propensity to war.”
47
The belief was that executives have instrumental
domestic reasons for inciting foreign wars similar to the logic behind diversionary theories of
war.
48
As Madison explained:
A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions
to liberty. The means of defence [against] foreign danger, have been always the
instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a
war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up
under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people. It is perhaps questionable,
whether the best concerted system of absolute power in Europe [could] maintain itself, in

45
Richard H. Ullman, “The ‘Foreign World’ and Ourselves: Washington, Wilson, and the Democrat’s
Dilemma,” Foreign Policy, no. 21 (1975): 101–102; Peter Gourevitch, “The Second Image Reversed: The
International Sources of Domestic Politics,” International Organization 32, no. 4 (1978): 899.
46
C. Perry Patterson, Presidential Government in the United States: The Unwritten Constitution (Chapel
Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1947), 79.
47
Madison, “Helvidius Number IV, September 14, 1793,” 87.
48
On diversionary war see Jack S. Levy and William R. Thompson, Causes of War (West Sussex, UK:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 99–104.
119
a situation, where no alarms of external danger [could] tame the people to the domestic
yoke.
49

It was for this reason that, as George Mason explained, the executive “was not safely to be
trusted with [the power of war].”
50

This fear of executive power explains why the Framers of the Constitution split the war
making powers between the executive and legislative branches. Important to note is the fact that
the House was vested with these powers as well as the Senate. The Framers could easily have
decided to exclude the House from decisions about war as they did with treaty ratification and
the appointment of ambassadors. In fact, this was suggested by Charles Pinckney at the
Convention. But as Oliver Elseworth argued: “It [should] be more easy to get out of war, than
into it.”
51
By essentially increasing the number of formal veto players, their purpose was to slow
down the decision-making process and ultimately reduce the occasions when the country might
become involved in war.
During debate at the Federal Convention George Mason rationalized the choice to require
action on the part of the executive, the Senate and the House by saying he was for “clogging

49
James Madison, “Records of the Federal Convention,” June 29, 1787 in Kurland and Lerner, 1987,
Article I, Section 2, Clause 3, Document 2. Or see John Jay in Federalist 4: “It is too true…that absolute
monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for purposes and objects
merely personal, such as, a thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private
compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families, or partisans. These, and a variety of motives,
which affect only the mind of the sovereign, often lead him to engage in wars not sanctioned by justice, or
the voice and interests of his people.” John Jay, “Federalist Number 4,” ed. George W. Carey and James
McClellen (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), 13.
50
George Mason, “Records of the Federal Convention,” August 17, 1787 in Kurland and Lerner, The
Founder’s Constitution, 1987, 3:Article I, Section 8, Clause 11, Document 4.
51
See Charles Pinckney and Oliver Elseworth, “Records of the Federal Convention,” August 17, 1787 in
ibid.
120
rather than facilitating war.”
52
Or as James Wilson explained to the Pennsylvania Ratifying
Convention:
This system will not hurry us into war; it is calculated to guard against it. It will not be in
the power of a single man, or a single body of men, to involve us in such distress, for the
important power of declaring war is vested in the legislature at large; this declaration
must be made with the concurrence of the House of Representatives; from this
circumstance we may draw a certain conclusion, that nothing but our national interest can
draw us into a war.
53

To be clear, the point was not to prevent the use of force altogether. Rather, the point was to
force sustained deliberation about why, when, and how the country went to war. This could only
happen by making the executive and legislature co-equal partners and involving both the Senate
and the House in the decision-making process.
This institutional arrangement, however, not only served to constrain the executive. By
requiring decisions about war and military appropriations to go through the legislative process
the Framers also believed that the decisions of this process would better reflect the views of the
people and thus result in a more republican foreign policy. When Madison warned that the
executive is “most distinguished by its propensity to war,” he continued by noting that “it is the
practice of all states, in proportion as they are free, to disarm this propensity of its influence.”
Again, Madison’s quote is indicative of the concern that executives are often more prone to war.
But equally revealing is that he points to the widespread belief among the Framers that there is a
direct and negative correlation between executive influence over war and popular freedom. By
vesting the more popularly rooted legislature with the primary decisions about initiating war, the
Framers believed that public views would be better accounted for in such decisions and that such

52
George Mason, “Records of the Federal Convention,” August 17, 1787 in ibid., 3:Article 1, Section 8,
Clause 11, Document 4.
53
James Wilson, “Pennsylvania Ratifying Convention,” December 11, 1787 in Phillip B. Kurland and
Ralph Lerner, eds., The Founder’s Constitution, vol. 1 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987),
Chapter 7, Document 17.
121
a process would be more becoming of a free society. Furthermore, it was thought that involving
the more popular branch of government would increase the long-term support of those who
would ultimately pay for and fight in any war. As Harold Koh suggests, the Framers were well
aware of the gains in “speed, secrecy, and efficiency” that could be had from leaving the
legislature out of the decision-making process. But they reasoned that this would undermine “the
longer-term consensus that derives from reasoned inter-branch consultation and participatory
decision-making.”
54

Lack of Systemic Pressure
Geopolitics, on the other hand, was not so much a driving factor in the decision to
constrain executive war-making power, but was instead a permissive factor that allowed the
constraint to emerge and persist. It is a well-worn maxim that the United States for much of its
history was nearly immune from foreign threats by virtue of the two large oceans that separated
it from more powerful states. The fact that the Atlantic Ocean separated the new country from
the more powerful states of Europe was not lost on the Framers. In fact, the United States’
insular geopolitical position proved to them why an extensive military establishment was
unnecessary and unlikely to emerge. Moreover, so long as an extensive military establishment
did not emerge, the institutional balance struck between the branches in the Constitution would
ensure similarly that a powerful executive with war-making powers would not develop.
When arguing for the creation of a post-Revolutionary War military establishment to
replace the Continental Army, George Washington suggested that in addition to the state militias
only 2,631 officers and soldiers were required because “Fortunately for us our relative situation
requires but few [standing forces]. The same circumstances which so effectually retarded, and in

54
Koh, The National Security Constitution: Sharing Power after the Iran-Contra Affair, 211.
122
the end conspired to defeat the attempts of Britain to subdue us, will now powerfully tend to
render us secure. Our distance from the European States in a great degree frees us of
apprehension.”
55
During the debates at the Convention and others related to the proposed
Constitution in 1787-1788, the relative isolation of the United States was frequently cited as a
reason why opponents of a federal government had no reason to fear the emergence of standing
forces or a powerful war-making executive. Hamilton explained in Federalist 8, “Europe is at a
great distance from us. Her colonies in our vicinity will be likely to continue too much
disproportioned in strength to be able to give us any dangerous annoyance. Extensive military
establishments cannot, in this position, be necessary to our security.”
56

What is important to note here is that this view is based on a larger theory of state-
building for national security, which mirrored and foreshadowed Hintze’s argument by more
than a century. Hamilton explained the logic of the argument as follows:
There is a wide difference…between military establishments in a country which, by its
situation, is seldom exposed to invasions, and in one which is often subject to them, and
always apprehensive of them. The rulers of the former can have no good pretext, if they
are even so inclined, to keep on foot armies so numerous as must of necessity be
maintained in the latter… But in a country, where the perpetual menacings of danger
oblige the government to be always prepared to repel it, her armies must be numerous
enough for instant defence.
Similar to Hintze, he continued by drawing out the distinction between Great Britain, a relatively
isolated naval power, and the land powers of the continent:
The kingdom of Great Britain falls within the first description. An insular situation, and a
powerful marine, guarding it in a great measure against the possibility of foreign
invasion, supersede the necessity of a numerous army…If Britain had been situated on
the continent, and had been compelled, as she would have been, by that situation, to make
her military establishments at home co-extensive with those of the other great powers of

55
George Washington, “Sentiments on a Peace Establishment,” May 2, 1783 in Kurland and Lerner, The
Founder’s Constitution, 1987, 3:Article I, Section 8, Clause 12, Document 6.
56
Hamilton, “Federalist Number 8,” 36.
123
Europe, she, like them, would in all probability, at this day, be a victim to the absolute
power of a single man.
57

So long as the United States was geographically isolated from potentially powerful enemies and
the states remained united together, Hamilton and others including Madison contended that the
federal government, like the British Monarch, would never “by real or artificial dangers” be able
“to cheat the public into an extensive peacetime establishment.”
58

It is important to note, however, that contained in this theory was the seed of an argument
for why a national security apparatus of some type was needed, and why a more extensive one
might be needed in the future. This was because while the Founders did see the Atlantic Ocean
as a great defensive shield behind which a limited and constrained state could be constructed,
they were not blind to the possible threats posed by both internal disorder and foreign danger.
Again, this was partly why the Constitutional Convention was called in the first place and why
the national government was designed to have greater foreign affairs powers than Congress had
under the Articles.
59
These concerns had first been raised by Shay’s Rebellion (1786-1787) and
were later justified by episodes like the Whiskey Rebellion (1794), the country’s quasi-war with

57
Ibid., 35–36.
58
Madison made nearly the same argument as Hamilton in Federalist 41, arguing: “Being rendered by her
insular situation and her maritime resources impregnable to the armies of her neighbors, the rulers of
Great Britain have never been able, by real or artificial dangers, to cheat the public into an extensive
peace establishment. The distance of the United States from the powerful nations of the world gives them
the same happy security. A dangerous establishment can never be necessary or plausible, so long as they
continue a united people.” Madison, “Federalist Number 41,” 209–210.
59
See, for example, James Wilson who with a tinge of hyperbole warned at the Pennsylvania Ratifying
Convention: “The prospect of a war is highly probable…We know we are unable under the articles of
confederation to exert ourselves; and shall we continue so until a stroke be made on our commerce, or we
see the debarkation of an hostile army on our unprotected shores? Who will guarantee that our property
will not be laid waste, that our towns will not be put under contribution, by a small naval force, and
subjected to all the horror and devastation of war? May not this be done without opposition, at least
effectual opposition, in the present situation of our country? There may be safety over the Appalachian
mountains, but there can be none on our sea coast. With what propriety can we hope our flag will be
respected while we have not a single gun to fire in its defence?” James Wilson, “Pennsylvania Ratifying
Convention,” December 11, 1787 in Kurland and Lerner, The Founder’s Constitution, 1987, 1:Chapter 7,
Document 17.
124
France (1798-1800), attacks against American shipping by the Barbary States (1801-1805,
1815), and the War of 1812 (1812-1815). In the latter, the country’s eastern seaboard was
blockaded, attacked, and certain parts were occupied, while the new capital of Washington DC
was captured and burned.
Thus, at the same time that the Framers created a constrained executive and argued that
only a small military establishment would be needed, they decided to build considerable
flexibility into the Constitution so that the American state could be adapted to uncertain future
circumstances. What is relevant here is that they were aware that in the face of foreign danger the
aim of self-preservation would trump any domestic constraints that might be written into law. As
Hamilton explained, “Safety from external danger, is the most powerful director of national
conduct.” It was a factor which would force any country to sacrifice even its most cherished
institutions and principles.
60
At a minimum, the executive had to be able to respond to any
attacks and the federal government had to at least have the option to build a powerful military
force if required by circumstance. In Federalist 41, Madison explained this by asking
rhetorically, “was it necessary to give an INDEFINITE POWER of raising TROOPS, as well as
providing fleets; and of maintaining both in PEACE, as well as in war?” He explained:
The answer indeed seems to be so obvious and conclusive as scarcely to justify such a
discussion in any place. With what color of propriety could the force necessary for
defense be limited by those who cannot limit the force of offense? If a federal
Constitution could chain the ambition or set bounds to the exertions of all other nations,
then indeed might it prudently chain the discretion of its own government, and set bounds
to the exertions for its own safety.
Madison continued:
How could a readiness for war in time of peace be safely prohibited, unless we could
prohibit, in like manner, the preparations and establishments of every hostile nation? The
means of security can only be regulated by the means and the danger of attack. They will,

60
Hamilton, “Federalist Number 8,” 33.
125
in fact, be ever determined by these rules, and by no others…If one nation maintains
constantly a disciplined army, ready for the service of ambition or revenge, it obliges the
most pacific nations who may be within the reach of its enterprises to take corresponding
precautions.
61

In both the passage from Hamilton earlier and this passage from Madison we see an
explicitly geopolitical understanding of the state. Given the country’s geographic circumstances,
the Framers envisioned the United States as “a non-interventionist, self-protective republic” that
would normally be at peace, according to Jules Lobel.
62
The constraints on executive war-
making powers and the limits against the development of an extensive military establishment
reflected that view. But the Framers also recognized that they could not foresee the country’s
future geopolitical position entirely. As Madison explains, if the Constitution could not “chain”
other nation’s ambitions and war-making capabilities, neither could it excessively chain those of
the United States. Doing so would unfairly usurp the powers of later governments that might face
different circumstances. During the Convention Elbridge Gerry suggested, for example, that they
cap a standing army at 2,000 or 3,000 soldiers. Washington is said to have broken his neutrality
as president of the Convention at this moment and uttered sotto voce that perhaps they might also
deem it unconstitutional for anyone to attack the country with a larger force.
63
The anecdote is
humorous but telling. It shows that even while the Framers were consciously trying to prevent
the emergence of what we today think of as a national security state, they knew it was
impracticable to outlaw one. As a result, there were no limits put in place.
For much of the country’s history, this geopolitical view of the state sat comfortably side
by side with the domestic view outlined above. At times, the two were at odds with one another
and this occasionally led to some tensions that I describe in the next section. But at no point—

61
Madison, “Federalist Number 41,” 208–209.
62
Lobel, “Little Wars and the Constitution,” 64.
63
Weigley, History of the United States Army, 85–86.
126
outside of a brief time during the Civil War—did these tensions threaten to overturn and change
forever the institutional balance struck at the Convention.

Executive War-Making Powers in the pre-World War II Period
From the Presidency of George Washington through World War II, domestic constraints
on executive war-making powers remained a core ordering principle in the organization and
conduct of American national security. First, a set of procedural norms based on the Constitution
was developed which made Congress central to deciding why, when, and how the country would
use force. Presidents sometimes pushed up against congressional war powers, but as I show
below they did so mostly within their Constitutional limits and otherwise paid deference to
Congress’s role. Second, opposition to the emergence of an extensive military establishment that
might empower the executive branch remained strong. The country maintained a relatively small
military establishment even during periods when there was greater opportunity for growth.
Though a full historical rendering of these developments is not possible here, the following
sections provide the background required to explain what changed in the mid-twentieth century
and why.
War Powers: The “Traditional Interpretation”
Some law scholars maintain that the Constitution provides a procedural blueprint for the
decision-making process to use force: the Congress declares war and the President wages it
subject to congressional oversight. Francis Wormuth and Edwin Firmage, for example, argue,
“the framers realized that the reasons we decided to go to war must be left for every generation
to work through within the political branches of government. Whether we should go to war and
under what conditions were political questions. But the way we go to war was not. The
127
procedural means were carefully stipulated.”
64
John Hart Ely likewise argues, “they pursued a
substantive end (the limitation of war to the absolutely necessary) by procedural means
(requiring the concurrence of both houses of Congress as well as the president).”
65
While these
scholars are correct in general terms, the specific procedures for initiating the use of force still
needed to be worked out in practice. This is because the Constitution is silent on many matters
and does not provide a set of political and legal procedures establishing how the general
distribution of war powers is to be translated into policy.
66
Declarations of war, for example,
were already at the time of the founding becoming increasingly rare.
67
Authorizations for the use
of force emerged as a common mechanism for Congress to initiate war, but nowhere were they
located in the text. Rather, as John Yoo contends, “the Constitution generally does not establish a
fixed process for foreign relations decision-making.”
68
Instead, this process arose in practice and
therefore we need to look at the procedural norms that actually grew out of the principles
enshrined in the Constitution.

64
Wormuth and Firmage, To Chain the Dog of War: The War Power of Congress in History and Law,
298.
65
Ely, War and Responsibility: Constitutional Lessons of Vietnam and Its Aftermath, 3, n10.
66
Louis Henkin, for example, regards the Constitution as a “strange laconic document” when it comes to
foreign affairs powers, elaborating elsewhere that “the constitutional blueprint for the governance of our
foreign affairs has proved to be starkly incomplete, indeed skimpy.” Harold Koh meanwhile suggests the
Constitution provides only “a skeleton” and that we need to “look beyond [its] cryptic text to discover the
broader constitutional principles that govern how Congress, the courts, and the executive should interact
in the foreign policy process.” Henkin, Foreign Affairs and the US Constitution, 13–15, 13; Louis
Henkin, “Foreign Affairs and the Constitution,” Foreign Affairs 66, no. 2 (1987): 287; Koh, The National
Security Constitution: Sharing Power after the Iran-Contra Affair, 68.
67
This point, for example, is acknowledged by Hamilton in Federalist 25 where he says “the ceremony of
a formal denunciation of war has of late fallen into disuse.” Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist Number 25,”
ed. George W. Carey and James McClellen (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), 124.
68
Yoo, The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11, 7–8.
128
From 1789 to 1941, the United States waged several major wars and used limited force
on scores of other occasions.
69
During this time, however, Congress only formally declared war
during five conflicts (against eleven adversaries).
70
Some practitioners and scholars point to the
large number of cases (some 125+
71
) in which the country used force but war was not formally
declared as evidence that the President routinely employed the armed forces during this period
without prior congressional approval. Such proponents of broad Presidential powers conclude
that therefore “history has legitimated the practice of presidential war-making.”
72
As others have
shown, however, there are problems with these cases in which Presidents reportedly committed
the country’s armed forces without Congressional consultation or authorization. On the one
hand, Edward Corwin argues that they were minor: “the vast majority involved fights with
pirates, landings of small naval contingents on barbarous or semi-barbarous coasts, the dispatch
of small bodies of troops to chase bandits or cattle rustlers across the Mexican border, and the

69
On the use of force during this period see Abraham D. Sofaer, War, Foreign Affairs, and Constitutional
Power: The Origins (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1976); Henry Bartholomew Cox, War, Foreign Affairs,
and Constitutional Power: 1829-1901 (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1984); Wormuth and Firmage, To
Chain the Dog of War: The War Power of Congress in History and Law, 135–151; Fisher, Presidential
War Power, 17–80; Richard F. Grimmett, “Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad,
1798-2010,” CRS Report R41677, 2010.
70
Against Great Britain, 1812 (War of 1812); Mexico, 1846 (Mexican-American War); Spain, 1898
(Spanish-American War); Germany, Austria-Hungary 1917 (World War I); Japan, Germany, Italy,
Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, 1941-2 (World War II).
71
Beginning in 1912 and continuing until 1972 when the War Powers Resolution was being debated, a
number of government reports were issued trying to calculate the number occasions on which the United
States used force overseas. These numbers vary considerably, oftentimes unexplainably. The number
cited comes from a State Department memo in 1966 that calculates Presidents used force unilaterally in
“at least 125 instances” through 1945 to justify Presidential initiative in Indochina. See Wormuth and
Firmage, To Chain the Dog of War: The War Power of Congress in History and Law, 142–145.
72
Henry P. Monaghan, “Presidential War-Making,” Boston University Law Review 50, no. 5 (1970): 19.
129
like.”
73
In other words, they had no chance of dragging the country into an actual conflict with
another state.
On the other hand, and more importantly, Francis Wormuth and Edwin Firmage show
through meticulous research that the cases regularly cited are in fact not actually instances of
executive war-making. They explain:
…eight of the acts involved enforcement of the law against piracy for which no
congressional authorization is required, sixty-nine were landings to protect American
citizens many of which were statutorily authorized, twenty concerned illegal invasions of
foreign or disputed territories which were not acts of war since the United States claimed
the territory, six were minatory demonstrations without combat, another six involved
protracted occupations of various Caribbean states that were authorized by treaty, and at
least one was an act of naval self-defense which is justified by both international and
municipal law.
74

Many of the instances included on the list, furthermore, were cases where force was used on the
initiative of local military officers—not the President—and in several of these cases the use of
force was later repudiated by the President and/or Congress and the commanding officer was
disciplined. Thus, Wormuth and Firmage conclude that there were actually perhaps only one or
two dozen minor instances during this period in which Presidents initiated hostilities without
Congressional authorization. Importantly, there is not a single case during this period when a
President maintained that they had an inherent authority to initiate war at their discretion.
What emerged during this period instead is what Gordon Silverstein terms a “traditional
interpretation” of Constitutional war powers in which Congress held a predominant role in
initiating war; a position accepted—if sometimes tested—by Presidents and upheld by the

73
Edward S. Corwin, “The President’s Power,” in The President: Roles and Powers, ed. David E. Haight
and Larry D. Johnston (Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1965), 361.
74
Edwin B. Firmage, “Rogue Presidents and the War Power of Congress,” George Mason Law Review
11, no. 1 (n.d.): 83–84; Wormuth and Firmage, To Chain the Dog of War: The War Power of Congress in
History and Law, 135–151.
130
courts.
75
Based on this recognized distribution of war powers, a set of procedural norms emerged
for varying levels of the use of force. The most straightforward were for large-scale general wars
like the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, and the two
World Wars. For each, the President—either in writing or in person through an address to a joint
session of Congress—laid out the reasons for war and requested a formal declaration. These
reasons were debated in Congress and based on a majority vote a declaration was issued either in
the form of a bill (in the nineteenth century) or a joint resolution (in the twentieth century). The
legislation was next forwarded to the President and signed into law. The Congress then
appropriated the necessary funding for expanding and maintaining the armed forces throughout
the course of the war.
There were some deviations from this general pattern. In the case of the Mexican-
American War President Polk provoked an attack against United States forces in disputed
territory thus forcing the hand of Congress and in the case of World War II President Roosevelt
tried using executive action to inch the United States toward war as early as 1939. But in both
cases Polk and Roosevelt sought formal declarations of war before committing the country to
full-blown hostilities.
76

Congress not only issued declarations of war to initiate general hostilities, but also formal
authorizations for the use of force in cases where more limited forms of force were called for.
The procedures for these took three forms. First, in the early decades after the Constitution,
Presidents asked on several occasions for authorization to employ America’s armed forces to
protect American shipping and citizens and to respond with offensive action if required. This

75
Silverstein, Imbalance of Power: Constitutional Interpretation and the Making of American Foreign
Policy, 43–62.
76
Polk was formally censured by the House of Representatives in 1848 for his actions and Roosevelt was
powerfully constrained by a series of neutrality acts in the 1930s.
131
type of authorization was provided during America’s undeclared war with France in 1798,
against the Bey of Tripoli and the Dey of Algeria in 1802 and 1815, and for the suppression of
piracy in the Caribbean in 1819.
77
In each case, Congress debated and passed by a legislative act
authorizing the President to employ the armed forces for specific tasks against specific
adversaries. It is important to note here that—in contrast to later authorizations—in each case,
congressional authorization identified exactly who was the target of hostilities and under what
circumstances force would be used.
Second, Congress issued what amounted to two permanent authorizations to cover
emergency cases that became routine and required immediate action on the part of American
forces. Both conceivably fell under the President’s responsibility to repel sudden attacks, but by
putting its stamp of approval on these acts Congress further legitimated them. The first was an
extension of the 1819 authorization for the suppression of piracy in 1823 to make permanent the
charge to resist and seize any foreign vessels engaged in piracy.
78
The second was an effort to
regulate emergency landings required to protect American citizens and property overseas.
Between 1833 and 1862 thirteen such landings occurred and in 1862 Congress decided to
authorize, by statute, regulations for local military commanders in consultation with local
consular officers to undertake such landings when required by circumstance. After 1862, several
dozen such landings took place under statutory law.
79

77
Jennifer K. Elsea and Matthew C. Weed, “Declarations of War and Authorizations for the Use of
Military Force: Historical Background and Legal Implications,” CRS Report RL31133, 2010, 5–7.
78
Landings in pursuit of pirates fell in a gray area during this period. When in 1823 the Secretary of the
Navy issued permission to commanders to pursue pirates ashore if required, President Monroe submitted
the question to Congress believing such landings required Congressional authorization. Congress chose
not to take up the question and such landings did occur on the initiative of local commanders without
either Congressional support or disapproval. See Wormuth and Firmage, To Chain the Dog of War: The
War Power of Congress in History and Law, 155–156.
79
This act was revised several times in subsequent years. Ibid., 156–160.
132
Third, Congress on other occasions enacted retroactive legislation to provide a form of ex
post-facto authorization for uses of force already underway. The most prominent case was in the
Civil War when President Lincoln called up the militia, enacted a blockade against
insurrectionary states, and suspended the writ of habeas corpus without congressional approval.
In a special joint session of Congress shortly thereafter, Lincoln expressed “the deepest regret
that the Executive found the duty of employing the war power in defense of the Government
forced upon him.”
80
He argued that his actions were necessary and legally taken by the federal
government, but acknowledged that they were beyond his authority as President and asked
Congress to render judgment and restore a proper Constitutional balance. One month later,
Congress passed a statute stating the President’s military actions were conducted “with the same
effect as if they had been issued and done under the previous express authority and direction of
the Congress of the United States.”
81
There were other cases of ex post-facto authorization as
well, including in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion when President McKinley ordered 5,000
American troops to take part in an international expeditionary force to protect foreigners and
foreign property in China and when President Wilson ordered the occupation of Veracruz in
Mexico in 1914.
82
What is important in these cases is that even when Presidents initiated the use
of force they never claimed a constitutional right to do so.

80
Abraham Lincoln, “Message to Congress in Special Session, July 4, 1861.”
81
On August 6, 1861, Congress passed Statute 326 stating: “That all acts, proclamations and orders of the
President of the United States after the Fourth of March, eighteen hundred and sixty-one, respecting the
army and the navy of the United States, and calling out or relating to the militia or volunteers from the
States, are hereby approved and in all respects legalized and made valid, to the same intent and with the
same effect as if they had been issued and done under the previous express authority and direction of the
Congress of the United States.” It took two years for Congress to pass legislation suspending the writ of
habeas corpus.
82
In the Boxer Rebellion, McKinley undertook the action as a naval landing to protect American citizens
in accordance with the statute described above. The court later determined that the actions went beyond
the protection of citizens and property and constituted an act of war, but determined that it had been
133
The predominant role of Congress in war initiation during this period is evident not only
in actual instances in which force was used but in non-cases as well. For example, in 1825 and
1834 Presidents Monroe and Jackson sought authorization for reprisals against a Spanish colony
and French shipping respectively, but were denied the authority to order them. In the 1930s,
moreover, Congress passed a series of neutrality acts preventing President Roosevelt from
offering material support to foreign countries as the second world war in a generation began to
take shape. Roosevelt pushed the limits of these acts but nonetheless remained constrained until
Congress formally declared war in 1941.
This brief discussion shows that most instances in which force was used during this
period were conducted either with a declaration of war, authorization, or subsequent
authorization from Congress. Nonetheless, force was used outside these established and accepted
procedures on several occasions. Most notably in 1854 the port of Greytown in Nicaragua was
bombarded and burned by Captain George Hollins. Hollins had received orders from the
Secretary of the Navy to seek redress for affronts committed in Greytown against an American
company and the minister to Central America. Though the instructions were ambiguous, the
secretary ordered Hollins to attempt to seek redress if possible “without a resort to violence and
destruction of property and loss of life.” In the reprisal against Greytown, Hollins clearly
exceeded his charge and his actions were condemned in the American press. But due to domestic
and international opinion, President Pierce was forced to own the attack and a subsequent
Supreme Court ruling indicated that he had acted within his authority as President.
83
This

authorized by subsequent legislation. In the Veracruz case, Wilson requested and received Congressional
authorization immediately after ordering American forces to occupy Veracruz.
83
Wormuth and Firmage, To Chain the Dog of War: The War Power of Congress in History and Law,
37–41.
134
incident is often cited as an important instance of Presidential war-making, but the facts of the
case suggest it serves as a poor precedent for broader claims of executive war-making autonomy.
Thus, beginning with the election of the first United States President in 1789 through
World War II, a series of procedural norms in line with the general framework of war powers
contained in the Constitution emerged and remained relatively intact. For major and sustained
hostilities, Congress provided formal declarations of war identifying by name the country the
United States was at war with and directing the President to mobilize all national resources
toward winning the conflict. In other less severe cases, Congress provided either specific
authorization (ex ante or ex post) for force to be used—again identifying the adversary by
name—or more general authorization to cover emergency instances. What is important to about
these authorizations is that Presidents treated them as binding unlike contemporary ones.
Several factors began to shift the initiative to executives during this period including the
permanent authorization enabling naval landings, which were often used a pretext to pursue
broader American interests (particularly in Latin America), and post-hoc authorizations, which
provided Presidents with the opportunity to take the initiative and force the hand of Congress.
Moreover, Presidents did sometimes use force on occasion outside of these established
procedures. These trends were particularly evident beginning around the turn of the twentieth
century, when there was a marked increase in Presidential power over foreign affairs that was a
direct result of the country’s more active foreign policy. Walter LaFeber suggests that it is in this
period that the roots of later Presidential power are to be found.
84
I discuss this shift at greater
length in the next two chapters.

84
Walter LaFeber, The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations Volume 2: The American
Search for Opportunity, 1865–1913 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 237.
135
But even when Presidents took more authoritative action in this period, it is important to
note that they did so only temporarily or “by relying falsely on either a statute, a treaty or
international law,” never on the inherent war-making power of the executive.
85
As Ely explains,
“when certain presidents did play a little fast and loose with congressional prerogatives…they
obscured or covered up the actual facts, pledging public fealty to the constitutional need for
congressional authorization of military action. It is therefore impossible to build the occasional
nonconforming presidential actions of this period into an argument that they had gradually
altered the constitutional plan.”
86
As will become clear in subsequent chapters, this did not occur
until the beginning of the Cold War.
The Military Establishment in the pre-World War II Period
The impact of the domestic constraint against a standing army on the development of the
American military establishment has been covered well elsewhere and so it is not necessary to
cover it in detail here.
87
Two points are worth making though. First, this constraint tended to
have a dampening effect on the long-term development of the United States’ standing forces and
its institutions of national security. In the country’s early years this was not as apparent. But by
1939 on the eve of World War II the gap between the country’s world standing and its military
was gaping. By then the United States’ economy was the world’s largest by two, while its
industrial production was three times larger than the next country. Moreover, the country’s

85
Gordon Silverstein makes a similar argument, explaining “some made exceptions to the rules, but never
challenged the rules themselves; they broke the rules, and defended their actions not as an alternate
reading of the Constitution, but rather as a temporary exception under particular conditions.” Firmage,
“Rogue Presidents and the War Power of Congress,” 84; Wormuth and Firmage, To Chain the Dog of
War: The War Power of Congress in History and Law, 149–151, 151; Silverstein, Imbalance of Power:
Constitutional Interpretation and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 44.
86
Ely, War and Responsibility: Constitutional Lessons of Vietnam and Its Aftermath, 10.
87
See Weigley, History of the United States Army; Millett, Maslowski, and Feis, For the Common
Defense: A Military History of the United States from 1607 to 2012.
136
population among the great powers was second only to the combined population of the Soviet
Union.
88

Yet, as I noted earlier, the United States’ armed forces were still quite small and
incapable compared to other states. The Army in particular remained a laggard. In 1939 it
numbered 190,000 and was ranked nineteenth in the world—behind Portugal and only slightly
ahead of Bulgaria.
89
Moreover, as Rick Atkinson explains, it was unprepared for any type of
significant military action at this time:
When mobilization began in 1940, the Army had only 14,000 professional officers. The
average age of majors—a middling rank, between captain and lieutenant colonel—was
nearly 48; in the National Guard, nearly one-quarter of first lieutenants were over 40
years old, and the senior ranks were dominated by political hacks of certifiable military
incompetence. Not a single officer on duty in 1941 had commanded a unit as large as a
division in World War I. At the time of Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, only one
American division was on a full war footing.
90

Not only were the United States’ military forces modest during this period, but they were
also based largely in the vicinity of the homeland. The country’s first permanent overseas
presence was not established until 1903 when Guantanamo Bay was leased as a coaling station,
and by 1938 there were only fourteen overseas bases almost all of which were located nearby in
the Caribbean and the Pacific, and used as coaling and water stations for the navy, not for force

88
For statistics on the period see Mark Harrison, “The Economics of World War II: An Overview,” in
The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), 1–42; Angus Maddison, The World Economy: Historical Statistics (Paris:
OECD, 2003).
89
George C. Marshall, “Biennial Report of the Chief of Staff of the United States Army to the Secretary
of War: July 1, 1943, to June 30, 1945,” in Biennial Reports of the Chief of Staff of the United States
Army to the Secretary of War: 1 July 1939 - 30 June 1945 (Washington, DC: Government Printing
Office, 1996), v.
90
Rick Atkinson, “Ten Things Every American Student Should Know About Our Army in World War
II,” Footnotes, the Foreign Policy Research Institute 14, no. 15 (2009).
137
projection.
91
Thus, even if American Presidents had wanted to project military power before
World War II without congressional authorization, the limited size of the military, coupled with
the lack of forward operating bases, severely restricted their options for doing so. That explains
why all major instances in which force was used in the country’s early history were declared or
authorized by Congress.
Second, the domestic constraint against a standing army resulted in a pattern of
“rollbacks” after all of the country’s major wars.
92
As explained in chapter one, there is a
literature on state growth, which finds that “in war, what goes up seldom comes down.”
93
The
idea is that during war, states must do things like collect more taxes, direct wartime economic
activity, and expand or establish new state institutions. After being “ratcheted” up, the growth in
state institutions and power becomes sticky and remains even after war is over. There is evidence
that this effect does occur, but not as we would expect with the growth of a military
establishment in the United States. Within several years of every major war prior to World War
II, the large-scale build-up in troops, funding, and state power was mostly disassembled. As I
show in the next chapter, even following World War I, when it appeared the United States would
play a more active role in the world, the War Department General Staff unsuccessfully proposed
a standing army of 500,000 officers and soldiers. By 1930, the army numbered less than 140,000.
What is important to note here is that even when war threatened to become the “nurse of

91
Jeffrey Engel, “Over There...to Stay This Time: Forward-Deployment of American Basing Strategy in
the Cold War and Beyond,” in Military Bases: Historical Perspectives, Contemporary Challenges, ed.
Luís Rodrigues and Sergiy Glebov (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2009), 19–20.
92
Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War
Grand Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 30–32.
93
Bruce D. Porter, War and the Rise of the State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics (New
York: The Free Press, 1994), 14. See also Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the
Growth of American Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
138
executive aggrandizement,” the domestic limits on a standing army prevented such a
development from occurring.

Conclusion
At the time of America’s Founding, the country’s leaders attempted to design a state and
system of government reflective of republican principles. Central to this project was an attempt
to constrain future executives from single-handedly initiating war. They sought to do so
explicitly in the Constitution by requiring legislative approval for the use of force and by placing
the power to construct and organize the country’s military establishment in the hands of the
legislature (and partly the states). Equally important was the fact that measures were included to
prevent the emergence of large standing forces and to ensure authority within and over the
military would remain fragmented. These efforts did not restrict executive war-making power
entirely. Presidents between 1789 and 1941 did at times take the initiative. President Polk helped
push the country into war with Mexico, President Lincoln took drastic actions alone in the early
days of the Civil War, and President Roosevelt inched the United States closer to World War II
prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor and Congress’s declaration of war. The shift toward greater
executive war-making powers after 1898 is discussed at length later. But as I will show this shift
was based on personal and situational autonomy, rather than institutional autonomy. Moreover,
as explained above, these occasions remained largely within a traditional understanding of the
institutional arrangement agreed to during the Constitutional Convention.
An important counterfactual to consider, however, is whether this arrangement could
have survived intact if the United States had faced greater systemic pressure earlier in its history.
Behind the Atlantic Ocean, the country experienced few major or even limited wars. Equally
139
important was the fact that between wars there was only little “apprehension of war,” which
Hamilton and Madison warned might also cause the country to abandon its institutions. It was
perhaps for these reasons, as much as the country’s domestic constraints, that it was able to resist
shifting greater war-making powers to the executive and building a larger military apparatus.
In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the keenest observers of the United States (then
and now), made this argument precisely. Throughout Democracy in America, he stressed that the
distinctness of the American political system was at least partly due to its geographic isolation
and the fact that it had “no reason to fear conquest.”
94
Specifically, he reasoned that the limited
powers of the executive were as much a result of the country’s “fortune” as the “efforts” of the
Framers of the Constitution. He explained that:
If the existence of the Union were under constant threat, if its great interests were daily
intertwined with those of other powerful nations, the executive power would take on an
increased importance in the public eye, because people would expect more of it, and it
would do more. To be sure, the president of the United States is the head of the army, but
that army consists of six-thousand soldiers. He commands the fleet, but the fleet has only
a few vessels. He directs the Union’s dealings with foreign nations, but the United States
has no neighbors. Separated from the rest of the world by the Atlantic Ocean and still too
weak to seek to rule the sea, it has no enemies, and only rarely do its interests intersect
with those of other nations of the globe.
95

Tocqueville determined that it was only under these “favorable circumstances” that “American
lawmakers found it easy to make the executive weak and dependent.”
96

Tocqueville, however, also seems to have foreseen that these circumstances would
change one day. In the conclusion to the first volume of Democracy in American, he anticipated
the United States expanding across North America and growing, along with Russia, to become

94
Tocqueville makes various forms of this argument several times throughout the text. Alexis de
Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Library of America, 2004), 141–42, 146–148, 261, 319–
320, quote on 148.
95
Ibid., 141–142.
96
Ibid., 148.
140
one of the two great powers on the planet.
97
There is little doubt that when this did occur he
would have expected the country’s changed circumstances—not its laws—ultimately to
determine the nature of executive power. Indeed, as I show in the next chapter, by the 1890s this
process did begin to occur. But domestic institutional transformation did not turn out to be as
easy as he might have expected.

97
Ibid., 475–476.
141
Chapter Four

The Rise to World Power and the Struggle to Build a National
Security State, 1890-1920

The last chapter examined the institutional formation and subsequent development of the
domestic constraints on executive war-making powers from America’s Founding through the eve
of World War II. The next two chapters consider how those constraints evolved and yet remained
durable under increasing systemic pressure beginning in the 1890s. The chapters, therefore,
focus on the phase in American history from 1890 to 1941 as a period of institutional resistance.
As defined earlier, systemic pressure occurs when factors at the international system level
exert force upon a state to act on behalf of its security. These factors include the reach of a state’s
overseas interests, geography, technology, and the balance of threat. During America’s rise to
world power beginning in the 1890s, a combination of these factors began to create pressure for
the United States to pursue a more assertive foreign policy.
1
But the extent to which America
actually faced systemic pressure beginning at the end of the nineteenth century was open to
debate, which helps explain why the country’s national security institutions and its behavior
evolved in fits and starts in the following years.

1
An important distinction needs to be made here between latent and actual world power. Though the
United States acquired tremendous latent power toward the end of the 1800s, it did not become one of the
world’s real leading powers until it joined the Entente Powers in World War I and decisively swung the
international balance of power in favor of the Allies.
142
What the chapter demonstrates is that the United States did at least face a degree of
systemic pressure during this period that placed a burden on the country’s existing institutions.
This pressure was at least enough to result in a degree of institutional stress that required
decision-makers to consider reconstituting some of the basic institutional arrangements that to
that point had been largely stable. By the turn of the century a prominent group of statesmen and
public intellectuals began to make the case for a more assertive foreign policy backed by greater
military capabilities and a willingness to project the country’s growing power overseas and use
force when necessary. This group of individuals followed in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton
who, as the last chapter explained, was the principle proponent at the Founding of a more
powerful state with a more energetic executive at its helm. Given the country’s changing
international position, they espoused what Leonard White called a “new Hamiltonianism,” which
stressed modernizing and increasing the capacity of the country’s armed forces and adopting new
institutional arrangements that would provide greater executive power and leadership.
2
This
group included important statesmen and public intellectuals such as Theodore Roosevelt, Henry
Cabot Lodge, Elihu Root, Albert Beveridge, Alfred Mahan, Herbert Croly, Leonard Wood, and
Henry and Brooks Adams
The institutional balance that had been forged at the Constitutional Convention and kept
largely intact throughout the nineteenth century, however, hampered the efforts of these
individuals. As the platform of the Democratic Party in the 1900 election exhorted, the semi-
imperial policy of the neo-Hamiltonians that relied on force to extend American interests
overseas was utterly “inconsistent with republican institutions.” Even worse, it actually

2
On neo-Hamiltonianism see Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics
of Civil-military Relations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 270–273; Paul Y. Hammond,
Organizing for Defense: The American Military Establishment in the Twentieth Century (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1961), 23.
143
threatened to be their undoing. The platform supported territorial and trade expansion through
peaceful means.
3
But in no uncertain terms, it denounced what it described as an emergent
“militarism,” explaining the consequences as follows:
It means conquest abroad and intimidation and oppression at home. It means the strong
arm that has ever been fatal to free institutions. It will impose upon our peace loving
people a large standing army and unnecessary burden of taxation, and will be a constant
menace to their liberties…We denounce it as un-American, un-democratic, and un-
republican and as a subversion of the ancient and fixed principles of a free people.
4

The Democrats under William Jennings Bryan would go on to lose the election. Nonetheless, the
ideas behind opposition—among both Democrats and many Republicans—to the domestic
institutional changes required to pursue a more assertive foreign policy remained key to
understanding the ultimately limited nature of state-building for national security that would
occur over the next four decades.
It is important to note that the neo-Hamiltonians were in fact able to advance important
policies that helped steer the country through a new period in its history. In the 1890s, a naval
building program was begun during peacetime for the first time in the country’s history. This
program underpinned America’s victory in the Spanish-American War in 1898 and continued
through the first years of the 1900s. After the war, reformers made some progress building and
streamlining the army to make it a more capable war-fighting organization. These efforts
continued both before and after World War I. Finally, under the leadership of Presidents
McKinley and Roosevelt, executives did push against the domestic constraints on executive war-
powers. Roosevelt in particular, elaborated a new and more expansive theory of the executive

3
Even ardent anti-imperialists supported expansion, but thought it could be better accomplished “without
armies, without war fleets, without bloody conquests, without colonies.” See Ernest C. Bolt, Jr., Ballots
before Bullets: The War Referendum Approach to Peace in America, 1914-1941 (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1977), xv–xvi, quoted on xv.
4
The Platform Textbook: Containing the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United
States, and All the Platforms of All Parties (Omaha: Vincent Publishing, 1900), 155–156, 157.
144
and attempted to use the office to wield the country’s armed forces more assertively. These
accomplishments demonstrate a degree of constitutive adaptability to the country’s changing
circumstances.
As the next two chapters show, however, these efforts were limited by how far Congress
and the American people were willing to go in the direction of altering America’s state structure
and decision-making procedures. As the theoretical expectations outlined in chapter two suggest,
moderate systemic pressure faced with strong domestic constraints combined to produce only
incremental change during this period.
In this chapter, I focus on the changing position of the United States in the international
system in the 1890s and the efforts by the neo-Hamiltonians to enact domestic institutional
change related to capacity building and military organization in response to those changes.
General institutional stress, combined with the country’s involvement in the Spanish-American
War and World War I, provided potential windows of opportunity for substantial modernization
of the country’s defense institutions and armed forces. Indeed, some state-building did occur at
this time. But it fell well short of what we might have expected given America’s extraordinary
rise to world power. In this chapter, I explain why efforts to build large standing forces and
centralize military authority failed. In the next chapter, I turn to focus on specific claims for
greater executive power that were made during this period and why such a shift was ultimately
resisted until the outbreak of World War II.

America’s Changing Place in the International System: Systemic Pressure
Circa 1890
By the 1890s, the United States began to occupy a new position in the international
system and the country began acquiring an increasing number of overseas interests. These
145
growing interests were linked to the country’s robust growth following the end of the Civil War.
According to one estimate America’s GDP grew by more than 4% a year on average from 1870
to 1913.
5
During this time, the country’s population more than doubled from 40 million to 100
million people. In the 1880s the United States surpassed Great Britain to become the world’s
largest economy and largest manufacturing country, the number one producer of iron/steel, and
the greatest consumer of energy.
6
By the turn of the century, Secretary of State John Hay could
report that the United States was approaching a position of “eminence in the world’s markets”
more quickly than anticipated, which was “shifting the center, not only of industrial, but of
commercial activity and the money power of the world to [America’s] marts.”
7

This spectacular growth put increasing pressure on the United States to turn its attention
overseas and acquire and defend interests in a new more forceful way. There were two primary
reasons for this. First and foremost, with America’s growing—and at times unstable economy—
there were good reasons to seek out new export markets (and later raw materials sources)
through commercial expansion.
8
In his classic historical study of the period, Walter LaFeber
shows that from the Civil War to the end of the century there was a consistent relationship
between America’s economic growth and its search for new markets.
9
New markets were
especially needed for the country’s increasing output of staple crops, raw materials, and

5
Economic statistics from this period can be problematic. This figure is slightly lower than other
estimates, which suggest it may have grown by as much as 5% a year in this time. Angus Maddison, The
World Economy: Historical Statistics (Paris: OECD, 2003).
6
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from
1500 to 2000 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 198–202.
7
Quoted in Alfred E. Eckes, Jr., Opening America’s Market: U.S. Foreign Trade Policy Since 1776
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 60.
8
The country’s steady long term economic growth was punctuated by severe decennial recessions in
1873-1878, 1882-1885, and 1893-1897. Especially the latter helped contribute to the belief that foreign
markets could help alleviate the turbulence of the domestic economy.
9
Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898, Thirty-Fifth
Anniversary Edition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).
146
manufactured goods. Between 1865 and 1900, production of cotton increased 433%, wheat
344%, corn 222%, refined sugar 460%, bituminous coal 1,100%, steel rails 331%, crude
petroleum 2,100%, and steel ingots and castings nearly 50,000%. In this same period, exports
increased 338% with the balance shifting from unmanufactured foodstuffs and raw materials
toward manufactured and semi-manufactured products.
10
The growing home market consumed
much of this production, but by the end of the century, exports—though still relatively small—
became more central to expectations about America’s future economic prosperity.
Concern about the need to find new export markets was accompanied—and
exacerbated—by the belief that the era of nearly unfettered continental expansion across North
America had passed. In 1890, the Superintendent of the Census reported that the century long
process of a constantly expanding frontier was over. The continent was now settled and
population density was rising.
11
The report inspired the historian Frederick Jackson Turner to
formulate the Frontier Thesis, which held that continuous continental expansion westward had
been central to the country’s economic, political, and moral development.
12
If the continental
frontier was now closed, the logical consequence was that America needed to find new channels

10
David M. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Trade and Investment: American Economic Expansion in the
Hemisphere, 1865-1900 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 9–10.
11
The key takeaway from the report was that “Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of
settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that
there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc.,
it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.” Robert P. Porter, “Distribution of
Population According to Density: 1890,” Extra Census Bulletin, no. 2 (April 20, 1891): 4.
12
The extent to which Turner’s thesis is true is debatable and has been the subject of argument. What is
important here, however, is that with the publication of the Census report and Turner’s thesis the closing
of the American frontier became a widespread idea that had important implications for America’s
conception of its role in the world. Turner’s frontier thesis was originally elaborated in a speech to the
American Historical Association in 1893 “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” It was
later published as part of a set of associated essays in Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American
History (New York: Henry Holt, 1920).
147
for expansion overseas.
13
This corollary argument was made most powerfully by Brooks Adams.
Adams argued that the closing of the American frontier was coinciding with a more general
disintegration of the international system. Together, the two required the United States to pursue
a more expansionist policy to “protect the outlets of her trade, or run the risk of suffocation.”
14

The impact of the ideas of Adams and especially Turner was important. They resonated with the
popular imagination of the period and more importantly came to have an outsized impact on the
thinking of decision-makers like Theodore Roosevelt, John Hay, Woodrow Wilson, and others.
15

By the late 1890s, with a growing and unstable economy and beliefs about a closing
frontier, those pushing for a more assertive foreign policy could present expansion not as
optional, but mandatory. Open calls for imperialism were even made for the first time in the
country’s history. In his famous “March of the Flag” speech in 1898, Senator Albert Beveridge
captured the spirit of this argument by contrasting the almost leisurely continental expansion of
the previous century with the country’s contemporary requirements in light of its recent war with
Spain:
We did not need the western Mississippi Valley when we acquired it, nor Florida, nor
Texas, nor California…We had no emigrants to people this imperial wilderness, no
money to develop it, even no highways to cover it. No trade awaited us in its savage

13
Again, it would be wrong to characterize the two in causal terms. What is important is the
complementary role that the idea of a closed frontier played in beliefs about expansion. As LaFeber
explains: “No such cause-and-effect relationship can, of course, be found which so neatly links the
closing of the frontier with American expansionist activities…But there can be no doubt that one
important part of the rationale for an expansive foreign policy in the 1890’s was a fervent (though
erroneous) belief held by many Americans that their unique and beneficent internal frontier no longer
existed.”LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898, 63–72, quote
on 64.
14
Brooks Adams, America’s Economic Supremacy (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900), quote
on 19; See also Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History (New York: The
Macmillan Company, 1897); Brooks Adams, The New Empire (New York: The Macmillan Company,
1903).
15
On the influence of Turner and Adams see William Appleman Williams, “The Frontier Thesis and
American Foreign Policy,” Pacific Historical Review 24, no. 4 (1955): 379–95.
148
fastnesses. Our productions were not greater than our trade. There was not one reason for
the land-lust of our statesmen from Jefferson to Grant…

But today we are raising more than we can consume. Today we are making more than we
can use. Today our industrial society is congested; there are more workers than there is
work; there is more capital than there is investment. We do not need more money—we
need more circulation, more employment. Therefore we must find new markets for our
produce, new occupation for our capital, new work for our labor.
16

By the late 1890s these views were widespread, especially among leading strategic thinkers like
Alfred Mahan and politicians like Beveridge, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Roosevelt. Moreover,
they captured the imagination of a public intrigued by the idea of national greatness and willing
to consider overseas expansion.
The second reason the United States was compelled to turn its attention overseas more
forcefully was because of international political factors. At the same time that overseas
commercial expansion appeared more necessary from a domestic perspective, American
decision-makers feared that such expansion faced a growing set of international obstacles. On the
one hand, they believed that domestic political instability in independent countries threatened
American interests there. Throughout the nineteenth century, the United States had acted when
required during civil unrest, especially in the Caribbean and Central and South America, but
mainly by protecting American citizens and property. Coupled with growing commercial and
strategic significance, however, possibilities of civil unrest took on greater importance and
appeared to require greater action. As Alfred Mahan explained in an article in The Atlantic
Monthly in 1890, “Unsettled political conditions, such as exist in Haiti, Central America, and
many of the Pacific Islands, especially the Hawaiian group, when combined with great military
or commercial importance as is the case with most of these positions, involve…dangerous germs

16
Albert J. Beveridge, “The March of the Flag,” in The American Spirit: U.S. History as Seen by
Contemporaries, ed. David Kennedy and Thomas Bailey, Twelfth Edition, vol. 2, Since 1865 (Boston:
Wadsworth, 2009), 171.
149
of quarrel, against which it is prudent at least to be prepared.”
17
According to Mahan and others,
the United States had to be prepared militarily in such cases both to put down unrest and to
prevent other powers from taking advantage of instability.
More dangerous, Europe’s great powers were in the midst of what was later recognized
as a second wave of imperialism. This was particularly pronounced in Africa where there was
intense competition over colonial expansion. At the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference, Germany,
France, Great Britain, and others agreed to partition much of Africa into exclusive spheres of
influence. By 1895 nearly the whole of the continent was under colonial rule. The United States
had only limited interests in Africa, but many leading Americans saw the increasing activities in
the Caribbean, Central and South America, and East Asia by these same powers (as well as
Russia and Japan in the latter region) in a similar light.
18
The great concern was that if the United
States did not act to open or keep open foreign markets, the access and activities of American
businesses, traders, and missionaries might be restricted. Even worse, they might be shut out of
them altogether.
Given this set of factors, the most important task for the United States was to establish its
hegemony in the Western Hemisphere once and for all. Since the Monroe Doctrine was
proclaimed in 1823, further colonial expansion by any European power in the Western
Hemisphere had been deemed off-limits. But increasing points of friction over commercial
interests and territorial adjustments—such as in the Venezuela Boundary Crisis with Great
Britain in 1895—caused many to believe the United States needed to act more forcefully. As

17
Alfred T. Mahan, “Document 1.5: A Call for Naval Power,” in America in the World: A History in
Documents from the War with Spain to the War on Terror, ed. Jeffrey A. Engel, Mark Atwood Lawrence,
and Andrew Preston (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 16.
18
See LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898, 245–251;
Thomas J. McCormick, China Market: America’s Quest for Informal Empire, 1893-1901 (Chicago:
Quadrangle Books, 1967), 91.
150
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge warned during the Venezuela crisis, “if Britain can extend her
territory in South America without remonstrance from us, every other European power can do
the same, and in a short time you will see South America parceled out as Africa has been.”
19

The United States responded by elaborating the Olney and later the Roosevelt Corollaries
to the Monroe Doctrine.
20
The former was issued during the Venezuela Boundary Crisis and
claimed the authority to mediate any border disputes in the Western Hemisphere. President
Roosevelt issued the latter during his State of the Union in 1904 following another crisis in
Venezuela the year before. It stated that the United States would undertake all international
policing efforts in the region and intervene—even when European interests were concerned—
where required. The policy was not designed to do favors for European states, many of which
had trading interests and large outstanding debts in Latin American. Rather, it was to prevent
them from intervening in the Western Hemisphere altogether thereby securing American
hegemony over the region and advancing American economic and political interests.
In East Asia, the United States had fewer historical interests than in the Western
Hemisphere and less of a claim to intervention.
21
Nonetheless, many American business and
political leaders in the late nineteenth century saw the country’s future security and prosperity

19
David C. Hendrickson, Union, Nation, Or Empire: The American Debate Over International Relations,
1789-1941 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 262.
20
The Olney Corollary was not a formally stated policy, but was instead based on Secretary of State
Richard Olney’s broadened interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine in the 1895 Venezuela Boundary
Crisis. Theodore Roosevelt announced the Roosevelt Corollary during his State of the Union Address in
1904, which lasted until 1934 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt abandoned it in favor of the Good
Neighbor policy. Richard Olney, “Document 1.9: U.S. Dominance in the Western Hemisphere,” in
America in the World: A History in Documents from the War with Spain to the War on Terror, ed. Jeffrey
A. Engel, Mark Atwood Lawrence, and Andrew Preston (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014),
23–24; Theodore Roosevelt, “Document 3.11: Theodore Roosevelt’s ‘Corollary’ to the Monroe
Doctrine,” in America in the World: A History in Documents from the War with Spain to the War on
Terror, ed. Jeffrey A. Engel, Mark Atwood Lawrence, and Andrew Preston (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2014), 71–72.
21
For still one of the best studies of American foreign policy toward East Asia around the turn of the
twentieth century see McCormick, China Market: America’s Quest for Informal Empire, 1893-1901.
151
tied to the region—most importantly, China. Between 1890 and 1897 American exports to both
China and Japan tripled, and totaled more than any other country’s to Manchuria.
22
But as the
New York Times noted at the time, what was really important was “not yet [America’s] present
trade with all Chinese ports, but the right to all that trade with its future increase.”
23
Or as Brooks
Adams, ever the imperialist, spelled out in more forthright terms, “The expansion of any country
must depend on the market for its surplus product; and China is the only region which now
promises almost boundless possibilities of absorption.”
24

Since the Treaty of Nanking, which ended the First Opium War between China and Great
Britain in 1842, the United States had relied on the latter’s commitment to maintaining an “open
door” policy with respect to foreign trade and investment in China. By the mid-1890s, however,
both internal disorder in China and foreign competition over access to the Chinese market
threatened to torpedo the open door policy. After the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894-1895,
Japan, Germany, and Russia (followed by Great Britain and France) began to carve China into
spheres of influence and stake out exclusive privileges and rights on investment and trade. By the
end of the decade, anti-foreign sentiment in China gave rise to the Boxer Rebellion, which
threatened to serve as a pretext for accelerating the partition of the country even faster. Senator
Lodge decried the fact that “All Europe is seizing on China and if we do not establish ourselves
in the East, that vast trade, from which we must draw our future prosperity…will be practically
closed to us forever.”
25

22
LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898, 301.
23
Quoted in McCormick, China Market: America’s Quest for Informal Empire, 1893-1901, 91.
24
Adams, America’s Economic Supremacy, 20.
25
Quoted in David Healy, US Expansionism: The Imperialist Urge in the 1890s (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1970), 172.
152
Though not necessarily obvious at the time, Great Britain’s Pax Britannica was already
in terminal decline and coming to a close.
26
In places like East Asia this had important
consequences for the United States, which for half a century essentially had practiced a form of
“hitchhiking imperialism” by relying on British power to further its own interests.
27
With Britain
no longer able single-handedly to police the open door in China, the United States either had to
join the scramble and carve out its own sphere of influence or contribute to policing the open
door. The former was impossible for domestic political reasons. The latter was possible, but
required more resources and greater willingness to use them when necessary. With tension rising
in 1899 and then during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, which the United States helped quell,
Secretary of State Hay issued what became known as The Open Door Notes.
28
In them, he
articulated the principles of respect for the administrative and territorial integrity of China and
the opportunity for international investment and trade in the Chinese market without
discrimination from any foreign powers with spheres of interest. The policy worked with mixed-
success, but the problem was that the United States lacked the capacity to enforce the open door
if another state violated the policy. This gap between capabilities and policy goals would become
most pronounced in the 1930s.

26
The Pax Britannica spanned the period 1815-1914 and is known as a time when Great Britain was a
global hegemon and the European powers were at relative peace. For the best work on Britain’s relative
decline at the time see Aaron L. Friedberg, The Weary Titan: Britain and the Experience of Relative
Decline, 1895-1905 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).
27
George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), 211.
28
John Hay, “Document 3.2: The United States Demands an ‘Open Door’ in China,” in America in the
World: A History in Documents from the War with Spain to the War on Terror, ed. Jeffrey A. Engel,
Mark Atwood Lawrence, and Andrew Preston (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 59–60; John
Hay, “Document 3.4: The Second Open Door Note,” in America in the World: A History in Documents
from the War with Spain to the War on Terror, ed. Jeffrey A. Engel, Mark Atwood Lawrence, and
Andrew Preston (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 62–63.
153
Throughout the nineteenth century the United States had always acted to maintain its
trade interests and safeguard its diplomats, traders, and missionaries. It did so either through
cooperative relations with European powers or unilateral actions. The nineteenth century is
littered with cases where United States naval forces were landed to protect American citizens and
property.
29
What began to change in the 1890s was the emergence of a view that the United
States would need to start conducting more military operations and larger ones at that.
30
For the
first time in American history there were even open calls for imperialism in some prominent
quarters. What emerged in the face of commercial expansion—a type of self-induced systemic
pressure—and a moderate increase in security competition was a more assertive and expansionist
foreign policy, coupled with efforts to reform the country’s underlying military and political
institutions. The problem that became clear was that there was a tremendous chasm between the
policy aspirations of some in the United States and the capacity of the country’s domestic
institutions to pursue such policies. The institutions would have to change before the policies
could.

Institutional Stress and State-Building During America’s Rise to Power, 1890-
1913
The most immediate need for the United States was for the country to modernize its
armed forces. Modernization of the armed forces required a fundamental reconstitution of the
machinery of the state, with far-reaching consequences for state-society relations, and the

29
See Richard F. Grimmett, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2010, CRS
Report R41677, 2010.
30
As Fareed Zakaria shows, such views had been around since the end of the Civil War, but until the
1890s they had found only a limited audience. Fareed Zakaria, From Wealth to Power: The Unusual
Origins of America’s World Role (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 44–89.
154
domestic balance of power between the states and the national government and between the
branches of the national government.
The Run-up to War with Spain
The most important changes to occur in America’s national security institutions in the
1890s centered on the construction of naval power. The navy was conceived of as having the
primary purpose to play in a more assertive foreign policy for two reasons. First, given the
country’s relative geopolitical isolation and the technology of the period, a navy with overseas
bases was seen as the most effective means for projecting power to secure the country’s limited
aims.
31
Second, while domestic opposition to a standing army was inclusive of both the army and
the navy, there was a double standard of sorts with the latter being seen as more compatible with
republican institutions. The division of labor between the two was explained by Lt. General John
M. Schofield in 1897:
In a country having the situation of the United States, the navy is the aggressive arm of
the national military power. Its function is to punish an enemy until he is willing to
submit to the national demands. For this purpose entire freedom of action is required;
also secure depots where supplies may be drawn and where necessary repairs may be
made, and harbors where cruisers may seek safety if temporarily overpowered. Hence
arises one of the most important functions of the land defense: to give the aggressive arm
secure bases of operation at all the great seaports where navy-yards or depots are located.
It may be that in special cases military forces may be needed to act in support of naval
operations, or to hold for a time important points in a foreign country; but such service
must be only auxiliary, not a primary object.
32

Thus, the navy was seen as providing the offensive arm to secure and extend the country’s
overseas interests, while the army was assigned a secondary role to defend extant foreign

31
If the United States had planned to embark on an extensive and sustained effort to conquer and pacify
overseas territories, the development of land forces would have been equally important. The fact that the
size of the army remained constant until war broke out with Spain in 1898 is an important indicator of
these limited aims.
32
Quoted in Graham A. Cosmas, An Army for Empire: The United States Army in the Spanish-American
War (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1973), 38.
155
outposts and help organize small expeditionary forces to take and hold new ones.
33
Given this
division, however, the navy was not in a position at the beginning of the 1890s to accomplish the
country’s changing aims.
Within a decade after the end of the Civil War, the navy had been downsized and
returned to a fleet of wooden sail—steam was expensive and required a network of overseas
coaling stations.
34
The navy’s withering assets were useful for the type of “gunboat diplomacy”
it was accustomed to conducting against lesser powers in Latin America and Asia, but were
largely obsolete against European powers.
35
By the early 1880s, a modernization plan was drawn
up to make up for nearly two decades of neglect following the Civil War and to deal with the
administrative problems that plagued the armed forces as a whole.
36
Most importantly, Congress
authorized the construction of four steel-hulled hybrid (steam-sail) protected cruisers. Though
some military reformers were more forward-looking, these efforts were still geared toward
continental defense and failed to centralize administrative control over the organization and
projection of the country’s military power. As Russell Weigley explains, “no responsible
government official of the 1880s was willing to acknowledge any but a defensive military intent”

33
With this division of labor, the Army would maintain its traditional primary role of providing
continental defense.
34
At the end of the war the Navy had 700 ships. Within five years that number was reduced to 52.
35
On the navy in this period see Nathan Miller, The U.S. Navy: A History, Revised and Updated (New
York: Quill, 1990), 143–148. “Gunboat diplomacy” involved mostly suppressing piracy, transporting
diplomats, evacuating citizens, and dispatching landing parties “to deal with recalcitrant ‘barbarous
tribes.’” It also involved protecting American merchants, investments, and strategic interests in Asia and
in South and Central America. Allan R. Millett, Peter Maslowski, and William B. Feis, For the Common
Defense: A Military History of the United States from 1607 to 2012, 3rd ed. (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 2012), 219–221, quote on 220.
36
Similar administrative efforts were undertaken in the army as well. As Zakaria explains, both branches
were plagued by “the traditions and vested interests of localism, decentralization, and antistatism”;
problems which were fed largely by Congressional control over the armed forces. Zakaria, From Wealth
to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role, 122–126.
156
in the modernization program.
37
It is important to note that these efforts were tied less to any
change in systemic pressure and more to the fact that the country’s existing armed forces were
inadequate under almost any circumstances.
By 1889, however, the United States’ outward naval posture began to change in response
to its increasing power and its changing relationships with foreign powers in world markets.
38

Allan Millet et al. explain that there were two priorities in this period, both of which represented
important discontinuities in America defense policy.
39
First, the United States slowly moved
toward constructing a modern navy that could not only protect its continental shoreline but also
project limited power overseas. What was required, in the words of Secretary of the Navy,
Benjamin Tracy, was “a navy that can wage war,” which at the time meant battleships.
40
In his
annual report in 1889 he argued that the country needed a fleet of twenty battleships (of which
the United States had none) with supporting cruisers and coastal defense vessels totaling some
one hundred ships. The construction of battleships, however, represented a sea change in naval

37
Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy
(New York: Macmillan, 1973), 169.
38
One event in 1889 symbolized the need for this change and had an important impact on decision
makers. In 1888, Germany overthrew the government in Samoa, which the United States had a treaty with
for a coaling station, and attempted to set up its own puppet government. The local population revolted
and in the ensuing turmoil American property was destroyed. This event, coupled with the fact that
Germany was emerging as an American rival not only in Samoa but also Hawaii, obliged the United
States to dispatch three warships to protect American citizens and property and counter German aims. On
the night of March 15, 1889, the three ships, along with three German ships, were sunk during a
Hurricane. Only the newly built British steel-hulled corvette HMS Calliope was able to survive the storm.
Lawrence Lenz explains that this event helped serve as a catalyst in the emerging consensus on the need
to build a new navy. Lawrence Lenz, Power and Policy: America’s First Steps to Superpower, 1889-1922
(New York: Algora Publishing, 2008), 23–37.
39
Millett, Maslowski, and Feis, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States from
1607 to 2012, 236–241.
40
The Secretary explained that the American navy as constructed did “not constitute a fighting force,
even when it is intended exclusively for defense. To meet the attack of ironclads, ironclads are
indispensible. To carry out even a defensive war with any hope of success we must have armored battle-
ships.”Lawrence Lenz, “Excerpts from Secretary of Navy Report 1889,” in Power and Policy: America’s
First Steps to Superpower, 1889-1922 (New York: Algora Publishing, 2008), 39.
157
policy because they would enable the United States for the first time “to gain command of the
sea” and actively project its naval power. Many in Congress were skeptical about such a shift.
The compromise that emerged in 1890 was for the authorization of three battleships, which
would be designated “sea-going coastal battleships” and be limited to a range of 4,500 miles.
41

These domestic barriers, however, slowly eroded and in 1892 another battleship (this time with
unlimited range) was authorized, followed by two in 1895 and three in 1896.
Second, with steam capable ships and increasing trade, sea lines of communication—
particularly coaling and maintenance stations—became more important for the ability of the
United States to project its growing naval power into the Caribbean, Central and South America,
and East Asia. During the nineteenth century, the United States had usage rights to certain
coaling stations as far abroad as Japan. In 1878 it had acquired exclusive privileges at Pago Pago
in Samoa and then rights for a base nine years later in Hawaii. In the 1890s, the United States
would annex both territories and construct naval facilities in the Philippines, Cuba, Guam, and
Samoa as well. These overseas assets came to play a supportive role in naval construction efforts
as they both required and legitimated a larger Navy.
Though the naval buildup in the 1890s was smaller than some would have liked and the
military reform efforts did not succeed in centralizing authority over the armed forces, the United
States was in a better position militarily at the end of the decade when it went to war against
Spain than it had been at the beginning. By the time the war began, the United States had eight
battleships (five more would be launched within two years), each of which alone could engage
Spain’s two aging squadrons. Equally important was the fact that the Naval War College, which

41
The range limitation and conceptual qualifier “coastal” show the deeply rooted nature of opposition to
the development of offensive capabilities. Italics added for emphasis. Millett, Maslowski, and Feis, For
the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States from 1607 to 2012, 239.
158
had been established as part of the military modernization efforts in 1884, planned extensively
for war against Spain in the mid-1890s and was prepared for what was expected to be a largely
naval encounter up front, followed by an expeditionary assault.
The Spanish-American War began over Cuba, but it had much larger consequences for
the United States. As Millet et al. explain, some of the growth and modernization in the armed
forces that took place over the following two decades likely would have taken place without the
war with Spain; the record of the 1890s suggests decision-makers were aware of the need make
up for several decades of neglect just to maintain the country’s minimal interests. But the war
acted to accelerate this change.
42
This was for two reasons. First, though the war had
demonstrated the importance of military force as an instrument of national policy, it also showed
that the country was woefully unprepared to confront an adversary more powerful than Spain.
Most significantly, while the war exhibited the latent capacity of American power, it also showed
the country’s severe difficulties in projecting that power overseas even in its near abroad. The
problems were captured by the fact that of the 5,462 deaths in the armed forces during the war,
only 379 were from combat. The vast majority stemmed from poor planning, lack of equipment
and supplies, and disease.
43

Second, during the war, the United States took possession of Hawaii, Guam, the
Philippines, and Puerto Rico, and began a protectorate-like relationship with Cuba. These
possessions firmly established an American presence in the Caribbean and the Pacific and
elevated the country’s interests in these regions even further. Notably, the need to establish
overseas bases and construct a canal across the isthmus in Central America became even more

42
Ibid., 285.
43
Ibid., 269–270.
159
critical. This expansion required not only an enlargement of both the army and navy, but also
significant reform to make them more capable war-fighting institutions.
Together, the problems confronted during the war and those encountered in its aftermath
created a degree of institutional stress that the American state had not previously experienced.
Decision-makers drew several important lessons from the conflict, which led to important state-
building efforts. These efforts, however, faced both significant institutional obstacles and also
opposition rooted in republican ideas about the dangers of standing armed forces and centralized
military authority. The result was a limited and incomplete state-building program.
Naval Reorganization After 1898
On the Navy side, both the planning and battleship building programs of the 1890s had
proven their worth in the war and afterward naval modernizers attempted to continue both
efforts. In 1900 the planning that had taken place earlier in the Naval War College and elsewhere
in the bureaucracy was consolidated in the general board, which consisted of senior officers who
were tasked with strategic planning for war, operations, and force structure. The establishment of
the general board, however, showed that even in the war’s aftermath, state-building efforts would
be difficult. Originally, proponents of the board wanted a naval general staff with formal
authority and greater resources.
44
But congressional opponents, along with conservative naval
officers, resisted this type of centralization. There were interest-based and parochial reasons for
this opposition, but concerns about the growth of the navy and centralized power remained a
principal stumbling block. Opposition was couched in the language of resisting efforts to
“Prussianize” the American armed forces, a program that was deemed fundamentally
incompatible with the country’s republican institutions. The general board, therefore, operated on

44
Hammond, Organizing for Defense: The American Military Establishment in the Twentieth Century,
55–59.
160
an informal basis only and was terribly under-resourced. It took until the outbreak of World War
I, and the Secretary pleading that the navy could not plan effectively for war, for Congress to
enact legislation related to navy reorganization.
45

In terms of the Navy’s building program, state-builders—led most forcefully by former
Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt who became President in 1901—had
slightly more success. Between 1899 and 1912, the strength of the Navy grew by 214%, the
strength of the Marine Corps by 209%, and the number of major combat vessels more than
doubled from thirty-six to seventy-four.
46
Moreover, the battleship building program that was
begun in the 1890s continued apace. This was partly because more battleships were needed to
defend the country’s new possessions, but also because changing military technology and the
naval arms race between Great Britain and Germany forced the United States to keep building
just to maintain the status quo. Ten battleships were built in Theodore Roosevelt’s first term. But
with the introduction of the Dreadnought class battleship by Great Britain in 1906, the United
States was forced to build another ten with the new technology over the next six years or risk
having a new but quickly obsolete navy.
There were, however, constraints on the building program because of Congress’s
continuing reluctance to create an extensive military establishment. First, the number of
battleships that the Navy needed to project the country’s power to its new overseas possessions

45
On Navy reorganization in this period see Henry P. Beers, “The Development of the Office of the Chief
of Naval Operations Part I,” Military Affairs 10, no. 1 (1946): 54–60; Henry P. Beers, “The Development
of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, Part II,” Military Affairs 10, no. 3 (1946): 10–38.
46
Major combat vessels refers to battleships and cruisers with 6-inch or larger main batteries. Millett,
Maslowski, and Feis, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States from 1607 to
2012, 285.
161
was far greater than the number Congress was even willing to consider funding.
47
In 1903, the
General Board argued that the United States needed a “two ocean navy” to be effective, which
meant a fleet of forty-eight battleships that could be split between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
48

Anything less, according to strategists like Mahan, limited the navy to projecting power in only
one ocean at a time. Thus, for example, war planning for a potential Japanese attack on
American interests in East Asia called for a withdrawal of American ships in the Pacific until the
main fleet could be transferred from the Atlantic and assembled in Hawaii. The plan, which
would remain the blueprint for potential war against Japan until the late 1930s, effectively ceded
the whole of the Pacific for at least sixty days.
49
The navy in fact never came close to a forty-
eight battleship fleet. This was because Congress was still focused on continental defense.
Moreover, as the Spanish-American War became more distant, the enthusiasm for naval power
waned. Between 1905-1913, naval construction slowed. Though the United States had the
second strongest Navy in the world by 1907, it slipped back down the world rankings by the time
of World War I.
Second, an emphasis on top line battleships obscures the fact that the building program
resulted in a force structure that was unbalanced. Roosevelt was able to bludgeon Congress into
building battleships, but not the accompanying destroyers, torpedo boats, small cruisers, colliers,
and support ships that made them effective in combat.
50
During the sail of the famous Great
White Fleet in 1907-1909, for example, foreign colliers and support ships were needed to assist

47
See the gap between General Board and Presidential recommendations on the one hand and
Congressional authorizations on the other for the years 1900-1914 in Phillips Payson O’Brien, British and
American Naval Power: Politics and Policy, 1900-1936 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998), 249–251.
48
On the idea of a two ocean navy see Richard D. Challener, Admirals, Generals, and American Foreign
Policy, 1898-1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 34.
49
Ibid., 30–32.
50
O’Brien, British and American Naval Power: Politics and Policy, 1900-1936, 51–52.
162
its circumnavigating the globe.
51
In 1916, the general board estimated that to balance the fleet
would require an additional 125 cruisers, destroyers, and other auxiliary vessels. Moreover, even
though the number of navy personnel rose dramatically by American standards during this
period, it was still too small. As a result, ships on average were undermanned by 10% of their
complement and importantly lacked the petty officers and technicians needed to operate
increasingly advanced equipment.
52

Third, projecting the country’s growing naval power overseas required bases and coaling
stations. During and immediately after the Spanish-American War, naval planners envisioned
establishing a string of naval installations around the Caribbean basin and across the Pacific from
Hawaii to the Philippines to China. But establishing such an extensive network required at a
major policy shift to project American power overseas. Concretely, it required increased funding
for the installations and troops to man them, both of which Congress was unwilling to
authorize.
53
At the end of the day the only two major bases developed were Guantanamo in Cuba
and Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.
Army Modernization After 1898
On the army side, the new territorial possessions necessitated some growth in the land
forces. Between 1890 and 1899 the size of the United States Army grew by 195%, but thereafter
remained at a strength of between 70,000-90,000 until World War I.
54
While this growth in the
size of the country’s standing forces seems significant, the military in fact remained quite small.

51
The Great White Fleet was the name given to the fleet of United State Navy vessels that
circumnavigated the globe between 1907-1909. The sailing was meant to provide experience operating as
a blue water navy, but also to showcase the growing naval capabilities of the United States.
52
Millett, Maslowski, and Feis, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States from
1607 to 2012, 288.
53
Challener, Admirals, Generals, and American Foreign Policy, 1898-1914, 36–45.
54
Millett, Maslowski, and Feis, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States from
1607 to 2012, 285, 683.
163
By comparison, the number of soldiers in the United States Army in 1914 numbered fewer than
those of much smaller countries like Bulgaria, Greece, and Romania. The fact that these
countries were so much smaller and poorer yet fielded larger armies than America can be
attributed to their insecure position in Europe.
In addition to remaining under-sized, another stumbling block to building a more
effective army was the fact that many of these soldiers were engaged in overseas constabulary
duties rather than active war preparation. What is important to point out here is that all reformers
recognized the need for the army to transition away from the era of Indian Wars and serving as a
frontier constabulary force in order to become a more battle-ready force. This could not happen
if it simply undertook the same old frontier duties in new places like Cuba or the Philippines. But
with the exception of World War I, this is what occurred to some extent even up until the eve of
World War II. As European observers were quick to note, “the United States had a declaratory
policy of military modernization and national defense, but it had a military establishment still
wedded to imperial policing.”
55

The Spanish-American War, however, did prove to be an impetus to some reorganizing
efforts in the army and gave rise to what Stephen Skowronek calls an “executive-professional
reform coalition” in the War Department.
56
This is one of the most important episodes of state-
building for national security in the pre-World War II period and is worth exploring in detail to
show the institutional resistance faced by those who sought to build or reorganize the armed
forces in a manner that undermined the existing arrangement.

55
Ibid., 300, 300–303.
56
Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative
Capacities, 1877-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 218.
164
Elihu Root who became Secretary of War in 1899 was the most important figure in the
organizational reform efforts that were undertaken in the war’s aftermath. Root stated in his
annual report that year: “The real object of having an army is to provide for war.” This platitude
was necessary to state only because the United States had never had such an army in peacetime.
As Root explained, for thirty-three years between the Civil War and the war with Spain:
…the possibility of war seemed at all times so vague and unreal that it had no formative
power in shaping legislation regarding the Army. The result was an elaborate system
admirably adapted to secure pecuniary accountability and economy of expenditure in
times of peace…The result did not include the effective organization and training of the
Army as a whole for the purposes of war.
57

Given the immediate need to administer new territorial possessions and the more general drift in
the country’s foreign policy toward greater assertiveness, Root argued that modernization was
required to make the army a more capable offensive military organization. Toward that end, he
proposed a series of reforms in the War Department’s annual reports including nationalizing the
state militias, creating new war planning capabilities, preparing war material, revising the
methods of officer selection and promotion, and expanding and streamlining military training
institutions and standards.
58

What is particularly important to highlight here is the potential impact of Root’s reform
plans on the country’s domestic institutions, which also explains why they were resisted and only
partially adopted. First, Root’s preferred plan to nationalize the militias aimed to push
considerable institutional authority vertically from the states to the federal government. For
decades, a small group of army reformers following the ideas of Bvt. Major General Emory
Upton had argued that the country needed a national reserve force in order to have a truly

57
Annual Reports of the War Department for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1899 (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1899), 45–46.
58
See ibid., 44–55; See Elihu Root, The Military and Colonial Policy of the United States: Addresses and
Reports, ed. Robert Bacon and James Brown Scott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916).
165
effective military establishment. In The Military Policy of the United States (a manuscript which
was left unfinished when he died in 1881 but nonetheless was widely circulated and later
published posthumously), Upton argued that the militias had proven largely inept throughout
American military history and should be abolished in favor an “expansible” national force
structure.
59
This would consist of a core standing army supplemented when needed by a
nationally trained and organized pool of reserves.
Root was influenced by the ideas of Upton, but was more attuned to what was politically
acceptable in the United States than Upton had been. The institution of the state militia populated
by citizen-soldiers embodied the country’s core republican values and was furthermore enshrined
in the Constitution. It could not simply be abolished. Yet, like Upton, Root was also deeply
aware of the need for the United States to have a better-trained reserve force available to be
deployed on behalf of the country’s increasing overseas interests (the militias were not only
lacking in capability but could not be deployed overseas). This meant that a national reserve
force of some kind was needed.
Root’s reform proposal was a compromise between Uptonian ideals and political reality.
On the one hand, he proposed keeping locally controlled National Guard units intact while
helping provide them with better support and training. At the same time, however, he wanted to
relegate them to domestic defense only and create a National Volunteer Reserve that would be
entirely controlled by the federal government and could be called up for international action. The
Reserve would be drawn from the Guards and receive higher pay, but be subject to federal
control and stricter training. Importantly, its officers would be reviewed by regular army officers

59
Emory Upton, The Military Policy of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office,
1916); The “expansible” army concept had been around since it was first proposed by John C. Calhoun in
1820. Millett, Maslowski, and Feis, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States
from 1607 to 2012, 112–113.
166
and appointed by the President.
60
This would effectively create a standing army-in-waiting and
replace the cumbersome process of relying on less well trained volunteer units that had to be
formed at the outbreak of war, as had been the case in the Mexican-American War, the Civil
War, and the Spanish-American War. Such volunteer units would still be needed in a larger war,
but could relegated to a tertiary role in the armed forces hierarchy.
Even with these watered down reforms, however, Root was not able to nationalize the
militia in the way many thought was required. With the Dick Act of 1903, the National Guard
was subjected to greater professional input, including better standards of training and
organization for what was termed the Organized Militia, in exchange for more financial support
from the federal government.
61
Moreover, the Act seemingly resolved the issue of state versus
national control over the militias in favor of the latter. The President was given the authority to
call out the Guard for up to nine months (instead of three), though not for service outside the
United States.
62
Additionally, national authority over the militias was extended. Previously, they
were under state control during peace and dual control during war. After the Dick Act, however,
they were placed under dual control during peace and full national control during war.
These changes, however, came at the expense of creating a truly national reserve force,
which was a bridge too far for both the National Guard and Congress. Instead, the Guard
remained the first-line offensive reserve force in the Dick Act. This status was formalized in
subsequent legislation in 1908, which required the Guard to be federalized before the Army

60
Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities,
1877-1920, 216–218.
61
The Act distinguished the Organized Militia from the Reserve Militia, which consisted of the
unorganized mass of able-bodied men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five in a given state.
62
The time restriction was later dropped altogether in a revised bill in 1908. The international service
restriction was also dropped but compulsory overseas service for the militia was later declared
unconstitutional. On the latter point see Russell F. Weigley, History of the United States Army (New
York: Macmillan, 1967), 324–325.
167
could organize a volunteer force. Moreover, the National Guard continued to have its officers
appointed by state governors. Though these appointments were tied to federal funding, this
arrangement limited the army from using its own standards of advancement and ensured some
continued autonomy for local and state politicians. The result of these reforms was to reform the
country’s reserve forces partly, but also to deny the federal government a large and capable
manpower reserve that could more easily be deployed overseas. Military planners would be more
or less stuck with the same ad hoc system for constructing an army when World War I broke out
as it had been in earlier wars.
The second part of the Root reform plan was to push institutional authority horizontally
from the legislature to the executive by breaking many of the lateral links between the army and
Congress. If the War Department was to become capable of waging war, it would need to be
streamlined as an executive organization with greater centralization and more immunity from the
parochial influence of Congress. The latter was not so much an intended purpose of the reforms
as a logical consequence of Root’s attempt to push the United States toward adopting a general
staff system in order to solve the problems of fragmented authority and poor planning that were
rife within the War Department. But in doing so, he revealed an executive-legislative fault line
that would continue to plague military modernization efforts for the next half century.
The institution of the general staff was what the military historian Michael Howard calls
“the greatest military innovation of the nineteenth century” and was the centerpiece of Root’s
proposed reforms.
63
It was first used by Prussia during the Napoleonic Wars and was quickly
adopted by Great Britain and France. But the United States had eschewed such institutional

63
Michael Howard, War in European History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 100.
168
change.
64
On the one hand, there had been no immediate need due to the lack of systemic
pressure faced by the United States. The primary purpose of a general staff was to prepare for
war in peacetime—something the country neither needed nor wanted to do previously. On the
other hand, even more than the proposal for a navy general staff, the idea of an army general
staff “conjured up visions of German militarism, regular Army arrogance, and executive branch
tyranny.”
65
A general staff was considered incompatible with the ideas about republican
government and America’s long-standing republican institutions.
Thus when Root did begin his push for a general staff he did so only slowly and was
careful to distance his proposal from European precedents, arguing: “Neither our political nor
our military system makes it suitable that we should have a general staff organized like the
German general staff or like the French general staff…We should have such a body of men
selected and organized in our own way and in accordance with our own system.”
66
Root’s plan
for a General Staff did have important differences with European examples. But as he and others
were keenly aware, the purpose of the general staff was partly to Prussianize the American
armed forces.
67
This required not only centralizing authority and building greater competencies
for planning and conducting war, which would favor the executive, but actively breaking some
of the Congressional links that served to inhibit these activities.

64
The other plank of Upton’s reform plans in the 1870s was to create a general staff. But as with his
thoughts on the militia his ideas about a general staff were ignored. Congress in fact formally rejected
such a plan during debates on Army reorganization in 1879.
65
Millett, Maslowski, and Feis, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States from
1607 to 2012, 293.
66
Annual Reports of the War Department for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1902 (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1902), 44.
67
On the Prussian origins of the Root reforms see Hammond, Organizing for Defense: The American
Military Establishment in the Twentieth Century, 12–17.
169
The main issue the general staff proposal aimed to remedy was the problem of a divided
chain of command within the army establishment. Most importantly, it was not always clear who
was atop the organizational hierarchy of the War Department. The Secretary of War was the
civilian head of the Department, while the Commanding General was the military head. The
status of both of these offices was further complicated by eight to ten bureau chiefs who were
often able to undermine both the Secretary and the Commanding General by virtue of the strong
and independent lateral connections they maintained with Congress. These ties were fueled by
the permanent nature of their positions on the staff in Washington DC.
68
This fragmented
structure of authority resulted in a disorganized army establishment that was riddled by “the
forces of localism, amateurism, and the pork barrel.”
69

Root’s proposal was to create a general staff headed by a Chief of Staff who would be
subordinate to the Secretary of War. The positions of both Commanding General and Adjutant
General (the chief administrative officer of the Army) would be abolished and the Chief of Staff
would be given genuine authority over the bureau chiefs. The bureau chiefs in turn would be
subject to forced rotation between staff and line positions and the general staff would take
control of all the bureau supply services. These services helped give the bureau chiefs direct
access to Congress and as a result were a primary source of their bureaucratic autonomy. Root
further attempted to break these lateral connections by announcing that appointments and
promotions would be based solely on internally determined merit-based criteria and not on
congressional recommendations.
70
In theory, these reforms would enable the Secretary, acting on

68
The army in the War Department was known as the staff, while the army in the field was known as the
line.
69
Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities,
1877-1920, 213.
70
Ibid., 220.
170
behalf of the President, to exert control over the entire War Department through one professional
soldier, the Chief of Staff. The Chief of Staff in turn would have the authority to carry out the
Secretary’s will throughout the Army establishment with less obstruction from Congress.
71
The
creation of a centralized and hierarchically ordered chain of command running from the
country’s chief executive officer through the entire military system was the aim of reformers
beginning with Root.
The results of the legislation passed in 1903, however, were ambiguous at best and in
some ways created new sources of institutional incoherence and struggle. The offices of
Commanding General and Adjutant General were abolished, while the office of Chief of Staff,
along with a general staff of forty-five officers, was created. Officers would rotate between staff
and line positions every four years. The general staff, however, was given somewhat uncertain
“supervisory” and “coordinating” authority over the bureaus, and the supply services were not
consolidated under its control. Moreover, the Bureau of Records and Pensions, along with its
powerful head, was exempted from this supervision and Congress inserted language to guarantee
that it could directly delegate legislative authority to the bureaus in order to circumvent the
general staff.
72
In subsequent legislation the following year the old Adjutant General’s
responsibilities were combined with the Bureau of Records and Pensions under a newly created
office of Military Secretary, which had an ambiguous dual relationship split between the
Secretary of War and the Chief of Staff. Finally, though the bureau chiefs were subject to
rotation between staff and line positions, in practice they would continue to maintain their lateral
connections to Congress.

71
Hammond, Organizing for Defense: The American Military Establishment in the Twentieth Century,
20.
72
Ibid., 26.
171
In securing these changes, Root had won some important victories for executive
influence and professionals in the War Department. Importantly, it gave this coalition a
potentially important institutional foothold in the Department for the first time. But Root’s
reorganization efforts were accepted incomplete. To be successful, they would need to be both
deepened and widened in the following years. Instead, the reverse occurred. Congress, allied
with conservatives in the War Department, both pushed back against Root’s reforms and ensured
that they did not tilt the balance too much in the direction of executive power.
The general staff itself was subjected to subsequent restrictions with its contingent being
reduced over the years. By the time of World War I, the staff for all intents and purposes had
been shrunk from forty-five to twenty officers and its “effective capacities…were nil.”
73
It had
neither centralized authority nor developed considerable capacities for planning and conducting
war. In 1907, the office of Military Secretary was abolished and the office of Adjutant General
was re-established. The Adjutant General came to wield essentially the same level of authority of
the Chief of Staff, once again blurring the chain of command. The lateral connections of the
bureau chiefs to Congress meanwhile were not broken. As a result, they “remained almost as
autonomous as before.”
74
Moreover, Congressmen continued to make requests for appointments
and promotions for friends.
75
Finally, even the Secretary of War was reminded of his place in the
state’s machinery. In 1912, the House Military Affairs Committee reprimanded the Secretary for
having “a very erroneous idea as to what his relation is to the Congress of the United States. His
office is not a Constitutional one. He derives no power from the Executive. He is the creature of

73
In comparison, the German, French, British, and Japanese had General Staffs of 650, 644, 232, and 234
officers respectively. Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National
Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920, 236.
74
Weigley, History of the United States Army, 323.
75
Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities,
1877-1920, 228.
172
the Congress of the United States, and as such is amenable to it. He has no power which
Congress does not confer.”
76

As Skowronek explains, Root’s state-building efforts represented an attempt in theory to
forge and institutionalize the executive-professional reform coalition atop the War Department.
These efforts did result in some important successes and contributed to developing a more
powerful, streamlined, and capable military organization. Given the country’s domestic
constraints against a standing army and centralized military authority, these achievements should
be considered significant. But the compromises that were made to secure passage of the reforms,
along with subsequent efforts to dilute them, tended in practice to undermine what might have
been potentially paradigmatic changes in the basic constitution of the military establishment and
its relationship to the executive and legislative branches of government. The fact that the post-
Spanish-American War building and reform programs threatened to alter the country’s
underlying institutional arrangement was what made them important. But this ultimately explains
why they were only partially adopted.
Just how incomplete the state-building efforts of the early 1900s were became clear by
the time World War I broke out in 1914. Some of the planning and organizational problems that
plagued the armed forces in the Spanish-American War had been resolved, as demonstrated by
later operations that went more smoothly. Most notably, the United States was better able to use
force to protect American interests against local disturbances in the Western Hemisphere, which
it did quite frequently in this period. But actual state-building for national security had been
limited. Importantly, the United States had not prepared itself to meet the challenge of
transoceanic great power politics.

76
Quoted in Hammond, Organizing for Defense: The American Military Establishment in the Twentieth
Century, 27–28.
173
World War I and Postwar Retrenchment
The years leading up to World War I did not alter the measured approach that was taken
in the early years after the Spanish-American War. In fact, these years in many ways resulted in
a step back from some of the more ambitious plans of the neo-Hamiltonians after an initial burst
of building and modernization in the early 1900s. Even the outbreak of war in August 1914
among Europe’s great powers, and the growing threat to American commercial interests that
came with it, did not at first lead to changes in the country’s security institutions. The challenge
before, during and after the war continued to center on how decision-makers could create and
project military force under the country’s still constrained domestic political institutions.
Preparation for War?
Several military questions dominated the pre-World War I period in the United States,
but none as much as the lingering question about how to prepare—if at all—for large-scale war.
The armed forces were now slightly larger, better equipped, and better organized than they had
been at the end of the nineteenth century. But as explained above, the compromises reached in
the early 1900s left in place much of the old status quo that had governed the armed forces for
much of the country’s history. The standing army was still small and authority over the army and
militia remained fragmented vertically between the National Guard at the state level and the
federal government at the national level, and horizontally between the legislative and executive
branches of the federal government. Coupled with the standing authorizations discussed in the
last chapter and greater activism on the part of some Presidents, this arrangement enabled the
country to defend and police many of its overseas possessions and interests. But this was true
only to the extent that these actions did not require large-scale intervention. The ability to project
174
more significant force overseas or engage in major wars still required prior decisions by
Congress, both for statutory authorization and for funding to scale up the armed forces.
When World War I began in August 1914, there was a brief flurry of excitement in the
United States. Few, however, believed the war would last long and that American soldiers would
be in Europe three years later. President Woodrow Wilson cautioned Americans to be “impartial
in thought as well as action,” and decidedly steered the country in the direction of a policy of
neutrality and non-involvement.
77
But as the war dragged on, a movement for greater
preparedness took form—pushed principally by neo-Hamiltonians like Wood and Theodore
Roosevelt—and decision-makers slowly began to think about what steps might be taken to
prepare the country for war.
The most immediate need was to reinvigorate the naval building program, which since
the mid 1900s had largely plateaued as older battleships and other assets became obsolete and
needed to be replaced. By 1914 the United States Navy was slipping back down the world
rankings.
78
With the outbreak of war, the country’s most immediate and primary interest was in
maintaining freedom of the seas, which required a more powerful navy in order to be taken
seriously by the belligerent powers. This need became even clearer after Germany began
unrestricted submarine warfare in 1915 and sunk the British ship Lusitania, killing 128
Americans.
79

77
Wilson following public opinion immediately declared a formal policy of neutrality. Woodrow Wilson,
“Message on Neutrality,” 1914.
78
The Navy estimated that the United States rose from fourth or fifth in the world rankings to second in
the 1900s but by 1911 had slipped back down to a “doubtful third.”Annual Reports of the Navy for the
Fiscal Year 1916 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1917), 4.
79
To be clear, the naval building program was not solely directed toward Germany. In fact, concerns
about Britain’s naval mastery similarly drove debates. See O’Brien, British and American Naval Power:
Politics and Policy, 1900-1936, 118–121.
175
In 1914, Congress was content to continue modernizing the fleet. But by late 1915 it was
clear that a larger building program was required. Following a set of recommendations by the
General Board, Congress passed—by a large margin—the landmark Naval Act of 1916 in
August of that year, which called for the United States to build a navy “second to none.” To do
so, the Act authorized a three-year $500 million dollars plan to produce ten battleships, sixteen
cruisers, fifty destroyers, seventy-two submarines, and fourteen auxiliary vessels, which would
enable the United States to rival even Great Britain by the early 1920s.
80
The Act was made
redundant the following year by America’s entry to the war, but it was important for what it
marked: a policy to undertake the largest peacetime military building program in the country’s
history. This was driven by the realization that the United States could not protect its growing
overseas interests during foreign wars, even when it remained neutral, without greater military
power.
The building program, however, was coupled with largely unsuccessful modernization
efforts in naval administration. The general board had been an important development for the
navy in 1900, but as Hammond explains it was a half measure of sorts that actually contributed
to stymieing more meaningful modernization over the following decade and a half.
81

Importantly, unlike in the War Department where at least a general staff with a Chief had been
created, the navy still lacked a clear military head and dedicated planning unit. In 1915, Congress
finally approved a Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), which would come to form the skeleton of
a staff system, though the office was created with no additional officers and little authority at
first. The Naval Act in 1916 helped remedy some of these defects by giving the NCO fifteen

80
Millett, Maslowski, and Feis, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States from
1607 to 2012, 304–305.
81
Hammond, Organizing for Defense: The American Military Establishment in the Twentieth Century,
55–59, 71.
176
assistants and formalizing his role as the navy’s chief officer.
82
Until World War II, however,
this office would remain hamstrung by its tenuous position in the navy. Unlike in the War
Department where a strong executive-professional coalition had emerged between the Secretary
and Chief of Staff, in the Navy Department the two would remain divided.
83
The navy had
powerful lateral links with Congress and was very much a creature of the legislature.
Modernization to make the army a more capable fighting force also continued to face
obstacles in the run-up to World War I. In 1912, the general staff, with the support of Secretary
of War Henry Stimson, produced the most comprehensive plan to date for the new army
envisioned by reformers entitled The Organization Land Forces of the United States. It is worth
quoting the report at some length to help shed light on the geopolitical context in which military
decision makers were planning even before World War I:
[W]ithin the past few years it is found that practically the whole earth is now divided up
among the principal nations and held by them either as actual possessions or as spheres of
influence. Hitherto the interests of nations or of small groups of nations have been more
or less local. But due to this worldwide expansion the contact between great nations and
races has already become close. It tends to become continually closer, due to the increase
of population and national needs, and due especially to the vastly increased facilities for
intercommunication. With this close contact thus so recently established comes a
competition, commercial, national, and racial, whose ultimate seriousness current events
already enable us to gauge. Since our conflict with Spain in 1898 practically all of the
principal nations of the earth have either been actively engaged in war or else brought to
the verge of actual war. The evidence is clear that the nations and races capable of
maintaining and protecting themselves are the only ones who can flourish in this world
competition.

We have been drawn from our state of isolation and are inevitably involved in this
competition. We must consider what preparation we will make to meet this change in our
national situation.
84

82
Miller, The U.S. Navy: A History, 181.
83
See Hammond, Organizing for Defense: The American Military Establishment in the Twentieth
Century, 49–84.
84
“The Organization of the Land Forces of the United States,” in Annual Report of the Secretary of War
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1912), 126.
177
In response to these changing conditions, the report stressed the increasing need to
distinguish between the functions of the country’s armed forces (both army and navy) at “home”
and “abroad.”
85
Given the increasing foreign interests of the United States, coupled with “the
emergency of modern war,” the report argued that the two services needed to be freed of their
home functions and built up in order to engage in “offensive” operations abroad.
86
The navy it
argued “must be free to seek and defeat the enemy” overseas, while the army needed “to secure
the fruits of naval victory.”
87
The need for the ability to project the country’s growing power
overseas with force was implied in the reforms of a decade earlier, but this was the first time the
War Department began to connect its planning proposals with active force projection.
This shift in policy aims required a larger and more powerful army, which would be
trained and ready to be deployed at all times for large expeditionary missions, as well as to serve
as the nucleus of a larger force during the early stages of major wars. The problem remained how
this could be accomplished within the country’s republican institutions.
Reform-minded officers and civilians looked to developments in European militaries for
ideas. Germany and France both maintained conscription-based peacetime armies of over
800,000 men, and had national reserves of 1,750,000 and 1,500,000 first-line troops
respectively.
88
The United States had a much larger population and was wealthier than both
countries. Lacking the same severity of systemic pressure, however, the United States did not
need such a large standing army formed from conscripts. Nor for ideational reasons was one
acceptable. The American reserve system, moreover, was still based on state-based militias, not a

85
Ibid., 67.
86
Ibid., 72, 67.
87
Ibid., 67.
88
These first-line reserves furthermore could be supplemented with secondary reserves. Weigley, History
of the United States Army, 336.
178
national reserve. The 1912 report instead turned to Great Britain, which, as a naval power like
the United States, maintained a volunteer-based standing army of roughly 250,000 and had a
nationally trained reserve force of 470,000 (combined Territorial Force and Special Reserve).
89

When World War I broke out, this arrangement enabled Great Britain to deploy an expeditionary
force of 250,000 soldiers across the English Channel within weeks, while subsequently
mobilizing nearly nine million more over the course of the war. Though not quite as ambitious,
this was more or less the capability envisioned by the report. It called for a total of 460,000
“mobile” troops, composed of 112,000 men in the regular army which would be supported by a
first-line contingent of 348,000 citizen soldiers organized in a national reserve. Furthermore,
plans were to be put in place to make an additional 300,000 citizen soldiers available
immediately when required.
90

Thus though the plan did not call for a huge increase in the regular army, it did
acknowledge that a break with traditional opposition to even a moderate sized standing army was
required. This was particularly true looking forward. The report suggested that force
requirements would likely rise in the future based on changing international factors and that no
limits should be placed on the potential size of the army or its scope of action. More importantly,
however, the plan did challenge once again the first-line status of the National Guard and by
extension the fragmentation of authority over America’s armed forces. It acknowledged this
challenge to the country’s military institutions, but argued: “we must recognize the fundamental
facts that victory is the reward of superior force, that modern wars are short and decisive, and
that trained armies alone can defeat trained armies.”
91
If the country would not tolerate a larger

89
“The Organization of the Land Forces of the United States,” 75–77.
90
Ibid., 122–123.
91
Ibid., 72–73.
179
standing army, it at least needed a better-trained reserve force that could act as a standing army-
in-waiting and be called up on relatively short notice. Over the ensuing years, especially after
World War I broke out, the varnish would be removed from reformers’ critiques of this deficit.
By 1915, the newly departed former Chief of Staff General Wood would state these views as
follows: “The voluntary system failed us in the past, and will fail us again in the future. It is
uncertain in operation, prevents organized preparation, tends to destroy that individual sense of
obligation for military service which should be found in every citizen, costs excessively in life
and treasure, and does not permit that condition of preparedness which must exist if we are to
wage war successfully with any great power prepared for war.”
92
Eventually, reformers like
Wood would go so far as to support conscription and universal military training.
The 1912 plan marked a renewed effort by the executive-professional reform coalition to
modernize the country’s military establishment after the Root reform effort had languished over
the previous decade. The plan, however, was a non-starter and fell on deaf ears in Congress.
Moreover, it was not taken up by the newly elected administration. The incoming Secretary of
War Lindley Garrison joined the reformist current, but he found few allies in the executive
branch as President Wilson and his Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan were both against
peacetime war preparation. When World War I broke out, a preparedness movement did
emerge.
93
But it was spearheaded by neo-Hamiltonians who were now mostly outside of

92
Leonard Wood, The Military Obligation of Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1915),
33–34.
93
The preparedness movement was a campaign begun in 1914 prior to America’s entry into World War I.
It sought to generate public support for increasing the country’s military capabilities and eventually for
intervening in the war on the Allied side. It was organized by individuals like Theodore Roosevelt and
Wood, and associated organizations that were newly founded including the National Security League,
American Defense Society, League to Enforce Peace, and American Rights Committee. Wood organized
military training camps for volunteers in Plattsburg, NY, and others organized preparedness parades and
other activities to put pressure on the Wilson administration.
180
government and it was distrusted and opposed by the administration who thought the
movement’s activities provocative. At the end of 1914, President Wilson reiterated his views in
his second Annual Message to Congress: “From the first we have had a clear and settled policy
with regard to military establishments. We never have had, and while we retain our present
principles and ideals we never shall have, a large standing army…We must depend in every time
of national peril, in the future as in the past, not upon a standing army, nor yet upon a reserve
army, but upon a citizenry trained and accustomed to arms.”
94

In 1915, however, the Wilson administration did begin to reconsider war preparation. The
effects of unrestricted submarine warfare, along with the sinking of the Lusitania in May, finally
convinced Wilson to order Garrison to reconsider the needs of the army. In a new plan entitled
Statement of a Proper Military Policy for the United States, the general staff essentially rehashed
their 1912 plan with larger figures. In light of the new circumstances of world war, the plan now
called for a regular army with 281,000 soldiers. Of these, 121,000 would be available to be
deployed immediately. The plan envisioned a three-part reserve force composed of 1) a regular
reserve (six years reserve duty after two years active duty) of an additional 379,000 soldiers, 2)
another reserve of 500,000 citizen soldiers ready to be deployed within three months, and 3) the
volunteer reserve of the Organized Militia.
95
The National Guard would be given increased
federal support, but would lose its first-line reserve status in this scheme and be relegated to
domestic defense only. The plan would give the country an effective 1,000,000 man fighting
force, which would be ready for action almost immediately and serve as the core of a larger
wartime army when required.

94
Woodrow Wilson, “Second Annual Message,” 1914.
95
Army War College, Statement of a Proper Military Policy for the United States (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1916), 13–18.
181
Though Wilson would not accept the size of the plan, he did endorse its primary
principles. In compromise with Garrison, and with the support of the general staff, he announced
in his third annual address in December 1915 a request to increase the regular army more
modestly to 141,843 soldiers and to create a national reserve force—to be called the Continental
army—of 400,000 men over three years.
96
Wilson found support in the Senate for his plan where
a modified version was eventually passed. But there was still strong opposition in the House. In
January he conducted a speaking tour on behalf of greater preparedness. In the meantime,
however, the Chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee James Hay offered a less
transformative bill that would increase the regular army, though maintain the first-line status of
the National Guard. The latter would effectively gut the envisioned reorganization of the
executive-professional reform coalition. By February, it was clear the national reserve plan
would not pass the House and Garrison was forced to resign.
Even as World War I continued to threaten American commercial and security interests
in the Atlantic and Europe, it was not clear any preparedness plan would pass until another
incident closer to home helped move the stalled legislative process. Following the Tampico
incident and the occupation of the Vera Cruz by American forces in Mexico in 1914, a tenuous
peace had emerged along the border. But on March 9, 1916, in the middle of congressional
debate over preparedness, an estimated 500-1000 of Francisco Villa’s men crossed the border
and attacked Columbus, New Mexico, killing fifteen American soldiers and civilians and
wounding another nine.
97
The War Department responded immediately by sending 5,000 troops
across the border in pursuit, after which it became clear that the incident might lead to war with

96
Woodrow Wilson, “Third Annual Message,” 1915.
97
These numbers are based on the War Department’s own estimates. Annual Report of the Secretary of
War (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1916), 278–279.
182
Mexico. Over the following month the War Department prepared for a possibly larger conflict by
attempting to recruit the regular Army to full authorized strength and by calling out the National
Guard in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. The former effort was unsuccessful, while the
limited strength of the latter showed the limitations of America’s reserve system.
98

It was in this context that a compromise emerged in May and the National Defense Act of
1916 was passed. The legislation called for an increase in the peacetime strength of the regular
army to 175,000 men.
99
The National Guard would remain the first-line reserve of the army, but
its numbers would be increased to over 400,000 and guardsmen would take a dual oath to both
their state and the federal government, enabling overseas deployment. The Guard was also
subjected to greater federal control, but the Division of Militia Affairs was made an independent
bureau in the War Department. The result was to further detach the guard from local politics in
exchange for increased independence at the national level.
100
The general staff meanwhile was
further weakened as explained above. By 1917, the size and locations restrictions of the act
ensured that only twenty officers were on the general staff in the War Department on the eve of
war. Furthermore, the administrative duties of the staff were restricted in a way that once again
called into question the relationship between it and the bureaus.
The National Defense Act of 1916 was a culmination of reform efforts since 1900 and
represented the most comprehensive attempt to organize the country’s land forces for war in its
history. For the professional-executive reform coalition, however, the legislation was seen as a

98
See Weigley, History of the United States Army, 347–348.
99
The organization of forces in the act provided a skeletal structure that allowed this number to be
increased to 286,000 in wartime.
100
Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities,
1877-1920, 232–233.
183
catastrophe.
101
Not only did it fail to establish a real peacetime army, it also did not centralize
authority within the War Department or streamline relations among the department, the
executive, and Congress. Worst of all, it reaffirmed the National Guard’s status as the country’s
first line reserve. Such changes, therefore, could only be considered cosmetic and not geared
toward actual war preparation.
The pattern of “executive challenge, constitutional confrontation, and congressional
counteroffensive” in the case of military modernization was consistent with other patterns in
government reform at the time, according to Skowronek: at the surface level they appeared to be
“progressive governmental adaptations to changing environmental conditions, but in their form
and content [they] reveal[ed] a government thoroughly caught up in an internal struggle over the
reconstitution of political and institutional power relationships.”
102
Clearly, decision-makers
were aware of changing environmental conditions and wanted to reform the country’s political
and military institutions to better meet new challenges. But they were still either unwilling or
unable to overcome the domestic constraints against such institutional transformation and tended
in each case to settle for reforms that did not fundamentally alter the status quo. The systemic
pressure at this time generated enough institutional stress to create conditions for possible
change, but not enough to surmount the domestic ideational and institutional obstacles to such
change.

101
Wood said he would have preferred no army legislation at all. The act in his view was actually “a
menace to public safety in that it [erroneously] purports to provide a military force of value…The thing is
dangerous to a degree exceeding anything ever attempted in legislation in this country…It has not the
support of the General Staff of the Army or the Army as a whole. It would be far better to have no Army
legislation than to have this measure put through.” Quoted in Jack C. Lane, Armed Progressive: General
Leonard Wood (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 199–200.
102
Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities,
1877-1920, 233.
184
The War and Its Aftermath
World War I would be the largest and most complex foreign undertaking against the most
capable adversary ever faced by the United States. Yet, after more than two decades of efforts to
build greater military capabilities and better organize the military establishment, the United
States was still militarily unprepared when it entered the war in April 1917. The reform efforts of
the previous years had been too late and too weak, and did not provide an institutionalized means
of projecting the country’s massive latent power overseas. Instead, as in previous major wars, the
United States was forced to build its military capabilities and administer its war efforts through
ad hoc measures that revealed many of the weaknesses of the American defense apparatus. These
weaknesses should not be overstated given the fact that the country did eventually mobilize over
four million men and contribute to an Allied victory. Mobilization, however, was slow and
dogged by inefficiencies. Moreover, as Skowronek explains, among the states that participated in
World War I “America was most clearly distinguished…by the weakness of its bureaucratic
machinery for controlling the war effort and by the intensity of the struggles being waged within
the bureaucracy (and ultimately between the bureaucracy and the private sector) over the
question of control.”
103
These limitations were most pronounced at the beginning of the war, but
continued to persist even as the size, capability, and authority of the defense apparatus grew
later.
The war, however, did present an opportunity for reformers. The size of the executive
branch swelled, new wartime agencies were created, and the army and reserve forces of the
country grew to an enormous size. The general staff—just recently emasculated by congress and
containing only twenty officers on the eve of war—ballooned to include 1,000 officers.

103
Ibid., 236.
185
Moreover, the war showed that the overseas threats the neo-Hamiltonians had warned about
before the war could indeed reverberate back to the United States. A lack of preparedness and
willingness to intervene against such threats had imperiled the country’s security and would do
so again they argued. Finally, if the United States could still be considered “on the periphery of
the Great Power system” in 1913, this was no longer true after the war.
104
The country debuted
with mixed success as an international military power. By the war’s end, however, its potential
military capacity was clearly on display. With Europe devastated by the war and Russia mired in
civil war, no one doubted the United States was now capable of being the world’s most powerful
state.
Even more than after the Spanish-American War, the post-World War I period provided a
window of opportunity for the types of sweeping domestic institutional changes and the more
assertive foreign policy championed by the neo-Hamiltonians. The question for decision-makers
remained what type of preparedness regime the country would maintain during peacetime. Was
the United States finally prepared to loosen some of its domestic constraints against centralized
authority and a standing army to take on a more interventionist foreign policy? Or would it revert
to the updated but still traditional conception of republican institutions that decision-makers had
settled on before the war?
Very quickly it became clear that public opinion and the preferences of decision-makers
ran in the direction of the latter. President Wilson hurriedly returned to his more pacific
tendencies and became less concerned with military matters. Instead, he attempted to obviate the
need for greater military preparedness—and by extension domestic institutional change—by
entrusting American commercial and security interests to the League of Nations. The League of

104
Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500
to 2000, 248.
186
Nations was ultimately rejected by a Republican Senate, but not because Republicans were
interested in greater military preparedness. In 1918, Theodore Roosevelt emerged once again as
the leading republican candidate for the party’s 1920 nomination until his health failed and he
died in early 1919. Wood became the heir of Roosevelt, but he could not win his party’s
nomination the following year. Instead, the Republican candidate was Warren Harding who
offered a “return to normalcy” after World War I and what many considered the excessive
reformist policies of the progressive era. It is possible Roosevelt or Wood would have attempted
to continue to push preparedness and reform efforts if elected. Regardless, as Huntington argues,
the rejection of Wood for the republican nomination in 1920 should be seen as the final nail in
the coffin of the neo-Hamiltonian project.
105
Both Republicans and Democrats were settled on a
policy of non-intervention and that made domestic institutional transformation less pressing.
Thus decision-makers nearly across the board shared a similar position about state-
building for national security even if for different reasons. For the army, the most immediate
consequence of this shared policy view was a massive draw down after the war and a return to
the status quo. By the middle of 1919 over 2.7 million men were discharged from the army and
by January 1920 year the army had been returned to a strength of 130,000 soldiers.
106
Hoping to
capitalize on wartime gains, the general staff began a new campaign for permanent
preparedness.
107
The postwar plan called for an increase in the regular army to an expansible
strength of 500,000 soldiers, a conscripted reserve of an 500,000 men formed from a universal
military training program administered by regulars, and the National Guard as a second-tier
reserve force. This plan would multiply by fivefold the army that preceded the National Defense

105
Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-military Relations, 270, 281–
282.
106
Weigley, History of the United States Army, 396.
107
Annual Report of the Secretary of War (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1919), 53–68.
187
Act of 1916 and create the national reserve long favored by reformers.
108
The plan also once
again sought to solidify the Secretary of War-Chief of Staff alliance by reinforcing the position
of the general staff in the War Department hierarchy, bringing an end to bureau autonomy, and
recognizing executive authority over military-industrial matters.
Congress, however, balked at these initiatives and began to reestablish some of the
authority it had inevitably ceded during the war. Again, the general staff plan was accused of
mirroring the German system against which the country had just fought bitterly to defeat.
Instead, Congress based parts of subsequent legislation on the advice of Colonel John M. Palmer
who had helped draft the 1912 general staff plan. Unlike other professionals, however, Palmer
placed greater weight on the need for the country’s military establishment to be “determined on
political grounds” and with respect for its “familiar” republican institutions—namely a small
standing army backed by citizen-soldiers.
109
Palmer suggested a much smaller regular army
backed by a better-trained citizen army. The latter would be considered the country’s main army
and be prepared to serve only during emergencies.
The National Defense Act of 1920 adopted many though not all of Palmer’s ideas and
was written in the form of an amendment to the 1916 act.
110
The authorized strength of the
regular army was set at 280,000 (which would never come close to being filled) and the citizen
army in the form of the National Guard and the Organized Militia was once again recognized as

108
Reformers argued this increase was necessary not only for greater preparation, but also because the
army had new organizations including the Air Service, the Transportation Corps, the Motor Transport
Corps, and the Tank Corps.
109
John M. Palmer, America in Arms: The Experience of the United States with Military Organization
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941), 141.
110
Importantly, as others have noted, it served as a consolidation and affirmation by Republicans of the
Democrat’s 1916 conception of the military establishment. Hammond, Organizing for Defense: The
American Military Establishment in the Twentieth Century, 87; Skowronek, Building a New American
State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920, 243.
188
the first-line reserve. Congress would not accept universal military training in any form—neither
the general staff’s plan nor Palmer’s modified Swiss-style approach. But the legislation did
enable better training for reserves and continued the reserve officer program that was expanded
to include tours of duty on the general staff.
111

As Congress consolidated these parts of the 1916 act, however, it also moved to weaken
the executive-professional position and strengthen its own in other parts of the legislation. First,
the National Guard position was better institutionalized at the national level to counteract the
influence of professionals over Guard affairs. In 1916 the National Guard had secured a position
in the state bureaucracy with a Militia Bureau in the War Department. In 1920 this bureau was
reorganized and the Guard position was strengthened vis-à-vis professionals with rules ensuring
that a guardsman would head it.
Second, Congress belatedly accepted the general staff as an institution and expanded its
contingent to include eighty-eight members. At the same time, however, the operations of the
general staff were reigned in. To begin with, its wartime powers of supervision were stripped.
The staff was to return to war planning alone and this would ensure the bureaus would regain
some of their autonomy by way of direct lines of access to Congress. Additionally, Congress
established lateral connections to the general staff itself by requiring recommendations from
subdivisions of the staff to accompany requests from the Secretary of War. This provision
enabled staff officers to do an end-run around the Secretary of War and come straight to
Congress, thereby undermining the centralized authority structure in the War Department long

111
This latter provision would prove very useful later. When the United States mobilized for World War
II two decades later it would be able to call up 80,000 reserve officers. Millett, Maslowski, and Feis, For
the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States from 1607 to 2012, 345.
189
envisioned by reformers.
112
Over the following two decades the general staff would push back
against these parts of the legislation. The result was what Skowronek characterizes as “a maze of
authoritative confusion.”
113
But Congress once again had effectively met the challenge posed by
a major war and the executive-professional reform coalition within the War Department.
The centerpiece of American defense policy in the post-World War I period would
remain the navy and its fleet. Even there, however, the United States would opt for the status quo
in naval administration, and arms limitations rather than a continued naval building program. On
the eve of his departure for the Paris Peace Conference Wilson threatened publicly that if Great
Britain refused to limit naval armaments, “the United States should show her how to build a
navy.”
114
He was even more threatening in private at the conference. The Navy Department,
moreover, prepared to continue the building program begun in 1916 with an eye toward building
a navy “second to none.” In 1918, it proposed a new plan to build an additional thirty-two new
capital ships over the following seven years, which began to make its way through Congress the
next year. This plan found little support in Congress and it is unlikely Wilson actually meant to
see them through. Rather, it was part of a bluff designed to force the other powers—particularly,
Great Britain—in Paris to come to terms with his agenda for the League of Nations and related
disarmament policies.
115

In fact, the League of Nations and other collective security measures like the various
naval conferences and treaties starting in Washington in 1921-1922, which sought to limit a

112
This was one of three ways that Dickinson explains the legislation sought to hamstring the Secretary.
John Dickinson, The Building of an Army: A Detailed Account of Legislation, Administration, and
Opinion in the United States, 1915-1920 (New York: The Century Company, 1922), 319–322.
113
Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities,
1877-1920, 243.
114
Quoted in Ross A. Kennedy, The Will to Believe: Woodrow Wilson, World War I, and America’s
Strategy for Peace and Security (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2009), 200.
115
O’Brien, British and American Naval Power: Politics and Policy, 1900-1936, 136–139.
190
potential naval arms race, and the Kellogg-Brian Pact in 1928, which sought to eliminate war as
an instrument of national policy, became de facto diplomatic and military policy for the United
States in the interwar period.
116
If decision-makers could limit the building of naval arms and the
use of force by other states, it would obviate the need for the United States to alter its domestic
institutions substantially. Stability and disarmament abroad therefore were directly tied to
institutional stability at home. As these internationalist efforts began to fail in the 1930s,
isolationism provided a new—if less credible—rationale for the status quo. These characteristics
of the interwar period are discussed at length in the next chapter.

Conclusion
The 1890s saw the United States begin its long ascent to world power and begin to face
increasing systemic pressure as its overseas interests multiplied. In 1898 the country fought a
war with Spain and in 1917 it entered World War I and helped tip the scales to the Allied side.
This increasing international security competition, punctuated by two major wars, forced the
country to consider building a large standing army for the first time in its history and
reorganizing its military establishment to centralize authority. The chapter shows that while
some important reforms did take place in this period, greater institutional change was thwarted
by the continuing strength of the constraints discussed in the previous chapter. By 1920, the
reform effort largely died out and little institutional change took place in the American military
establishment over the following two decades.

116
The Washington Naval Conference was held in 1921-1922 and limited the naval armaments of the
great powers, including total tonnage, the size of battleships and guns, and the further development of
bases in the Western Pacific. The Washington Conference was followed by additional conferences in
Geneva (1927 and 1932) and London (1930 and 1935).
191
As the chapter demonstrates, America’s basic state structure remained largely intact
during its rise to power. Most importantly, the institutional architecture of the state was not
expanded or reorganized in a way that altered the original relationship between the branches of
government or state and society. Whatever elements of the future national security state were
present by the end of this period, they were embyonic at most.

192
Chapter Five

The Drift Toward Executive War-Making Powers, 1890-1941

As the United States started to increase its military capabilities in the 1890s and then
reorganized the military establishment a decade later, the pendulum of war-making powers
slowly began to swing in the direction of Presidents. By the early nineteenth century, the strength
of the United States Army was four times larger than it had been in 1890. The War Department
was now better organized and more capable of planning operations and deploying troops
overseas. The United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps meanwhile were both
more than twice as large, and the country now had a growing fleet of battleships. With these
developments, Presidents—foremost Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin
Roosevelt—would increasingly push the boundaries of the domestic constraints on their
independent war-making capabilities.
Questions about whether, and the extent to which, executives had the power to use the
country’s armed forces independently, however, remained critical to understanding the
development of the country’s political and military institutions during this period. As the last
chapter showed, domestic considerations helped thwart the development of the latter. In this
chapter, I turn to the look more closely at the development of the country’s political institutions,
specifically as they relate to war powers. As was discussed earlier, the small increase in the
193
American armed forces and the efforts to better centralize authority helped give Presidents
greater de facto war-making powers at this time. The question remained whether Presidents
could or would also claim these powers de jure, and whether Congress would facilitate to such
claims.
This chapter focuses on the debate that emerged at this time about Presidential powers in
foreign affairs with a specific eye to its implications for the use of force. That debate was started
by the neo-Hamiltonians who were so central to the narrative of the last chapter. Neo-
Hamiltonians like Alfred Mahan and Theodore Roosevelt recognized that to make force a more
usable instrument required not only building more military power and reforming the armed
forces. They were also aware that such a policy shift required political institutional change to
provide the executive with more foreign affairs powers. Liberal internationalists like Woodrow
Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt came to recognize this fact later as well. The arguments for such
change, however, were subtle because they directly challenged the institutional balance struck
between the branches of the federal government at the Constitutional Convention. Yet, as legal
scholars have begun to show in recent years, the movement toward greater executive discretion
in foreign affairs—specifically, with respect to war powers—in this period was important.
1
As I
discussed in chapter three, there was no decisive break with the traditional interpretation of
executive war powers at this time. That would break would come after World War II. Given the
exigencies associated with the country’s growing international aims, however, Presidents began
to push against the boundaries of what they could do independently with the armed forces,

1
G. Edward White, “The Transformation of the Constitutional Regime of Foreign Relations,” Virginia
Law Review 85, no. 1 (1999): 1–150; David Gartner, “Foreign Relations, Strategic Doctrine, and
Presidential Power,” Alabama Law Review 63, no. 3 (2012): 499–534; See also David J. Barron and
Martin S. Lederman, “The Commander in Chief at the Lowest Ebb: A Constitutional History,” Harvard
Law Review 121, no. 4 (2008): 1034–1056.
194
establishing purposefully, or not, new precedents for executive war-making. These actions were
based on the claim that existing decision-making procedures prevented the country from
pursuing a proactive foreign policy.
In this chapter, I discuss these developments, as well as the backlash against them.
Between 1900 and 1920 the pendulum swung in the direction of greater executive independence.
Similar to the changes discussed in the last chapter, this shift should be read as an embryonic
institutional response to increasing systemic pressure during America’s rise to power. As I show
below, those like Mahan, Roosevelt, and Wilson recognized that becoming a great power meant
the country’s domestic institutional arrangement required rebalancing to provide executives with
greater flexibility to wield its power. And to a limited extent this is indeed what occurred.
Following World War I, however, policymakers—particularly those in Congress—attempted to
resist this institutional rebalancing. In the 1920s and early 1930s, they tried to eliminate the
central role of force in world affairs through internationalist policies. With that approach in
tatters by the mid-1930s, they turned instead to placing direct constraints on executive actions
that might drag the country into war. Again, these efforts should be read as a sign of the
tremendous institutional resistance state-builders faced when trying to adapt the American state.

Institutional Stress and the Case for Greater Executive War-Making Powers
during America’s Rise to Power
At the end of the nineteenth century, the American Congress stood as the preeminent
branch of the federal government in foreign affairs. Beginning in the 1890s, however, a nascent
argument emerged about how long that balance could remain weighted toward Congress given
the country’s trajectory in the world. Over the next four decades, both neo-Hamiltonians and
liberal internationalists alike began to make the case that the changing position of the United
195
States in world affairs required greater discretion for the country’s executive to use force on
behalf of its expanding interests. This argument, moreover, was furthered by the actions of
several presidents who helped redefine the power of the Presidency in practice.
Alfred Mahan, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Executive as Steward
Following the Spanish-American War in 1898, an important question for decision-makers
was whether the balance struck between executive and legislative war powers in the Constitution
could survive the institutional stress generated by the country’s growing international
responsibilities. Though this question was rarely discussed directly, it entered debates about how
to project the country’s growing military power overseas and what to do with its newly acquired
territorial possessions. What is important is that some decision-makers began to envision a shift
in the pendulum from the legislature to the executive at this time. Focusing on the views and
practices of Alfred Mahan and Theodore Roosevelt helps explain why and how this perspective
emerged.
Mahan’s views are insightful for several reasons. First, he was one of the earliest to
articulate the general belief that the institutional arrangement of the American government was
unequipped for managing the country’s growing international responsibilities.
2
He was also
perhaps the clearest and most far-sighted of the neo-Hamiltonians in his views about the central
role military force would have to play in the protection and extension of American interests
overseas.
3
The two, moreover, were linked for Mahan. To manage the country’s growing

2
This would become a common theme among neo-Hamiltonians, but Mahan was slightly ahead of his
contemporaries in articulating this view. See also Brooks Adams, America’s Economic Supremacy (New
York: The Macmillan Company, 1900), 43–53; Brooks Adams, The New Empire (New York: The
Macmillan Company, 1903), xv–xvi.
3
At a time when some argued that force was becoming less central to international affairs, Mahan
maintained that it was still essential. Alfred T. Mahan, The Interest of America in Sea Power: Present and
196
international responsibilities required building and projecting military power; something he
believed the American political system was not designed to do. In his most forthright views on
the subject, he worried that “any project of extending the sphere of the United States” would be
“met by the constitutional lion in its path.”
4

Additionally, what is noteworthy about Mahan is that he was of two minds on the
structure of the American government codified in the constitution. On the one hand, he was a
conservative and a strict constructionist when it came to the preservation of limited government
in the domestic arena. As early as 1884, years before he would become a great strategist, he
argued that the great issue of the time was between state “centralization and the reverse.” Where
he stood on the matter was clear: “The strict construction of the constitution…the vigilant
limitation of the central government to simply what is granted it by the constitution; this is my
dearest wish.”
5
On the other hand, when it came to the foreign affairs powers of the government
Mahan took precisely the opposite view. In The Interest of America in Sea Power he argued that
domestic constraints built into political systems are often “artificial” and “ill adapted” to a state
in transition, which he believed was true of the United States at the time. He explained that there
comes a time during such transitions “when old traditions, accepted maxims, or written
constitutions have been outgrown, in whole or in part; when the time has come for a people to
recognize that the limits imposed upon its expansion, by the political wisdom of its forefathers,
have ceased to be applicable to its own changed conditions and those of the world.” He did not
suggest rewriting the constitution, but rather thought that “modifications” were needed to enable

Future (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1898), 178, 192–193, 245, 256, 268; See also Alfred T.
Mahan, Some Neglected Aspects of War (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Company, 1907), xvi–xvii.
4
Mahan, The Interest of America in Sea Power: Present and Future, 257.
5
Alfred T. Mahan, “Letter to Samuel A. Ashe, July 26, 1884,” in Letters and Paper of Alfred Thayer
Mahan, ed. Robert Seager II and Doris D. Maguire, vol. I: 1847–1889 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press,
1975), 571–572.
197
the country to act more freely abroad without completely abandoning its political traditions at
home.
6

Mahan’s views on the constitution are significant because they foreshadowed two of the
novel ideational changes that would eventually have to occur to make the shift toward greater
executive war powers possible. The first was the splitting of domestic and foreign policy. As
explained in chapter four, the domestic constraints against executive war powers were designed
in part to guard against the growth of more general executive powers that might lead to tyranny
in the domestic arena. This problem, however, could be mitigated if the domestic and foreign
policy making powers of the executive were at least conceptually firewalled from one another.
Then the growth of executive war powers would not necessarily bleed in to domestic politics and
imperil the institutional balance there. Second, though Mahan advocated greater constitutional
flexibility in foreign affairs, he was ardently opposed to any type of formal constitutional change
that might undermine the overall framework of limited government.
7
As Walter LaFeber notes,
in doing so, he anticipated the approach later decision-makers would ultimately take:
“maintaining the form of the Constitution, but reinterpreting its provisions so the foreign policy
of a nineteenth-century continental nation could legitimately become the foreign policy of a
twentieth-century global power.” Thereby the Constitution could remain “a roaring lion” in
domestic affairs, while becoming “a tame, purring, cooperative cat” in foreign affairs.
8
Such a
distinction was necessary for creating of what Aaron Wildavsky later referred to as the idea of

6
Mahan, The Interest of America in Sea Power: Present and Future, 70–72, quote on 71.
7
He was particularly fearful of what he described as “the swing of the pendulum...toward Socialism in the
sense of the Government taking more and more into its hands—to me the insidious growth of a new
slavery.” Alfred T. Mahan, “Letter to Samuel A. Ashe, January 3, 1897,” in Letters and Paper of Alfred
Thayer Mahan, ed. Robert Seager II and Doris D. Maguire, vol. II: 1890–1901 (Annapolis: Naval
Institute Press, 1975), 483.
8
Walter LaFeber, “The ‘Lion in the Path’: The US Emergence as a World Power,” Political Science
Quarterly 101, no. 5 (1986): 708.
198
“two presidencies”—a constrained presidency in the domestic arena and a powerful presidency
in the international arena.
9

Mahan was not clear about the exact constitutional modifications needed; only that they
should be directed toward allowing the United States to act more forcefully in its foreign
relations. At least one of these modifications, however, included insulating the executive from
popular pressures. Mahan consistently lauded the freedom of European statesmen to act
independently and lamented the constraints against such action in the United States. In what
would become a more widespread view over time, he suggested the public and Congress were
incapable of deciding questions of foreign policy. He openly worried that public opinion would
act as a “crippling force” on the country’s potential strength.
10
Privately, he ridiculed public
opinion, writing to a friend that he could “conceive few more pitiful sensations than that of
fretting about what the public thinks.” “The public,” he contended, “is an honest and in the main
well-meaning fellow, but in current questions of the day a good deal of a fool.”
11
As for
Congress, he held a similarly dismissive view, arguing “the dangers of a country so free as ours
lie in the legislature rather than in the executive; in the tyranny of a majority rather than in the
abuse of one man’s power.”
12

While Mahan began to outline an intellectual justification for insulating the executive, it
would take presidential initiative to actually challenge and begin to change the institutional status
quo. This effort can be said to have begun under President McKinley following the Spanish-

9
Aaron Wildavsky, “The Two Presidencies,” Trans-Action 4 (1966): 7–14.
10
Mahan, The Interest of America in Sea Power: Present and Future, 103.
11
Alfred T. Mahan, “Letter to Robert U. Johnson, May 22, 1898,” in Letters and Paper of Alfred Thayer
Mahan, ed. Robert Seager II and Doris D. Maguire, vol. II: 1890–1901 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press,
1975), 556.
12
Alfred T. Mahan, “Letter to Samuel A. Ashe, February 2, 1886,” in Letters and Paper of Alfred Thayer
Mahan, ed. Robert Seager II and Doris D. Maguire, vol. I: 1847–1889 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press,
1975), 625.
199
American War, though it is not clear he had the specific aim of expanding executive war powers
through his actions.
13
As noted in chapter four, McKinley independently dispatched 5,000 troops
from the Philippines to China as part of an international expeditionary force during the Boxer
Rebellion in 1900.
14
Presidents (and local commanders on their own initiative) had acted
similarly to protect American citizens and property on the basis of statutory authorization in
many instances previously. What was different about this case was that it broadened the scope
for such actions. McKinley likewise justified the use of force by the duty to protect American
citizens and property and denied that it constituted an act of war. The Boxer Rebellion operation,
however, exceeded the size of earlier ones and was clearly conducted with a larger political aim
in mind. The Supreme Court later determined the mission did indeed constitute an act of war,
though it avoided the war powers question by arguing the President’s actions had been
authorized by subsequent legislation.
15

The Boxer Rebellion served in hindsight as a symbolic turning point of sorts. This was
the first time a President used the responsibility to protect citizens and property so blatantly as a
pretext to use force to promote other American foreign policy goals. Following McKinley, others
would continue to stretch the boundaries of executive war powers along the same lines. Perhaps
none would do so as much as his successor Theodore Roosevelt who not only stretched these

13
Prior to the Spanish-American War, for example, McKinley sought congressional authorization not
once but twice. The first authorization provided the authority “to use the military and naval forces of the
United States as may be necessary.” He returned for a second authorization later because he did not
believe the first enabled him to enact a blockade against Cuba. This episode suggests McKinley clearly
still saw specific congressional authorizations as necessary for using force. See Gartner, “Foreign
Relations, Strategic Doctrine, and Presidential Power,” 509.
14
Congress was officially in recess.
15
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), 88–89; Louis
Fisher, Presidential War Power, Third Edition, Revised (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas,
2013), 58.
200
boundaries in practice, but also attempted to construct a more expansive conception of the
executive in theory.
Like Mahan, Roosevelt believed the United States needed to use force on behalf of its
growing interests.
16
He also believed, however, that this would prove difficult in a democracy.
Public opinion was ill informed and Congress was institutionally incapable of guiding the
country’s foreign policy as a great power. He lamented the fact that Americans were “short-
sighted” and did “not understand how things are outside [their] own boundaries.”
17
The United
States now had “interests in the whole world,” he argued, but without an understanding of the
world at large Americans could neither decipher those interests nor act on behalf of them.
18

Congress, meanwhile, did not fare much better in Roosevelt’s opinion. He thought congressmen
were hopelessly dependent on local constituencies, and, therefore, lacked the institutional
independence to prepare the country for war adequately or conduct its foreign policy
effectively.
19
He expressed shock that even after the Spanish-American War Congress still

16
See Theodore Roosevelt, “‘The Strenuous Life,’ Speech Before the Hamilton Club, Chicago, April
10,1899,” in The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses, ed. Janet Baine Kopito (Mineola, NY: Dover,
2012), 1–10; Theodore Roosevelt, “‘Military Preparedness and Unpreparedness,’ Published in the
‘Century,’ November 1899,” in The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses, ed. Janet Baine Kopito
(Mineola, NY: Dover, 2012), 79–88; Theodore Roosevelt, “‘Expansion and Peace,’ Published in the
‘Independent,’ December 21, 1899,” in The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses, ed. Janet Baine Kopito
(Mineola, NY: Dover, 2012), 11–17. See also John B. Judis, The Folly of Empire: What George W. Bush
Could Learn from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (New York: Scribner, 2004), 59–60.
17
Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1913), 581; Quoted in
Howard K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1956), 455.
18
Roosevelt explained: “Here what is most lacking to us is to understand that we have interests in the
whole world. I wish that all Americans would realize that American politics is world politics; that we are
and that we shall be involved in all great questions.” André Tardieu, “Three Visits to Mr. Roosevelt,” The
Independent LXIV (April 16, 1908): 862.
19
In 1908, for example, he wrote to Whitelaw Reid about declining support for American policy in the
Philippines complaining that “A legislative body most of the members of which are elected by
constituencies that in the nature of things can know nothing whatever of the totally different conditions of
India, or the Philippines, or Egypt, or Cuba, does not offer the best material for making a success of such
201
showed “a queer inability” to put the United States on a better security footing and laid the blame
for future foreign policy failures at their feet.
20
Equally concerning for Roosevelt was the
slowness with which Congress deliberated. His bold foreign policy vision called for international
policing actions, which required the United States to intervene quickly during emergencies.
Congress, according to Roosevelt, was not equipped to deal with these types of instances.
Unlike McKinley, who had inadvertently broadened executive war powers through his
actions during the Boxer Rebellion, Roosevelt would attempt to do so more purposefully when
given the chance. During his Presidency he ordered the use of force to protect American citizens
and property several times, as others had. However, similar to McKinley’s deployment of the
expeditionary force during the Boxer Rebellion, Roosevelt’s interventions in Columbia (over
Panama and the canal), the Dominican Republic, and Cuba stand out because they were all
clearly linked to larger political aims and were conducted without even congressional
consultation.
21
None of these actions moreover were authorized post hoc.
Roosevelt justified his actions based on both short and long-term arguments in favor of
decisive executive action. In the short-term, he argued such action was a functional adaptation to
temporal circumstances. International politics were now unfolding more quickly; a fact driven by
technological advances in the nineteenth century in transportation and communication. It was at
this time that Lafeber suggests Louis Fisher’s “shrinking globe” theory of American foreign

government.” Quoted in Judis, The Folly of Empire: What George W. Bush Could Learn from Theodore
Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, 68.
20
He argued that public opinion and Congress were likewise responsible for the lack of preparedness after
the Civil War. Roosevelt, “‘The Strenuous Life,’ Speech Before the Hamilton Club, Chicago, April
10,1899,” quote on 7; Roosevelt, An Autobiography, 225, 234–236.
21
There is some question about whether interventions in cases where the United States has treaties, as in
Cuba, are in effect authorized by treaty stipulations. Congressional war powers advocates argue that this
cannot be the case. The Senate alone holds treaty powers in Congress, while war powers are held jointly
with the House. Thus, a treaty—ratified by the Senate and signed by the President— cannot serve as a
basis for action because it does not give the House a vote. See Fisher, Presidential War Power, 60.
202
policy began to take shape.
22
Given these changes, Congress—and by extension long drawn out
congressional deliberation—remained important for determining domestic matters and the long-
term foreign policy goals of the country. Roosevelt argued, however, that the qualities that made
the legislature an effective institution in these areas made it unsuited “for shaping foreign policy
on occasions when instant action is demanded.”
23
He explained this logic throughout and after
his Presidency. For example, nearly a decade after intervening in Columbia on behalf of the
United States’ canal interests, he proudly argued: “If I had followed traditional, conservative
methods I would have submitted a dignified state paper of probably two hundred pages to
Congress, and the debates on it would be going on yet. But I took the Canal Zone and let
Congress debate, and while the debate goes on, the canal does also.
24
” In 1906 he made an
argument along similar lines in a letter to Henry Cabot Lodge about having just ordered troops to
intervene in Cuba:
Of course if I had announced…that under no circumstances would I use armed force…or
if…I had stated I could take no action until Congress decided what to do—just imagine

22
Fisher argues that over the twentieth century United States decision-makers have come to see the world
as constantly getting smaller and bringing foreign threats closer to American shores. He explains: “This
idea of a shrinking globe has been part of the conceptual shift behind the enlargement of presidential
power. We apply the concept to travel and communication with neutral effect, but constitutionally it
shrinks not merely the globe but congressional power as well.” This view became most pronounced after
World War II, but can be seen in nascent form beginning at the turn of the twentieth century. Louis
Fisher, Constitutional Conflicts Between Congress and the President, Fifth Edition, Revised (Lawrence,
KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 257; LaFeber, “The ‘Lion in the Path’: The US Emergence as a
World Power,” 714–715.
23
Theodore Roosevelt, “Letter to William Howard Taft, September 17, 1906,” in The Letters of Theodore
Roosevelt, ed. Elting E. Morison, vol. V: The Big Stick, 1905–1907 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1952), 414.
24
Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt (New York: Random House, 2010), 145. Roosevelt’s actions in
Columbia were in fact so flagrant that two decades later Congress sought to make amends while
negotiating a new treaty. As Louis Fisher explains, “The Thompson-Urrutia Treaty of 1922 gave
Columbia special canal rights and a cash grant of $25 million to compensate, in effect, for Roosevelt’s
heavy-handed tactics. The original version of the treaty contained an expression of ‘sincere regret’ for
America’s actions in 1903, but the final version merely said that the United States and Columbia were
‘desirous to remove all the misunderstandings growing out of the political events in Panama in November
1903.’” Fisher, Presidential War Power, 60.
203
my following the Buchanan-like course of summoning Congress for a six weeks’
debate…as to whether I ought to land marines to protect American life and property—the
fighting would have gone on without a break, the whole Island would now be a welter of
blood.
25

Roosevelt explained that in these and other circumstances only the executive was well suited to
take the types of decisive actions that were needed to protect American citizens and property,
and to further the country’s political, commercial, and security interests.
In the long-term, however, he conceived of his actions as part of a broader initiative to
expand the powers of the executive in foreign affairs. Roosevelt articulated a conception of the
modern American executive known as the stewardship theory of the Presidency. The logic
behind the stewardship theory was two-fold. First, the President was the only nationally elected
official in the United States government. Therefore, he was the only elected individual who
could claim legitimately to act on behalf of all the American people. Roosevelt believed this was
an important, yet untapped source of power. Second, he reinterpreted the Presidency to argue
that there was in effect a residual source of inherent Presidential power located in the
Constitution; that Presidents were “limited only by specific restrictions and prohibitions
appearing in the Constitution or imposed by the Congress under its Constitutional powers.”
26

Otherwise, he believed it was in “the public interest that the Executive should have an absolutely
free hand.”
27
In a well-known passage, Roosevelt summarized the stewardship theory in his
autobiography as follows:

25
Theodore Roosevelt, “Letter to Henry Cabot Lodge, September 27, 1906,” in The Letters of Theodore
Roosevelt, ed. Elting E. Morison, vol. V: The Big Stick, 1905–1907 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1952), 427.
26
Roosevelt, An Autobiography, 388–389.
27
Theodore Roosevelt, “Letter to William Howard Taft, November 29, 1908,” in The Letters of Theodore
Roosevelt, ed. Elting E. Morison, vol. VI: The Big Stick, 1907–1909 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1952), 1391.
204
My view was that every executive officer…was a steward of the people bound actively
and affirmatively to do all he could for the people, and not to content himself with the
negative merit of keeping his talents undamaged in a napkin. I declined to adopt the view
that what was imperatively necessary for the Nation could not be done by the President
unless he could find some specific authorization to do it. My belief was that it was not
only his right but his duty to do anything that the needs of the Nation demanded unless
such action was forbidden by the Constitution or by the laws.
28

He was careful to note that Congress retained its full powers and that Presidents needed to heed
legislative directives, but that in policy vacuums they should act with discretion.
29

While the stewardship theory was meant to apply to all aspects of government, Roosevelt
was explicit that foreign affairs was one of the most important areas where stewardship was
needed. He was keen in particular to the idea that his independent actions as President in this
area would serve as precedents that he hoped others would follow. This was particularly true of
his penchant to use force to further the country’s interests. As civil war threatened Cuba in 1906,
he wrote to his Secretary of War William Howard Taft explaining his intentions as follows:
[I]f the necessity arises I intend to intervene, and I should not dream of asking the
permission of Congress…I intend to establish a precedent for good by refusing to wait for
a long wrangle in Congress. You know as well as I do that it is for the enormous interest
of this Government to strengthen and give independence to the Executive in dealing with
foreign powers…Therefore the important thing is for a President who is willing to accept

28
Roosevelt wrote his autobiography during the administration of his successor William Howard Taft
who he had handpicked but became disenchanted with in part because of his distaste for Taft’s
abandonment of his new Presidential approach. Roosevelt labeled his own approach “the Jackson-Lincoln
theory of the Presidency” in an attempt to root his view in previous administrations that were both
popular and legitimate. He accused Taft meanwhile of adhering to the “Buchanan school” in an attempt to
link Taft to one of the country’s least popular administrations. He described this approach as taking a
“narrowly legalistic view that the President is the servant of Congress rather than that of the people, and
can do nothing, no matter how necessary it be to act, unless the Constitution explicitly commands the
action.” Roosevelt, An Autobiography, 388–399, 504.
29
One provides an exception to this view and foreshadowed the type of fait accompli practices that some
of his successors would come to rely on after World War II. When Roosevelt decided to send the “Great
White Fleet” around the world, he did so on his own accord. When word made its way to Congress, an
effort began to restrict appropriations for the voyage because it had not been authorized and congressmen
were worried it would exacerbate American-Japanese relations. As Barron and Lederman explain:
“Roosevelt claimed no power to disregard such a funding curtailment, arguing only that he already had
the money from prior appropriations.‘ He dared Congress to ’try to get [the fleet] back.” Barron and
Lederman, “The Commander in Chief at the Lowest Ebb: A Constitutional History,” 1035.
205
responsibility to establish precedents which successors may follow even if they are
unwilling to take the initiative themselves.”
30

Roosevelt’s actions as President did help serve as precedents for some of his successors,
particularly in terms of extending what it meant to protect citizens and property. William
Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson and others would rely on a similar logic to conduct small-scale
operations in the Caribbean, and Central and South America throughout the 1910s and 1920s.
It is important, however, not to overstate either Roosevelt’s intentions or the actual
changes he was able to effect in terms of broadening executive war powers. First, even though
Roosevelt articulated a bold theory of the Presidency, his actions were less radical than his
rhetoric might suggest. In substance he still adhered to a more or less traditional interpretation of
the institutional arrangement between the branches envisioned in the Constitution. As Gordon
Silverstein explains, contemporaries have a habit of anachronistically interpreting Roosevelt’s
actions as an inter-branch struggle. It is true as I showed above that Roosevelt did view his
presidency in such terms at times and did believe the executive ought to be far less restrained by
the legislature in foreign policy. As Silverstein reminds us, however, the dominant struggle at the
time was not between the branches of the federal government, but between “advocates of a
strong nation” like Roosevelt and “those who feared central power, struggled to retain checks on
it, and advocated the continuation of decentralized authority.”
31
In practice this struggle centered
on questions of national versus state power. Indeed, as I explained earlier, this was true for the
entire history of the pre-World War II period. Roosevelt believed that by acting forcefully as

30
Roosevelt, “Letter to William Howard Taft, September 17, 1906”; In the case of the Dominican
Republic he made a similar argument stating that he hoped “the action there taken should serve as a
precedent for American action in all similar cases.” Roosevelt, An Autobiography, 548.
31
Gordon Silverstein, Imbalance of Power: Constitutional Interpretation and the Making of American
Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 54–56, quote on 55.
206
President he was not furthering the interests of the executive over the legislature, but promoting a
truly national policy as head of the federal government.
Second, it is critical to note that Roosevelt acted through sheer force of personality—
what I called “personal autonomy” earlier—not by explicitly institutionalizing a new set of
Presidential powers. As William Widenor explains, Roosevelt’s was “a highly personal solution
to the problem of the conduct of foreign policy under American circumstances,” which did not
survive his Presidency intact.
32
This personal dimension to the growth of executive war-making
powers was important during this period and is a topic I come to back to later. For now, it
sufficient to note that Roosevelt had an extraordinary personality and capacity to act that was
separate from and was not derived solely from his institutional position.
Third, and related to the second point, Roosevelt’s successors did not simply pick up the
precedents he established and run with them. Oddly enough, it was his former Secretary of War,
handpicked successor, and future Supreme Court Justice William Howard Taft who offered the
most critical counterpoint to Roosevelt’s broad view of executive power contained in the
stewardship theory. Taft called it “an unsafe doctrine,” which in practice would create executive
powers with potentially indefinable boundaries.
33
Taft believed that without congressional
authorization Presidential war powers were limited to determining the movement of the armed
forces and the capacity to “defend the country against invasion, to suppress insurrection and to

32
William C. Widenor, Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an American Foreign Policy (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 149–150, quote on 149.
33
Taft directly refuted Roosevelt by arguing: “The true view of the Executive functions is, as I conceive
it, that the President can exercise no power which cannot be fairly and reasonably traced to some specific
grant of power or justly implied and included within such express grant as proper and necessary to its
exercise. Such specific grant must be either in the Federal Constitution or in an act of Congress passed in
pursuance thereof. There is no undefined residuum of power which he can exercise because it seems to
him to be in the public interest.” William Howard Taft, Our Chief Magistrate and His Powers (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1916), 144–145, 139–140.
207
take care the laws be faithfully executed.” These powers enabled Presidents to use small naval
marine detachments overseas in emergencies, but could not supersede Congress’s duties to
initiate an “act of war.”
34
It is not clear Roosevelt intended to push executive war powers that far
either. Regardless, if he did intend to, Taft ensured that such a change was not permanent.
Woodrow Wilson and the Theory of Government as a Living System
The heirs who took up Theodore Roosevelt’s interest in the growth of presidential power
came from across the aisle in the form of Woodrow Wilson and Theodore’s cousin, Franklin
Roosevelt. Wilson in particular is an important figure because he was perhaps the only scholar-
practitioner to ever serve as an American President. His views and practices therefore represent
those of someone who as a political scientist thought extensively about the institutional
arrangement of the United States government and as a President attempted to put into practice
what he thought should be the proper balance between the branches of government. In this
section I discuss Wilson and his theory of government as a living system and then return to look
at Franklin Roosevelt’s activism later in the chapter.
In 1885 Woodrow Wilson rose to prominence as a political scientist with the publication
of his dissertation Congressional Government: A Study of American Politics. In this treatise he
explained why the institutional arrangement envisioned by the Framers had come to favor a
government dominated by the legislature. By virtue of Congress’s control of the purse strings, it
could act as “supreme overlord” of the country’s affairs—a position that was sometimes
undermined by the divided nature of American government, but one that had been consolidated

34
Taft distinguished local police actions from acts of war as a means of distinguishing Presidential war
powers. The former were conducted by naval marine units in emergencies and were to be directed by the
President, while the latter were conducted by regular army units for others purposes and were to be
authorized beforehand by Congress. He argued that President Wilson’s actions in the Vera Cruz incident
constituted an act of war and therefore were unconstitutional. Ibid., 95–96.
208
over time.
35
The Presidency, on the other hand, was a relatively weak institution. Presidents
rarely could initiate policies. Rather, their power was in denying congressional initiatives.
According to Wilson, Presidents were essentially no stronger than their ability to wield the veto
pen. Moreover, given Congress’s appropriations and approval powers over executive offices, he
went so far as to describe the President as “powerful rather as a branch of the legislature than as
the titular head of the Executive.”
36
As the title of his work suggested, the United States had a
government dominated by Congress.
Wilson, however, would later begin to change his views as the world around him began
to change and foreign policy issues came to the forefront. In the fifteenth edition of
Congressional Government, which was published in 1901, he wrote a new preface explaining
that his earlier work no longer accurately captured the state of American government. In what
constituted a nascent theory of state, Wilson characterized the American government as “a living
system” that was in the process of undergoing tremendous change.
37
One of the most important
changes he identified was in the growth of Presidential power stemming from the country’s
overseas involvement since the Spanish-American War. The country’s plunge into international
politics had created new policy space for “constructive statesmanship” by Presidents, thereby
expanding the powers of the office. This was not an isolated shift, according to Wilson, but
rather a larger response to the structural demands of international politics. He explained:
When foreign affairs play a prominent part in the politics and policy of a nation, its
Executive must of necessity be its guide: must utter every initial judgment, take every
first step of action, supply the information upon which it is to act, suggest and in large
measure control its conduct. The President of the United States is now, as of course, at

35
Woodrow Wilson, Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics, Fifteenth Edition
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1901), 312, 316.
36
Ibid., 260.
37
Ibid., v.
209
the front of affairs, as no president, except Lincoln, has been since the first quarter of the
nineteenth century, when the foreign relations of the new nation had first to be adjusted.
38

Wilson concluded the new preface by conceding that these changes threatened to unbalance the
entire institutional arrangement he described in Congressional Government, making it
“hopelessly out of date.”
39

In the succeeding years, Wilson’s views would continue to evolve further along these
lines as part of a broader—though not fully formed—theory about the relationship between
international politics and domestic political institutions. Already by the end of the 1890s he had
developed the outline of this theory in his massive tome The State: Elements of Historical and
Practical Politics, which examined the comparative development of states throughout history.
Wilson concluded that state institutions historically had formed and transformed “in response,
not to new theories, but to new circumstances”; that “institutions…varied infinitely according to
their environment.” Similar to contemporary continental theorists, he reasoned that to a large
degree they were shaped by “Climate, war, [and] geographical situation.”
40

Later, he would apply these ideas specifically to the United States in Constitutional
Government in the United States, which updated and in many ways overturned his views from
two decades earlier by placing the President, not Congress, at the center of American
government. Again, he framed his views about the changing nature of American political
institutions by noting that government is “a living thing…It is modified by its environment,
necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life.”
41
On the one hand,

38
Ibid., xi–xii.
39
Ibid., xiii.
40
Woodrow Wilson, The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics, Revised Edition (Boston:
D.C. Heath & Company, 1897), 555.
41
Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1908), 56.
210
Wilson the political scientist used this theory to explain the changing nature of American
government. Looking back on American history, he noted the changing fortune of the Presidency
based partly on whether domestic or foreign questions predominated the business of government
at any given time. Looking at the present, he noted how the Spanish-American War and the
country’s growing involvement overseas afterward had created new circumstances for the
country and “changed the balance of parts” within the government. With “foreign questions”
now “leading questions,” the President was by necessity put “at the front of [America’s]
government.”
42
This trend he argued was only likely to become more pronounced over time.
On the other hand, Wilson the political theorist and aspiring politician increasingly
advocated a greater role for the executive. In an important break with the Framers, he rejected
what he described as the static Newtonian logic of checks and balances contained in the United
States Constitution. Wilson’s critique was that if the parts of government constantly limited each
other, the whole could not act.
43
He argued instead that, as a living system, government “must be
Darwinian in structure and in practice.”
44
In a view that echoed Mahan, he said that for a country
to survive and prosper, its constitution had to be remade “from age to age by changes of life and
circumstance and corresponding alterations of opinion. It does not remain fixed in any
unchanging form, but grows with the growth and is altered with the change of the nation’s needs
and purposes.”
45
Given the country’s present circumstances, constitutional change meant

42
Ibid., 59.
43
This was of course the entire logic behind the theory of limited government contained in the
Constitution.
44
Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States, 54–57, quote on 57.
45
He continued later: “The Constitution cannot be regarded as a mere legal document, to be read as a will
or a contract would be. It must, of the necessity of the case, be a vehicle of life. As the life of the nation
changes so must the interpretation of the document which contains it change, by a nice adjustment,
determined, not by the original intention of those who drew the paper, but by the exigencies and the new
aspects of life itself.” Ibid., 22, 192.
211
increased presidential power. Wilson did not advocate for formal institutional change. Rather, he
called on Presidents as the only nationally elected figure to use the backing of public opinion and
assume a greater role vis-à-vis Congress, arguing: “The President is at liberty, both in law and
conscience, to be as big a man as he can. His capacity will set the limit.”
46
This was an approach
he would carry into office himself.
Though Wilson was interested in the trend toward growing presidential powers in the
general area of foreign affairs, he said very little specifically about the division of war-making
powers between the branches of the federal government. This was perhaps because, unlike
Theodore Roosevelt, he did not see force as so central an instrument in the country’s foreign
policy toolbox prior to taking office. In fact, Wilson fashioned himself a pacifist and at least
publicly promised to keep the United States out of World War I as President. But if Wilson
intended to avoid using force to achieve the country’s foreign policy goals, his actions painted a
different picture. By the time he left office in 1921, he had launched half a dozen interventions in
Latin America, deployed troops to Siberia, and entered the United States into World War I. In
practice, he hewed closely to the policy of armed intervention of his predecessors Roosevelt and
Taft and actually surpassed them to become “the greatest military interventionist in U.S. history”
to that point, according to Lafeber.
47

In each of these instances of intervention, moreover, Wilson showed the same penchant
for executive discretion as his predecessors in terms of the procedural means for employing
armed force. In the Veracruz case, for example, he requested Congressional authorization to send
troops, which he received two days later in the form of a joint resolution. But before Congress

46
Ibid., 70.
47
Walter LaFeber, The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad (New York: W.
W. Norton & Company, 1994), 261.
212
could finish debating the issue and pass a resolution, Wilson ordered the landing of Marines in
Veracruz and committed the country to a seven-month occupation. In what would become a
trend later, he essentially handed Congress a fait accompli and argued that he had the authority to
employ the armed forces with or without Congressional support.
48
One year later he ordered
another intervention in Haiti to help establish a more acceptable government there. He confided
to his Secretary of State Robert Lansing “I fear we have not the legal authority to do what we
apparently ought to do,” but argued that seeking proper legislation would be too cumbersome.
49

Even in the case of World War I, where Wilson attempted to keep the country out of war
during the first few years and eventually sought and received a Congressional declaration of war,
he played a pivotal role in committing the country to use armed force earlier. In February 1917,
as Germany refused to stop its campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare, Wilson sought a
Congressional resolution to move the country from a policy of neutrality to one of armed
neutrality. Again, he noted that he believed he already possessed such authority, but was seeking
the backing of Congress to be sure.
50
The House passed the bill, but the Senate could not agree.
A small minority argued that the bill unconstitutionally delegated war powers to the President.
How neutrality policy was implemented was closely related to determining whether the country
would inch closer to war or not. Pressed by a Congress mired in procedural inertia, Wilson

48
In his address to Congress, Wilson was careful to note: “No doubt I could do what is necessary in the
circumstances to enforce respect for our Government without recourse to the congress, and yet not exceed
my constitutional powers as President.” Woodrow Wilson, “An Address to Congress on the Mexican
Crisis, April 20, 1914,” in Woodrow Wilson: Essential Writings and Speeches of the Scholar-President,
ed. Mario R. Dinunzio (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 389.
49
Woodrow Wilson, “Letter to Robert S. Lansing, August 4, 1915,” in Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed.
Arthur S. Link, vol. 34: July-September 1915 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 78.
50
Wilson explained: “I feel I ought…to obtain from you full and immediate assurance of the authority
which I may need at any moment to exercise. No doubt I already possess that authority without special
warrant of law, by the plain implication of my constitutional duties and powers; but I prefer, in the
present circumstances, not to act upon general implication. I wish to feel that the authority and the power
of the Congress are behind me in whatever may become necessary for me to do.” Quoted in Fisher,
Presidential War Power, 68–69, quote on 68.
213
ultimately decided to shift to a policy of armed neutrality independently before a decision was
made.
51
Two months later, however, he returned to Congress seeking a declaration of war against
Germany. He argued that a policy of armed neutrality was “impracticable” because Germany had
decided to treat America’s armed guards as unlawful combatants. Wilson, therefore, was forced
to admit that his own policy of armed neutrality had come to “produce what it was meant to
prevent” by making America’s entry into the war necessary.
52
There had been strong support in
Congress for armed neutrality and it is likely the country was heading in the direction of war, but
Wilson’s independent actions made it inevitable.
Again, like Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson believed in active Presidential leadership and
helped push the Presidency toward greater discretion in the use of force. This was particularly
true in terms of the use of force for protecting citizens and property, broadly conceived. But as
legal scholars have shown, time and again when faced with more significant questions about
committing the country to war, they—and later Franklin Roosevelt—adhered to what I described
in chapter four as a traditional interpretation of executive war-making powers. Their actions
certainly challenged that interpretation, but did not constitute a fundamental break with it.
Though Roosevelt and Wilson suggested as much, what is important is that at no time during this
period did any President ever claim a prerogative to make war independently.

51
On this episode see Justus D. Doenecke, Nothing Less Than War: A New History of America’s Entry
Into World War I (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2011), 264–277.
52
Woodrow Wilson, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress Calling for a Declaration of War,” in
Woodrow Wilson: Essential Writings and Speeches of the Scholar-President, ed. Mario R. Dinunzio
(New York: New York University Press, 2006), 399.
214
The Case for Executive Constraint during the Interwar Years
During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the Untied States’ more assertive
foreign policy and the accompanying shift from the legislature to the executive with respect to
the initiative to use force caused few substantive efforts to curb executive war-making powers.
Presidents were acknowledged as the dominant foreign policy voice of the government.
Moreover, they were able to use force to protect citizens and property (at least in principle),
though it was widely accepted that anything more extensive required congressional
authorization. But by the close of World War I, decision-makers became more aware of the need
to prevent the trend toward greater executive war-making powers from continuing.
World War I was the country’s first full-blown industrial era war and created novel
challenges for the institutional balance between the executive and the legislature. As Edward
Corwin explains, the war forced Congress “to extend its power to a vast new range of complex
subject-matter that had hitherto existed entirely outside the National Government’s orbit, and at
the same time give its legislation affecting that subject-matter a form which would render it
easily responsive to the ever changing requirements of a naturally fluid war situation.”
53
Unable
institutionally to deal with such challenges, Congress effectively delegated its powers to the
President. Thus, the war not only ceded vast powers to the federal government, but also located
those powers nearly exclusively in the executive branch.
The kneejerk reaction by congressional leaders after the war was to attempt to rein in
Presidential powers. Those powers had grown to a necessary but uncomfortably large size during
the war. Even more worrisome was that they appeared to be resilient afterwards as President
Wilson deployed troops to Siberia as part of an ambiguous extension of the 1917 declaration of

53
Edward S. Corwin, Total War and the Constitution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), 38–39, quote
on 38.
215
war against Germany. For ardent anti-imperialists like Robert La Follette, the concern was that
with the way things were heading “the worst fears of the anti-Federalists at the time of the
Constitution’s ratification, about the dangers of a too-powerful executive office, would become
fully realized.”
54
Even imperialists like Henry Cabot Lodge and other neo-Hamiltonians worried
whether it would be possible to return to the old institutional balance and supported Congress
reasserting its prerogatives.
55
Some of this was for partisan reasons, but many rightly feared the
concern raised by future Secretary of State Charles Evan Hughes who in 1920 questioned
“whether constitutional government as hitherto maintained in this Republic could survive
another great war, even if victoriously waged.”
56

After two decades of growing executive war-making powers, particularly the frightening
size such powers reached during World War I, decision-makers across the spectrum began to
revisit the question of how to prevent the country’s engagement in international politics from
further destabilizing its domestic institutional arrangement. Central to these efforts was the need
to step back from the previous two decades of practice and limit the role of force in the country’s
foreign policy. Decision-makers pursued two strategies. In the early years, internationalist efforts
were pursued to regulate the international system in order to preclude the types of domestic
institutional changes required in a world where force was required. When this policy began to
fail, more isolationist efforts were made to work from the inside out by fragmenting authority
and by tying the hands of the executive to prevent the country from being dragged into war.

54
Richard Drake, The Education of an Anti-Imperialist: Robert La Follette and U.S. Expansion
(Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), 269.
55
Widenor, Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an American Foreign Policy, 280–281.
56
New York Times, June 22, 1920. Quoted in Corwin, Total War and the Constitution, 170.
216
Outlawing War
Though many continued to lament the growth in executive power to use the armed forces
in small wars, the key for decision-makers after the war was to eliminate the need for major uses
of force. More minor interventions, which the United States had now been conducting regularly
for several decades, certainly posed a challenge for the government. But most observers did not
think they threatened to undermine the country’s domestic institutional arrangement wholesale.
57

They could be conducted by maintaining still relatively small standing forces and by allowing
Presidents to command those forces during emergencies in a way that did completely unhinge
the original balance between the branches of government established in the Constitution. More
significant uses of force, however, did threaten to do so. World War I was an extreme case, but
an insightful one. It showed how constant preparation for and involvement in war might rapidly
erode the country’s republican institutions by shifting immense powers to the executive branch.
The impulse on the part of decision-makers after the war, therefore, was to return to a
policy of fewer interventions overseas; a policy of diplomacy without force.
58
What was

57
Some did object to these types of interventions as well and worried about their effect on the country’s
domestic institutions. Writing after the war, for example, the noted legal scholar John Bassett Moore
argued: “There can hardly be room for doubt that the framers of the constitution, when they vested in
Congress the power to declare war, never imagined that they were leaving it to the executive to use the
military and naval forces of the United States all over the world for the purpose of actually forcing other
nations, occupying their territory, and killing their soldiers and citizens, all according to his own notions
of the fitness of things, as long as he refrained from calling his action war or persisted in calling it peace.”
John Bassett Moore, The Collected Papers of John Bassett Moore, vol. V: 1918–1924 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1944), 196; In any event, these types of interventions declined markedly after Nicaragua
in 1926, which Hendrickson argues was a “swan song” of sorts during this period. Afterwards, successive
administrations moved toward adopting a far less interventionist “good neighbor” policy. David C.
Hendrickson, Union, Nation, Or Empire: The American Debate Over International Relations, 1789-1941
(Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 347–348.
58
It is important to stress that this trend toward diplomacy without force was by far the dominant motif at
the time, not isolationism as is sometimes assumed. There were isolationist sentiments that persisted
throughout the interwar period. But especially in the 1920s there were strong internationalist sentiments—
even in the Republican Party—and internationalist policies predominated. The interwar period therefore
is better characterized as one of internationalism in 1920s, followed by growing
217
important was to reduce the role of force as an instrument of foreign policy not only in the
United States, but everywhere. The main effort immediately after the war came from Wilson in
the form of his quest to secure ratification of the Treaty of Versailles and establish the League of
Nations.
59
The League was designed as a collective security organization that in theory would
regulate, enforce, and ultimately prevent the use of force by states. As the first line of the
preamble to the Covenant read, the first commitment of member states was “the acceptance of
obligations not to resort to war.”
60

The United States Senate, however, never ratified the treaty—foremost because of the
League of Nations—even though there was widespread popular support for it throughout the
country. There were political and partisan reasons for this. But those reasons obscure the fact that
a great deal of genuine opposition came from the impact opponents believed the League would
have on America’s domestic institutions. On the one hand, they believed that rather than
obviating the need for the Untied States to use force, the League actually appeared to commit it
to doing so regularly. This stemmed from a paradox central to the proposed collective security
organization that neither Wilson nor other proponents were ever able to reconcile. The League
was premised on the idea that only in an international system where power politics prevailed
would states become militaristic. It was only by changing this dimension of the system,
therefore, that war could be prevented. But doing so required members to use force to enact such
a change. The League, therefore, suffered from a tautology of sorts: war was required if war was
to be eliminated. Wilson never denied this fact, but nor did he assuage those who were concerned

isolationism/unilateralism in the 1930s. To be clear, however, the object in both decades was to reduce or
eliminate the possibility of American military involvement overseas.
59
Wilson insisted on linking the two together instead of presenting them as separate pieces of legislation.
60
League of Nations, Covenant of the League of Nations, April 28, 1919, available online at:
http://www.refworld.org/docid/3dd8b9854.html [accessed February 16, 2015]
218
about it. Instead, he attempted to explain it away by suggesting that force would be necessary
only rarely and that public opinion and economic sanctions would be the main enforcement
mechanisms.
61

Opponents of the League seized on the fact that it appeared to commit the United States
to use force regularly, even in cases where the country may have no real interests. Senator
William Borah, one of the League’s most vociferous opponents, decried that it called for “force
to destroy force, conflict to prevent conflict, militarism to destroy militarism, war to prevent
war.”
62
It would require the United States to arm and conduct military policing operations around
the world. La Follette warned: “we are contracting to be ready for war any minute, and we are
also agreeing to send our men and ships to the most remote parts of the world if the League shall
so require.”
63
This was precisely the type of interventionism, however, that most people were
now in favor of avoiding. Opponents couched their hostility to the League and its requirement
for the United States to commit to a policy of force in terms of the poisonous effect this would
have on the country’s domestic institutions. According to Borah, “when you shall have
committed this Republic to a scheme of world control based on upon force, upon the combined
military force of the four great nations of the world, you will have soon destroyed the
atmosphere of freedom, of confidence in the self-governing capacity of the masses, in which

61
To be precise, he suggested force would not be required “98 percent” of the time. Hendrickson, Union,
Nation, Or Empire: The American Debate Over International Relations, 1789-1941, 336.
62
Quoted in Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition: The Treaty
Fight in Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 89.
63
Quoted in Drake, The Education of an Anti-Imperialist: Robert La Follette and U.S. Expansion, 284.
219
alone a democracy may thrive.” The country could remain democratic on the surface, he argued,
but at a deeper level its values and institutions would corrode.
64

On the other hand, opponents thought joining the League would not only commit the
country to using force, but it would also cede Congress’s war powers to an international
organization at a time when they were trying to re-establish those powers at home vis-à-vis the
executive branch. If it was unconstitutional for a President to take the country to war, certainly it
was unconstitutional for the League to do so. Article 10 of the Covenant, which stipulated “In
case of any such aggression or in case of any threat or danger of such aggression the Council
shall advise upon the means by which this obligation shall be fulfilled,” became the main point
of objection.
65
Again, “irreconcilables” like Borah heaped scorn on the Covenant for not leaving
decisions about war and peace “to the judgment and sense of the American people but to the
diplomats of Europe.”
66
But even those like Lodge who were still committed to using force to
further American interests in the world, were wary about ceding Congress’s authority in this
area.
67

Opponents in the Senate centered their efforts to remedy the League’s perceived defects
on attaching amendments to the treaty to get at the factors they believed were the real causes of

64
For Borah’s most comprehensive views on this subject see his William E. Borah, Closing Speech of
Hon. William E. Borah on the League of Nations in the Senate of the United States, November 19, 1919
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1919), quote on 11.
65
League of Nations, Covenant of the League of Nations.
66
There were sixteen “irreconcilable” Senators (14 Republicans, 2 Democrats) who opposed the Treaty of
Versailles and the League in their entirety, including Borah. There were another thirty-two “hard” and
“soft” reservationists who had similar objections, but were potentially reconcilable based on the terms of
settlement. Quoted in Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition: The Treaty
Fight in Perspective, 90.
67
Ernest C. Bolt, Jr., Ballots before Bullets: The War Referendum Approach to Peace in America, 1914-
1941 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977), 90; Widenor, Henry Cabot Lodge and the
Search for an American Foreign Policy, 293–296.
220
war.
68
Those like La Follette argued that the League would act as a rubber stamp for powerful
countries and simply serve as a new means for the same old set of militaristic polices. He
thundered: “If this really was a war for democracy, let us prove it, by taking the war-making
power out of the hands of the rulers in all countries and putting it into the hands of the people in
all countries.”
69
In addition to proposing popular referendums on declarations of war, opponents
of the League suggested other measures including limiting arms expenditures, abolishing or
requiring a popular referendum on conscription, renouncing the economic exploitation of League
mandates, and supporting the right of people to revolt against oppressive regimes (including
colonial ones).
70
Some of this opposition was a result of posturing, partisanship, and efforts to
kill the League in its entirety. But as Ernest Bolt shows, many of these initiatives were actually
consistent with previous and later efforts to re-establish popular control over the country’s war-
making powers, as I discuss below.
71

As the debate over the treaty dragged on, Elihu Root, now an elder statesmen, and Lodge,
now Chairmen of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, narrowed down the list of
reservations and amendments to fourteen that if changed might secure passage. As Walter
McDougall explains, the list did not represent an effort “to gut the peace that Wilson had
fashioned.” A compromise was still very much possible. Rather, the list attempted “to ensure that

68
Some fifty reservations and amendments in total were introduced. Walter A. McDougall, Promised
Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776 (New York: Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, 1997), 143.
69
Quoted in Drake, The Education of an Anti-Imperialist: Robert La Follette and U.S. Expansion, 249.
70
See Bolt, Jr., Ballots before Bullets: The War Referendum Approach to Peace in America, 1914-1941,
89–90; Ross A. Kennedy, The Will to Believe: Woodrow Wilson, World War I, and America’s Strategy
for Peace and Security (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2009), 205–206.
71
Bolt, Jr., Ballots before Bullets: The War Referendum Approach to Peace in America, 1914-1941.
221
[Wilson’s] new order did not gut the sovereignty and Constitution of the United States…”
72
The
President, however, was not willing to strike any kind of compromise, even based on a milder set
of reservations proposed by Democrats. The League of Nations was established, but not with
American participation.
With the defeat of the League of Nations in the United States Senate, however, the
internationalist attempt to reduce the country’s need to use force by transforming the
international environment did not die. In fact, with the departure in 1921 of Wilson, who had
created toxic relations with Congress, and the election of a Republican President Harding, who
as the last chapter explained promised a “return to normalcy,” the chances for such policies
actually increased. In fact, the Republicans who came to power over the next decade were
largely internationalists of one stripe or another.
73
As Jonathan Zasloff explains, many of them
descended from the legal tradition of Elihu Root who looked to international law to ensure peace
and “advocated a vision for world politics committed to American engagement with the outside
world, but downplayed power concerns, insisting that proper institutional structures could
prevent most international conflicts.”
74
Even the so-called Peace Progressives in Congress who
we tend to think of today as being arch-isolationists were committed in the 1920s to international
efforts of disarmament.
75

72
McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776, 143–
144.
73
Hendrickson, Union, Nation, Or Empire: The American Debate Over International Relations, 1789-
1941, 344–345.
74
Zasloff explains that Root and others adhered to a form of classical legal ideology, which maintained
that international law and institutions could be upheld without state coercion. This was the legal reasoning
behind the proposition that diplomacy could be conducted without force. See Jonathan Zasloff, “Law and
the Shaping of American Foreign Policy: From the Gilded Age to the New Era,” New York University
Law Review 78, no. 1 (2003): quote on 246.
75
See Robert David Johnson, The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1995).
222
Over the next decade, successive Republican administrations, with the support of both
parties in Congress, pursued a series of international agreements designed to limit armaments
and make war both materially and morally impossible. International agreements on arms
limitations had been explored earlier. For example, when Great Britain produced the first
Dreadnaught in the early 1900s, and Congress balked at building a new class of battleships,
Theodore Roosevelt sent feelers to British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey proposing a plan
to limit tonnage.
76
With the outbreak of World War I, however, arms reduction became a central
goal of American foreign policy. It was one Wilson’s Fourteen Points and plans for future
limitations agreements were stipulated in Article 8 of the Covenant of the League of Nations. But
with the United States not ratifying the Treaty of Versailles or joining the League, arms
limitations negotiations were conducted in a series of separate conferences.
The Washington Naval Conference was held in 1921-1922 and resulted in three major
treaties. The Five Power Treaty limited the United States and Great Britain to 500,000 tons
(warship tonnage), Japan to 300,000 tons, and France and Italy each to 175,000 tons.
77
The Four
Power Treaty committed the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and France to consultation over
any future crises in East Asia. And the Nine Power Treaty codified the Open Door Policy,
requiring signatories to respect the territorial integrity of China and the principle of equal access
to the Chinese market. The Washington Conference was followed by additional conferences in
Geneva (1927 and 1932) and London (1930 and 1935), which led to further naval limitations and

76
Phillips Payson O’Brien, British and American Naval Power: Politics and Policy, 1900-1936
(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998), 63.
77
The treaty not only set upper limits, but also reduced existing fleets by requiring the scrapping of
twenty six warships by the United States, twenty four by Great Britain, and sixteen by Japan. They also
agreed to a hiatus of ten years on further capital-ship building (with some exceptions). Furthermore, the
treaty committed the signatories to maintaining the status quo in terms of naval bases and fortifications in
the Pacific.
223
a vague agreement on land and air forces as well. But by 1933 these agreements began to break
down as Germany and Japan withdrew.
Beyond limiting armaments, however, American decision-makers went as far as trying to
effectively outlaw war in the Kellogg-Brian Pact of 1928. Also known as the Pact of Paris, the
agreement committed all signatories to “renounce” war “as an instrument of national policy,”
and affirm that “the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of
whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by
pacific means.” The Senate ratified the treaty 85-1 with the reservation that the treaty neither
limited the United States from self-defense, nor required the country to use force against those
who violated the agreement.
The Lurch to Domestic Constraint
It was only beginning in the 1930s, when the international legal efforts of the previous
decade began to break down seriously, that congressional leaders made a more concerted effort
to reinforce the country’s domestic constraints on executive war-making powers. In 1931, Japan
invaded and then annexed Manchuria in violation of the Kellogg-Brian Pact and the League of
Nations, and ended up withdrawing from the latter. In 1935, Italy invaded Abyssinia. And in
1935, Nazi Germany remilitarized the Rhineland thus beginning its well-documented steps
toward unilaterally abrogating its treaty commitments and dragging the European continent into
a second world war. These and other incidents showed that international legal agreements and
organizations without teeth were not much more than empty rhetoric and could not be relied on
to prevent conflict.
78

78
Other incidents revealing the weakness of the League and associated international agreements included
the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay in 1932, the Spanish Civil War that began in 1936, and the
Japanese invasion of China in 1937.
224
The cumulative breakdown of the international system began to generate increasing
systemic pressure for the United States. Instead, of functionally adapting to the changing
conditions, however, policymakers turned inward to shield the country’s existing institutions. As
the 1930s wore on, American decision-makers turned to support the idea that if they could not
regulate the international system to prevent the country from being dragged into war, at least
they could prevent their own government from taking the country to war haphazardly. This was
true not just of so-called isolationists and pacifists, but also internationalists. Importantly, it is in
this sense that we should consider the 1930s as a period of isolationism. As Franklin Roosevelt
exclaimed: “We are not isolationists except in so far as we seek to isolate ourselves completely
from war.”
79
The United States was still willing to maintain all of its foreign relations and
participate in international conferences and agreements, but shied away from any involvement
that intersected with brewing conflicts around the world. It was in this environment that
decision-makers began to craft policies designed at the time to keep the country out of war, but
that we tend to think of today as isolationist.
They pursued two different policy tracks of institutional resistance. The first was a
national referendum on declarations of war. This effort turned out to be less successful than the
second one but is perhaps more insightful because of the direct and far-reaching nature of its
assault on the war-making powers of the government as a whole. The idea for Constitutional
safeguards against war in the form of a referendum had been around in one form or another in
the United States since the early 1900s.
80
But with the outbreak of World War I, the idea began

79
Franklin D. Roosevelt, “I Have Seen War. ...I Hate War—Address at Chautauqua, N.Y. August 14,
1936,” in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, vol. 1936, The People Approve
(New York: Random House, 1938), 288.
80
There were also efforts to enact a referendum on conscription. On the history of the war referendum
movement in the United States see Richard Dean Burns and W. Adams Dixon, “Foreign Policy and the
225
to gain greater credibility among peace advocates. In the 1920s, their efforts focused mainly on
pushing for referendums on war declarations to be considered as components of the international
agreements being negotiated. As these efforts languished, however, the idea of a war referendum
in the United States at least continued to resonate among Americans; for example, both the
Democratic and Progressive party platforms of 1924 included a proposal for one. But it was not
until the 1930s that it was seriously considered.
The cause of the war referendum is best told by focusing on the debate surrounding the
so-called Ludlow amendment in 1938, which ultimately failed but was the closest advocates ever
came. In January 1938, after a long and protracted struggle, debate ended on the question of
whether or not to discharge House Joint Resolution 199 (the Ludlow amendment), which
proposed changing the United States Constitution to require a national referendum before the
country entered any war. The proposed amendment required specifically:
Except in the event of an invasion of the United States or its Territorial possessions and
attack upon its citizens residing therein, the authority of Congress to declare war shall not
become effective until confirmed by a majority of all votes cast thereon in a Nation-wide
referendum. Congress, when it deems a national crisis to exist, may by concurrent
resolution refer the question of war or peace to the citizens of the States, the question to
be voted on being, Shall the United States declare war on _________? Congress may
otherwise by law provide for the enforcement of this section.
81

The Ludlow amendment was the culmination of the efforts described above to formally constrain
the government’s ability to use military force by placing decisions about war and peace directly
in the hands of American citizens.
Congressional proponents of the resolution argued that a national war referendum would
help institutionalize the promise of popular sovereignty, which they claimed was at the heart of

‘Democratic Myth’: The Debate on the Ludlow Amendment,” Mid-America XLVII, no. October (1965):
288–306; Bolt, Jr., Ballots before Bullets: The War Referendum Approach to Peace in America, 1914-
1941.
81
House Joint Resolution 199, Congressional Record 75
th
Congress, 1
st
Sess., LXXXI, 4084.
226
democracy. As Senator Gerald Nye argued: “If ever there was a question to which the
people…should have a voice, it is this one: ‘Should we engage in a foreign war?’” A vote against
the resolution, in the words of another congressman, would be “to deny the principle of popular
government.” With a referendum, proponents argued, the American people would “gain the
power to stop war, to unmake war” and thereby “prevent the sudden and ill-considered sort of
action which might plunge [the United States] into war,” as was argued had been the case with
the country’s entry into World War I. The American public, for its part, was largely in favor of
the effort as polls at the time showed nearly three-quarters of the population supported a national
war referendum.
82

Opponents, meanwhile, argued that a national war referendum would only serve to
complicate the decision-making process to use force and constrain decision-makers even more
precisely at a time when they needed greater flexibility. Instead of promoting peace, they argued,
such a referendum would inadvertently lead to war by emboldening potential adversaries.
83

President Roosevelt and other administration officials were among the most ardent opponents of
a national war referendum and they worked both openly and behind the scenes to engineer a
defeat for the resolution.
84
The President wrote a letter, which was read aloud during House
debate, in which he stated that such a constitutional change would “cripple any President in his
conduct of our foreign relations, and it would encourage other nations to believe that they could

82
Quoted in Burns and Dixon, “Foreign Policy and the ‘Democratic Myth’: The Debate on the Ludlow
Amendment,” 292, 299, 290.
83
See for example Walter Lippmann, “Mr. Ludlow Prepares for War,” New York Herald Tribune,
December 18, 1937.
84
Bolt, Jr., Ballots before Bullets: The War Referendum Approach to Peace in America, 1914-1941, 166–
167, 171–174.
227
violate American rights with impunity.”
85
Privately, he expressed even greater alarm. He wrote
to his son warning that “National defense represents too serious a danger, especially in these
modern times where distance has been annihilated, to permit delay and our danger lies in things
like the Ludlow Amendment which appeal to people, who, frankly, have no conception of what
modern war, with or without declaration of war, involves.”
86

What is important to highlight about the war referendum debate is that on the surface
congressional proponents appeared to be attempting to tie their own hands. After all, the
Constitutional authority to declare war lay with Congress, and Congress had declared ex ante
every major war the United States had ever entered. The effort, however, as suggested by
President Roosevelt’s comments, reveals a deeper fact that was obvious to congressional leaders
at the time: the war-making powers in previous decades had slowly been shifting away from the
legislature and toward the executive. It is reasonable to assume that because the executive was
coming to claim a dominant position within the national government, they believed the only
effective way to present such an accumulation of these powers was to push them back down to
the popular level.
In the end, the resolution to move the Ludlow Amendment to the House floor was
defeated 209-188.

In total, thirty-one war referendum resolutions were introduced in Congress
between 1914 and 1935 and another thirty-three between 1935 and 1941. None, however, were

85
President Roosevelt to the Speaker of the House of Representatives January 6, 1938, Department of
State, Peace and War: United States Foreign Policy, 1931-1941 (Washington, DC: Government Printing
Office, 1943); Secretary of State Hull likewise contended that it “would most seriously handicap the
Government in the conduct of our foreign affairs generally, and would thus impair disastrously its ability
to safeguard the peace of the American people.” The Secretary of State to the Chairman of the Committee
on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, January 8, 1938, ibid., 401.
86
“Memorandum for J.R., January 20, 1938,” in Elliott Roosevelt, ed., F.D.R.: His Personal Letters,
1928-1945, vol. II (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950), 751.
228
successful.
87
The case of the Ludlow amendment, therefore, is illustrative not because it almost
passed.
88
Rather, the popular push for a national war referendum in many ways represented the
most radical of several efforts that both formally and informally sought to tie the hands of the
government—specifically the executive branch—to prevent it from dragging the country into
war.
The second, and more successful, effort stemmed from the Nye Committee investigation,
which was conducted between 1934-1936.
89
The investigation began as an inquiry into the role
bankers and munitions producers played in America’s entry into World War I. A popular notion
at the time suggested these so-called “merchants of death” had dragged the country into the
war.
90
The investigation, however, also served as a forum to interrogate what many saw as “the
war-making proclivities of the executive branch.”
91
As Wayne Cole explains, the Nye
Committee began with the assumption that presidents—like Wilson in World War I—often fall
victim to special interests. Later, however, committee members “began to view the president as a

87
Bolt, Jr., Ballots before Bullets: The War Referendum Approach to Peace in America, 1914-1941, 152.
88
Though this was a strong showing by proponents of a referendum, it remained far from becoming a
constitutional amendment. H. J. Res. 199 was a resolution to discharge the bill on an amendment from
committee where it had been holed up for years. A shift of 11 votes in the final tally would have sent the
resolution to the House floor for general consideration. From there it would have required two-thirds
support from both the House and the Senate before requiring ratification by three-fourths of State
legislatures.
89
Also known as the Senate Munitions Committee, the Nye Committee was organized to investigate
America’s entry to World War I. It was led by Senator Gerald Nye, a Republican from North Dakota
(chosen by a Democratic majority in Congress). Over eighteen months, the committee held ninety-three
hearings and interviewed more than two hundred witnesses.
90
The Committee investigation coincided with a popular notion at the time, which suggested that bankers
and munitions producers had helped push the United States into World War I. Popular works that laid out
these views included Helmuth C. Engelbrecht and Frank C. Hanighen, Merchants of Death: A Study of
the International Armament Industry (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1934); Smedley Butler,
War Is a Racket (New York: Round Table Press, 1935).
91
Wayne S. Cole, Roosevelt & the Isolationists, 1932-45 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press,
1983), 141–162, quote on 142.
229
force for war quite as dangerous as munitions makers and international bankers.”
92
As I explain
below, many at the time believed Wilson’s policies had actually pushed the country into war. But
as the investigation turned to assault Wilson’s legacy more directly, a Democratic Congress
concerned with a Republican-led committee attacking one of their own abruptly terminated it in
early 1936.
The Nye Committee investigation was important not because it produced any shocking
findings. In fact, the findings partly absolved its intended targets. Rather, it was important
because it ultimately contributed to the passing of a series of Neutrality Acts designed to keep
the United States out of any future conflicts. The purpose of these acts was to keep the United
States neutral in part by limiting the President’s discretionary powers to make decisions about
arms exports and foreign loans to belligerents—actions that might drag the country into war,
advertently or inadvertently.
93
Many believed at the time it was the exercise of vast discretionary
powers by Wilson in World War I that had doomed American efforts to remain neutral then.
94
In
that conflict, Wilson was in charge of maintaining America’s neutrality policy with no legislation
directing how he was to do so. Thus he could choose with which countries to trade and with
which to embargo arms, bar loans, and limit trade. This resulted, many critics claimed, in Wilson
picking sides and pursuing a policy of only partial neutrality that made American involvement in

92
Cole, Roosevelt & the Isolationists, 1932-45.
93
Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1979), 102–121, 139–140; Cole, Roosevelt & the Isolationists, 1932-45, 163–186, 223–
252..
94
See, for example, C. Hartley Grattan, Why We Fought (New York: Vanguard, 1929); Walter Millis,
Road to War, 1914-1917 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935); Salvatore A. Cotillo, “Memorandum-
American Neutrality Legislation Threatens the Collapse of Western Civilization,” in Neutrality Hearings
Before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, Seventy-Fourth Congress, Second
Session, on S. 3474, January 10 to February 5, 1936 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office,
1936), 271–273; Ernest K. Lindley, Half Way with Roosevelt (New York: The Viking Press, 1937), 282;
Edwin Borchard and William Potter Lage, Neutrality for America (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1937), 57.
230
the war inevitable. With conflicts now brewing around the world, Congress was determined to
legislate neutrality policy more strictly this time around. The point was to resist international
security competition from remaking America’s decision-making procedures and instead entrench
the country’s existing institutional arrangement.
In August 1935, Congress passed the first of several neutrality acts. On the one hand, the
act was a victory of sorts for those who advocated tying the executive’s hands in a way that
ensured impartial neutrality. It placed an automatic ban on exports of “arms, ammunition, or
implements of war” to all belligerents; prohibited American vessels from carrying munitions to
belligerents; and required arms manufacturers to apply for an export license from the newly
established Munitions Control Board in effort to better regulate all arms shipments from the
United States. The constraints these measures placed on the executive was not lost on President
Roosevelt who originally opposed any type of neutrality legislation and then tried unsuccessfully
to engineer a bill that would provide him with greater flexibility.
95
Upon signing the act, he
warned: “History is filled with unforeseeable situations that call for some flexibility of action. It
is conceivable that situations may arise in which the wholly inflexible provisions of Section I of
this Act might have exactly the opposite effect from that which was intended. In other words, the
inflexible provisions might drag us into war instead of keeping us out.”
96

On the other hand, the act did not go as far as some would have preferred in tying the
executive’s hands. The act left some wiggle room, for example, by allowing the President to
determine what constituted “implements of war”; when an embargo should go into effect; and
when to withhold protection for Americans traveling on belligerent ships. Those like John

95
Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945, 102–108.
96
Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Presidential Signing Statement on Approval of Neutrality Legislation, August
31, 1935,” in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, vol. 1935, The Court
Disapproves (New York: Random House, 1938), 345–46.
231
Bassett Moore—widely considered the most learned international jurist of his generation—
believed that these provisions would enable President Roosevelt to shape the contours of
neutrality policy and grant him “practically unlimited discretionary powers as regards peace and
war.”
97
It would effectively allow the President to steer policy in “unneutral ways that would
make the United States in fact, though not avowedly, a party to the war,” exactly as had
happened in World War I.
98
As Judge Salvatore Cotillo cautioned in a memorandum prepared for
the hearing on the extension of neutrality legislation in 1936, “‘Discretion’ is the threat! Put no
man in this position, and the President should be the last one to demand this power.”
99
In fact, he
feared that the 1935 legislation had already given President Roosevelt such discretion and
documented how the President was already using it in a way that was undermining the country’s
neutrality.
100

These fears notwithstanding, the act and its successors did in fact reflect precisely the
traditional interpretation of the institutional balance between the legislature and the executive.
Congress in consultation with the President set the broad contours of neutrality policy and the
President was given some discretion to execute that policy subject to constraints on his ability to
commit the country to war independently. Roosevelt had opposed neutrality legislation

97
He continued: “I say this because, in dealing with questions of neutrality, we are in the domain of peace
and war; and, by the Constitution of the United States, the power to declare war is lodged, not in the
President, but in the Congress.” John Bassett Moore, “Statement by Dr. John Bassett Moore,” in
Neutrality Hearings Before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, Seventy-Fourth
Congress, Second Session, on S. 3474, January 10 to February 5, 1936 (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 1936), 173.
98
Moore warned: “I would not give this unlimited power to any man. I would myself decline it if it were
offered to me, even though I happen to understand the law of neutrality, and know what is and what is not
neutral according to that law. The bestowal of such power would constitute the worst form of dictatorship
ever set up.” Ibid., 176, 177.
99
Cotillo, “Memorandum-American Neutrality Legislation Threatens the Collapse of Western
Civilization,” 272.
100
Ibid., 264–265.
232
altogether, seeking the same free hand Wilson enjoyed before America’s entry to World War I.
He settled for a compromise, which was certainly constraining, but at least provided some degree
of discretion. Given the context at the time this arrangement seemed reasonable both
constitutionally and in terms of the challenges the country faced.
In 1937, a second neutrality act was passed, which this time was written without an
expiration date.
101
The act included the earlier provisions in addition to several new ones. Civil
wars were now covered (in response to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War the year before);
Americans were now fully restricted from travelling on belligerent vessels; and American
merchant ships were now banned from carrying any arms (even non-American ones) to
belligerents. In one concession to the President, the act contained a two-year “cash and carry”
provision, which would allow countries to purchase vital raw materials that were not classified as
“war implements,” including oil.
102
The President had strongly favored “more permissive”
legislation, but as Senator Hiram Johnson said the act was meant be restrictive in order to
prevent what he described as “the President’s sinister...grasp of the war-making power.”
103

If in 1935 the country’s strict neutrality policy seemed reasonable, by 1937 the
international security environment was clearly becoming more malign and the policy appeared
less appropriate. The year before, Nazi Germany had reoccupied the Rhineland and in July Japan
invaded China. In October, President Roosevelt gave a speech in which he explained that all
indicators were pointed toward war, warning “let no one imagine that America will escape, that
America may expect mercy, that this Western Hemisphere will not be attacked.” There was to be

101
The 1935 act was renewed in 1936 with an added provision, which prohibited loans to belligerents as
well.
102
“Cash and carry” meant that belligerents could purchase permitted materials so long as they were paid
for in cash and were carried away in non-American ships.
103
Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945, 139, 140.
233
“no escape through mere isolation or neutrality,” he argued.
104
Yet, in May Congress had
legislated just that and for the next two years the President’s hands were tied as the world slid
inexorably toward World War II. In September 1939—after Germany’s invasion of Poland and
declarations of war by Britain and France—Roosevelt announced to Congress that he regretted
having ever signed the neutrality acts and asked finally to have them repealed in their entirety.
105

In the years from 1939-1941 Americans engaged in one of the fiercest debates in the
country’s history about whether or not to become involved in World War II.
106
More than five
decades later, Arthur Schlesinger described it as “the most savage national debate of my
lifetime—more savage than the debate over communism in the late 1940s, more savage than the
debate over McCarthyism in the early 1950s, more savage than the debate over Vietnam in the
1960s…[It] had an inner fury that tore apart families, friends, churches, universities, and political
parties.”
107
Opponents in Congress maintained their long-standing position. They argued that the
war would undermine the country’s existing institutional arrangement, which could not survive
another major war as Secretary of State Hughes had warned back in 1920. Senator Robert Taft
channeled this traditional perspective as the United States moved closer to war in 1941, explaing:
Far from safeguarding democracy, war is likely to destroy democracy right here in the
United States. Congress is abandoning the constitutional safeguards. It is granting
unlimited powers to the President…and the Executive Departments…Some of these

104
This was a warning he would issue repeatedly over the coming years. Franklin D. Roosevelt,
“‘Quarantine’ Speech at Chicago, October 5, 1937,” in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D.
Roosevelt, vol. 1937, The Constitution Prevails (New York: Macmillan, 1941), 408.
105
Franklin D. Roosevelt, “The President Urges the Extraordinary Session to Repeal the Embargo
Provisions of the Neutrality Law, September 21, 1939,” in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin
D. Roosevelt, vol. 1939, Neutrality and War (New York: Macmillan, 1941), 516.
106
Lynn Olson, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939-
1941 (New York: Random House, 2013).
107
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., “Back to the Womb? Isolationism’s Renewed Threat,” Foreign Affairs 74,
no. 4 (August 1995): 4.
234
powers will end at the end of the present emergency, but if the war lasts for five years, I
doubt whether we ever return to our constitutional system.
108

The debate, however, not only divided Congress, which had been divided over the issue for some
time, but also the executive branch. As Lynn Olson explains, high ranking military officers who
believed the country should stay out of the war “worked to sabotage the policies of their
commander in chief, leaking top secret information to isolationist members of Congress and to
[Charles] Lindbergh and other key leaders in the antiwar movement.”
109
Thus, on the eve of its
most important foreign challenge since independence, the United States’ traditional domestic
constraints—particularly those informed by a distrust executive war-making powers and a
preference for fragmented military authority—threatened to paralyze the country’s ability to act.
Following the actual outbreak of World War II in 1939, however, the country began to
inch toward adopting a more flexible position. In September, President Roosevelt declared a
state of limited emergency and two months later Congress passed less restrictive neutrality
legislation. The emergency was declared, Roosevelt explained, “to make wholly constitutional
and legal certain obviously necessary measures.” These measures included increasing the
personnel of the country’s armed forces, though he was careful to acknowledge that they would
still remain “below peace-time strength as authorized by Congress.”
110
The new neutrality
legislation meanwhile began to loosen many of the restrictions of the previous neutrality acts.
Most importantly, the 1939 Neutrality Act renewed the “cash and carry” provision, which had
lapsed earlier in March. At the time, the President had argued to have it renewed and extended to

108
Robert A. Taft, “Radio Address—Shall the United States Enter the European War? May 17, 1941,” in
The Papers of Robert A. Taft, ed. Charles E. Wunderlin, Jr., vol. 2: 1939–1944 (Kent, OH: The Kent State
University Press, 2001), 246.
109
Olson, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941,
xix.
110
Roosevelt, “The President Urges the Extraordinary Session to Repeal the Embargo Provisions of the
Neutrality Law, September 21, 1939,” 520.
235
include arms, but was rebuffed by Congress. Now the new legislation finally accepted these
requests, effectively ending the embargo by making arms available to the country’s future allies
Britain and France. Neutrality as a policy, however, remained in force. The act continued to
restrict loans to belligerents; American vessels were prohibited from transporting passengers or
goods to belligerent ports; and Americans were restricted from traveling on belligerent vessels or
to combat zones. It was not until “lend-lease” legislation was passed in March 1941 that all the
pretenses of neutrality were ultimately abandoned. Finally, following the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and a declaration of war by Germany four days later, the
United States entered World War II as a full participant with congressional declarations of war
against Germany, Japan, and Italy.
111

Between 1939-1941, President Roosevelt did act with discretion and certainly pushed the
boundaries of the intended purpose of neutrality legislation.
112
Like Wilson, he believed in
government as a living system and was seldom mistaken for a strict constructionist when it came
to the Constitution. Some advocates of executive war-making powers often cite his actions
during this time as examples of the historical nature of executive prerogative in the prewar
period. Yet, Roosevelt’s often aggressive use of executive power notwithstanding, it should be
noted that his actions are often taken out of context and blown out of proportion. In each case
where he pressed up against Congress’s war-making authority, Roosevelt sought to conform his
policies to existing legislation. As Barron and Lederman explain, he pushed for amendments
when he disagreed with legislation and looked for novel ways to construe legislative statutes

111
The following year, Congress declared war against Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania.
112
Zeisberg summarizes most of these activities nicely. Mariah Zeisberg, War Powers: The Politics of
Constitutional Authority (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 62–63.
236
narrowly in order to gain a freer hand.
113
But at no point in time did he claim extensive or
preclusive powers for the executive to use force or commit the country to war outside of
legislation authorizing such a course of action. Moreover, like Theodore Roosevelt and
Woodrow Wilson before him, the fact that Franklin Roosevelt was able to do so much should be
chalked up in large measure to his force of will and the personal autonomy he was able to carve
out within the country’s existing institutional arrangement. Executive power grew during this
period, but executive war-making powers were not yet institutionalized.

Seeds of Executive War-Making Powers
Before concluding the chapter, it is important to point out that though there was not a
wholesale effort to institutionalize executive war-making powers at this time, several crucial
ideational changes did occur that helped facilitate such efforts in the postwar period. By the post-
World War I period, it was clear that the emergence of the United States as a world power and
the actions of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson over the previous two decades had
placed the government’s foreign affairs powers in flux. With a more assertive foreign policy, the
American state now faced a degree of institutional stress not experienced on a regular basis
previously. Though this stress did not reach a level—outside of World War I—that threatened to
remake inter-branch relations in the area of foreign relations entirely, it did give rise to a set of
new ideas about how those relations were changing and might need to be reshaped in the future.
In 1921, the political scientist Quincy Wright wrote an award-winning essay later
published as The Control of American Foreign Relations in which he discussed the impact this

113
Barron and Lederman, “The Commander in Chief at the Lowest Ebb: A Constitutional History,” 1042–
1051; See also Silverstein, Imbalance of Power: Constitutional Interpretation and the Making of
American Foreign Policy, 59–62; Fisher, Presidential War Power, 75–80.
237
stress was having on the government.
114
Wright wrote that all constitutional states struggle with
what he described as the “dual position of foreign relations power.” This duality arises from the
fact that foreign relations power is derived from both “constitutional” (i.e. domestic) and
“international” sources. The former defines and limits the “power” of the government to act,
while the latter places certain “responsibilities” on its actions.
115
When a state is less involved in
world affairs, Wright suggested, this duality is not particularly problematic. But when a state
becomes more involved in world affairs, its international commitments can begin to place great
burdens on its domestic constitution and a gap can open up between the power and the
responsibility to act.
116
Wright argued that constitutional states somehow had to reconcile the
two. This was particularly true for states in transition like the United States.
For the United States, the problem of reconciliation was two-fold. First, as explained in
chapter four, the Framers of the Constitution never accepted an extra-constitutional source of the
foreign relations power. Wright’s entire thesis, however, was predicated on the idea that with the
country’s growing international responsibilities this position could no longer be maintained.
Decision-makers had to have some discretionary powers to act outside of those that were
specifically delegated in the Constitution. Second, the Framers split much of the foreign relations
power, including the powers of war and peace, between the executive and legislative branches of
government. Wright noted that this arrangement was fine in theory, but that in practice
legislative bodies like the United State Congress were “large, slow moving and ill informed on

114
Quincy Wright, The Control of American Foreign Relations (New York: Macmillan, 1922). My
knowledge of Wright draws heavily on White, “The Transformation of the Constitutional Regime of
Foreign Relations,” 32–46.
115
Wright, The Control of American Foreign Relations, 3–9, quotes on 4.
116
At worst, an executive acting on behalf of such commitments “might radically alter the
constitution…impair national independence…[or] establish autocracy. Were these commitments
fundamental law, obligatory upon all organs of the government, the achievements of centuries battling for
constitutionalism and popular sovereignty might be sacrificed by the stroke of a pen.” Ibid., 5.
238
foreign relations.”
117
The Congress could not be expected to conduct foreign policy given the
challenges now faced by the country. But nor could the country’s growing international
responsibilities be allowed to undermine the country’s domestic institutional arrangement
completely by shifting absolute power to the President.
Wright’s solution to both problems was to revisit Locke and Montesquieu’s ideas about
the dual-executive discussed in chapter four. In accordance with these ideas, he suggested that
control of foreign relations be treated as if it were a “fourth department” of government separate
from control of domestic affairs. In this scheme, the President would essentially be given
Locke’s federative power, but be subject to a congressional veto and therefore the enumerated
powers of the Constitution. In domestic affairs, meanwhile, the traditional arrangement of
congressional initiative subject to a presidential veto could be maintained.
118
The implication of
this division was that the executive would still be constrained, but have vastly greater power
when it came to issues of foreign affairs.
As G. Edward White explains, Wright was not alone in this thinking. The idea of a
separation between foreign and domestic affairs as a means of distinguishing the different
dimensions of executive power was slowly gaining ground in academic works at this time.
119

Nobody, however, was more important to advancing this idea than Senator, and later Supreme
Court Justice, George Sutherland. Originally as a Senator in the early 1900s, Sutherland was
primarily interested in staking out the national government’s foreign affairs powers vis-à-vis the
states. Over time, however, his ideas broadened and came to form the core of a larger theory of
government, parts of which he was able to legitimize in his capacity as a Supreme Court

117
Ibid., 7.
118
Ibid., 140–150.
119
This included prominent legal scholars like Edward Corwin White, “The Transformation of the
Constitutional Regime of Foreign Relations,” 32, see fn 104.
239
Justice—most notably in the case United States vs. Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation.
120
What
is relevant here is the fact that Sutherland’s theory of government could be read essentially to
grant the executive almost unlimited war-making powers.
121

In a series of lectures at Columbia University in 1918, Sutherland—like others
throughout this chapter—argued the United States faced “altered conditions” since the Founding
and as a result needed to rethink the Constitution.
122
Central to this rethinking were two key
principles that came to form the core of his views of the government’s foreign relations power.
First, contrary to Wright and the widely understood intentions of the Founders, Sutherland
contended that the national government indeed had a significant extra-constitutional reservoir of
what he called “external” powers as a result of the United States’ sovereignty. He explained that
sovereignty was located in the nation and predated the Constitution. Thus, even if the
Constitution did not exist, the national government as representative of the nation would still
wield those powers; they were not the Framers to delegate in the first place. Second, Sutherland
argued that this extra-constitutional source of the national government’s “external” powers made
them distinct from the government’s “internal” powers. The former derived from the country’s
sovereignty and therefore were inherent and unlimited. The latter, on the other hand, were
reserved to the American people (and the states) and therefore were limited to what was
enumerated in the Constitution.

120
Here I am primarily interested in Sutherland’s later views. For an excellent review of Sutherland’s
original ideas and how they evolved over time see ibid., 42–62. Sutherland’s relevant works include
George Sutherland, “The Internal and External Powers of the National Government,” North American
Review 191, no. 652 (1910): 373–89; George Sutherland, Constitutional Power and World Affairs (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1919).
121
Though it is important to point out that at least in 1918 Sutherland himself did not read it that way. See
Sutherland, Constitutional Power and World Affairs, 70–91.
122
These lectures were published as ibid., Chapter 1, 26–27, quote on 48.
240
Sutherland’s views were important, but they may ultimately have remained dubious had
he not been given the chance to legitimize them in constitutional law in the Curtiss-Wright case.
As White explains, in the intervening years between Sutherland’s articulation of his ideas above
and the Curtiss-Wright case, developments in American foreign policy made not only the
question of the national government’s external powers pertinent, but also the question of
executive discretion within the national government to wield those powers.
123
The exact details
of the case itself are not particularly important here. What is relevant is that it called into
question the authority of Congress to delegate part of its foreign affairs powers to the President.
The case, therefore, provided a forum for Sutherland who wrote the Court’s opinion to elaborate
his views on the powers of the national government and the executive.
At the core of his opinion was a three-part argument: First, he articulated his
understanding of the extra-constitutional source of authority for the national government’s
external powers. Sutherland explained that “the powers of external sovereignty…if they had
never been mentioned in the Constitution, would have vested in the federal government as
necessary concomitants of nationality…[They] exist as inherently inseparable from the
conception of nationality.” In other words, those powers could be read as deriving from the
international system, not from the United States Constitution. Second, he outlined what he
described as “the marked difference between foreign affairs and domestic affairs,” arguing the
national government had to be accorded “a degree of discretion and freedom from statutory
restriction which would not be admissible were domestic affairs alone involved.” And finally, he
argued that within the national government it is the President that wields the foreign relations
power: “Not only, as we have shown, is the federal power over external affairs in origin and

123
White, “The Transformation of the Constitutional Regime of Foreign Relations,” 99–103.
241
essential character different from that over internal affairs, but participation in the exercise of the
power is significantly limited. In this vast external realm, with its important, complicated,
delicate and manifold problems, the President alone has the power to speak or listen as a
representative of the nation.”
124

Taken as a whole, Sutherland’s argument made the case for a powerful centralized
executive that could wield power in foreign affairs far more vast than its power in domestic
affairs. In this formula, he solved two problems that have been mentioned throughout this
chapter. On the one hand, as Mahan foreshadowed, Sutherland made the case for firewalling the
foreign and domestic policy making powers of the executive. At least theoretically this would
prevent growth in the former from imperiling the institutional balance in the latter. In fact,
Sutherland—like Mahan before him—presents an interesting paradox: As a Supreme Court
Justice he was known as a constitutional conservative and a member of the so-called “four
horsemen” who opposed the expansion of Presidential power in domestic affairs by voting
against most of the cases involving Roosevelt’s New Deal policies. Yet, at the same time, he
offered perhaps the most radical and transformative reading of the President’s foreign affairs
powers ever. This was an important ideational shift that later helped facilitate the process of
institutional transformation.
On the other hand, Sutherland found a new source of executive power. By looking to
national sovereignty rather the Constitution as a source of authority, he found a seemingly
unlimited set of foreign affairs powers for the executive that could not be subject to the country’s
traditional domestic constraints against such powers. As Harold Koh explains, the significance of
this shift became more apparent in the postwar period when Presidents used Curtiss-Wright as

124
United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp., 299 U.S. 304 (1936).
242
“an effective judicial amendment of Article II of the Constitution to add to the powers
enumerated there an indeterminate reservoir of executive authority in foreign affairs.”
125
Using
Curtiss-Wright, Presidents could effectively claim de jure foreign affairs powers, including a
certain degree of war-making autonomy.
With these two problems solved, Sutherland’s opinion can be read as the legal foundation
of the case for Aaron Wildavsky’s “two presidencies”—one in the domestic arena and one in the
foreign arena.
126
Sutherland’s formula rested on shaky constitutional ground and has been
rejected by many legal scholars since.
127
Nonetheless, it became part of constitutional law,
providing a general blueprint for and legitimation of executive autonomy. It should be stressed
again that President Roosevelt did not at this time claim an inherent and preclusive authority to
conduct the country’s foreign affairs—particularly those powers pertaining to the initiation of
war. But Sutherland at least provided Roosevelt’s successors with a justification for doing so if
they wished.

125
Koh explains: “Among government attorneys, Justice Sutherland’s lavish description of the president’s
powers is so often quoted that it has come to be known as the ”’Curtiss-Wright, so I’m right’ cite“—a
statement of deference to the president so sweeping as to be worthy of frequent citation in any
government foreign-affairs brief.” Harold H. Koh, The National Security Constitution: Sharing Power
after the Iran-Contra Affair (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 94.
126
Wildavsky, “The Two Presidencies.”
127
There are essentially four problems that scholars have noted with Sutherland’s argument: 1) There is
no evidence that there is any extra-constitutional source of the foreign affairs power. 2) There is
insufficient evidence that the Framers treated foreign and domestic affairs powers differently. 3) Even if 1
and 2 were correct, the Constitution divided the whole of the foreign affairs powers between the
legislature and the executive. 4) The “sole-organ” doctrine cited by Sutherland refers to communication
between the United States and foreign countries and does not extend to the war-making powers. See
Michael J. Glennon, Constitutional Diplomacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), Chapter 1;
Koh, The National Security Constitution: Sharing Power after the Iran-Contra Affair, 93–96; Fisher,
Constitutional Conflicts Between Congress and the President, 90–93; Michael D. Ramsey, The
Constitution’s Text in Foreign Affairs (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), Chapter 1, 46–48.
243
Conclusion
The last two chapters have focused on the phase in American history from 1890-1941 as
a period of institutional resistance. In a straight-line functional adaptive explanation of state
behavior, we should expect the United States to have converted its growing economic power and
position in the international system during this period into a more active foreign policy backed
by at least the threat of military force. At a minimum we should expect such a shift to have
occurred by the 1930s when the international security environment deteriorated rapidly and
began to threaten America’s core interests in Europe and Asia. As the chapters demonstrate,
however, a potential behavioral shift required a concomitant institutional shift. The country’s
state structure and decision-making procedures needed to be transformed to provide state leaders
with the capacity, organization, and flexibility to respond more forcefully to changes in the
international security environment. Yet the persistence of republican ideas about the dangers of
standing armed forces, centralized military authority, and executive war-making powers and the
embeddedness of these ideas in the country’s existing institutions prevented such institutional
transformation from occurring.
This institutional transformation would begin to occur in the early 1940s. Most
importantly, it would continue to occur even after World War II ended and ultimately lead to the
creation of the modern American national security state by the early 1950s. An important
question exists about why the United States chose to build such a state apparatus for security
after World War II, but not after World War I when it could just have easily begun to do so. As I
show in the next chapter, the key difference was in the systemic pressure faced by the United
States in the second period. Whereas policymakers fully expected the country to return to a
peacetime footing after World War I, they did not think this would be possible after World War
244
II. The latter shaped the emergent national security state in important ways, but it was the
expectation of future war in its aftermath that ultimately led to the breakdown of the traditional
republican constraints against state-building for national security and the development of
executive war-making autonomy.

245
Chapter Six

Systemic Pressure and Institutional Stress in a Shrinking World,
1941-1950

From the decade beginning in December 1941, a succession of transformational events
and changes shook the very foundations of America’s conception of security: the Japanese attack
on Pearl Harbor; World War II and the challenges associated with projecting American military
power across two oceans; the development and devastating use of nuclear and other advanced
weapons; bipolarity and the emergence of the Cold War between the United States and the
Soviet Union; alarming political, economic, and security weakness in postwar Europe; crises in
Iran, Greece, Berlin and elsewhere across the globe; the “loss of China” in 1949; and the
outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula in 1950. These experiences, coupled with the perceived
failure of American foreign policy in the 1930s, led to a fundamental reevaluation of the
country’s foreign policy goals and the national security infrastructure required to achieve them.
Laying the groundwork for this reevaluation process began even before the guns of
World War II fell silent. In his annual State of the Union address to Congress in January 1943,
President Roosevelt explained that after World War I the United States had tried to produce a
peace based on “a magnificent idealism” and failed. Though the toughest fighting in World War
II remained ahead, he looked to the future in his remarks and argued the country could not afford
to repeat the same mistakes again. It would not be possible to base America’s postwar foreign
246
policy on “good intentions alone” once the war was over. Instead, the United States would have
to “pull the fangs of the predatory animals of this world.” Otherwise, they would “multiply and
grow in strength—and…be at our throats once more in a short generation.”
1

Just how expansive a postwar foreign policy the United States would eventually adopt
was not entirely clear at the time Roosevelt made his remarks. But nearly all observers
recognized it would have to be very different than the country’s previous foreign policy. As he
often did, the noted New York Times columnist and author, Walter Lippmann captured the
prevailing frame of mind that emerged during the war in his U.S. War Aims. America’s period of
“unique, effortless security” was over, he argued. The country now had “to be defended, like all
the other great states of history, by diplomacy, by policy, and by arms.” Accordingly, the prewar
debate about whether the United States needed what he called a “positive policy,” therefore, was
“settled.” In the postwar period it would remain only “to deliberate upon what kind of positive
policy” was needed.
2

When World War II did conclude, a consensus emerged among decision-makers and
public intellectuals that the severity of systemic pressure faced by the United States was greater
than at any time since the War of Independence. Systemic pressure was driven by technological
changes that threatened to render the Western Hemisphere’s geographic isolation null. This
pressure was coupled with the emergence of a cold war with the Soviet Union that many
observers feared would escalate into a “total war” of unprecedented size and scope. Together,
these factors led policymakers to conduct a comprehensive review of America’s foreign policy

1
Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Address to the Congress on the State of the Union, January 7, 1943,” in The
Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, vol. 1943, The Tide Turns (New York: Harper,
1950), 33, 32.
2
Walter Lippmann, U.S. War Aims (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1944), 196–210, quotes on 197,
200.
247
goals and national security requirements. This process began during World War II, reached its
formative stage in 1947-1948, and eventually resulted in the production in 1950 of NSC 68,
which redefined the country’s interests in global terms and became the blueprint for America’s
cold war foreign policy.
3
If doubts remained in policymakers minds at this time, they were
largely swept away by the Korean War.
The most important result of this process was that policymakers decided the country had
to remain prepared for war at all times and make force a more useable instrument of state. As
Secretary of State James Byrnes explained, “we must be willing to implement our foreign policy
with whatever force is necessary to make it effective.”
4
Moreover, the United States could no
longer reasonably expect to get by with a passive policy based on protecting American interests
in the Western Hemisphere; it had to shift to an active policy based on projecting its military
power to the far corners of the globe.
Together, the country’s experiences before, during, and after World War II, along with
rising expectations about future war, generated a tremendous amount of institutional stress in the
country’s national security infrastructure. As I show below, questions about the ability of the

3
As Melvin Leffler, Richard Challener and others have pointed out, “the significance of NSC 68 can be
exaggerated.” On the one hand, the document served in many ways to simply reaffirm the policy positions
that had been reached as early as 1947-1948 and were already laid out in the NSC 20 series. On the other
hand, the document was accepted and then shelved in April 1950 until the outbreak of the Korean War
later that year. Thus NSC 68 was neither a fully novel document nor did it mark an explicit policy change
at the time it was accepted. Nonetheless, NSC 68 was the most comprehensive summation of official
administration thinking after the war and did come to provide America’s foreign policy blueprint, even if
it might not have without Korea. See Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security,
the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1992), 355–356;
Richard D. Challener, “The National Security Policy from Truman to Eisenhower: Did the ‘Hidden Hand’
Leadership Make Any Difference?,” in The National Security: Its Theory and Practice, 1945-1960, ed.
Norman A. Graebner (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 45–47, quote on 47; The full text can
be located at “NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, April 7, 1950,” in
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950, vol. I National Security Affairs; Foreign Economic Policy
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1977), 234–92.
4
Quoted in The President’s Advisory Commission on Universal Training, A Program for National
Security (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1947), 6.
248
United States as a democracy to survive a prolonged struggle were pervasive, both in private and
public. Nearly all observers agreed the country’s national security infrastructure needed to be
strengthened and reorganized, and that the traditional balance of power between the executive
and legislative branches needed be tilted even further in favor of the former.
As was the case throughout American history, the domestic constraints against a large
peacetime military establishment, centralized military authority, and executive war-making
powers continued to weigh on the minds of decision-makers. As John Millet explained at the
time, a question that pervaded discussions of state-building efforts was “whether prolonged and
large-scale defense efforts through the instrument of government will bring, gradual, but far-
reaching, alterations in the power structure of our democratic system.” Millet warned, however,
that the more pressing question that trumped the former was whether there was “any purposeful,
rational way to avoid such change?”
5
American leaders had long sought to avoid sacrificing the
country’s cherished domestic institutional arrangement at the altar of national security. But in the
postwar period many believed this position was no longer defensible.
The uncertainty of policymakers was reflected in many postwar policy documents, which
suggested the country could pursue roughly four courses of action.
6
These different courses of
action, moreover, were linked to different domestic institutional arrangements. The first—
isolationism—meant the prospect of autarky at home and eventually facing a defensive war in
North America once the Soviet Union had overrun the world and gathered its strength. But it
would enable a complete rollback of wartime measures and more or less a return to the status
quo. The second—hemispheric defense—risked the likely possibility of surrendering Europe and

5
John D. Millett, “National Security in American Public Affairs,” The American Political Science Review
43, no. 3 (1949): 533–534.
6
“NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, April 7, 1950,” 272–287.
249
Asia to Soviet aggression. But it would only require the maintenance of a moderate defense
establishment and would not undermine the country’s domestic institutional arrangement. The
third—global containment—offered the opportunity to thwart Soviet aims without necessarily
risking a total war. But it would require a major military buildup and considerable institutional
rearrangement. While the fourth—immediate war with the Soviet Union—might prevent the
emergence a long drawn out cold war. But it would mean total war and require the American
state to become a garrison state—a possibility that was not only repugnant, but was thought to be
strategically unwise in the long run. As policymakers weighed these options, containment
emerged as a compromise of sorts. It would enable the United States to respond to its strategic
environment, even though it ultimately necessitated a significant departure both in America’s
peacetime military posture and its national security institutions.
This chapter is the first of two that focus on the phase in American history from 1941-
1960 as a period of institutional transformation. The two chapters together detail: 1) the
changing nature of the world in the postwar period, 2) the institutional stress this caused, and 3)
how policymakers attempted to grapple with it institutionally. In this first chapter, I focus on the
first two and then turn to the third in the next chapter.

Systemic Pressure: Technology and the “Apprehension of War”
Following World War II, a consensus emerged among policymakers about two important
changes in the external relations of the United States: First, technological developments in
warfare were widely agreed to be radically changing the nature of America’s strategic
environment. Most importantly, these changes were thought to be compressing time and space in
a way that meant the United States could no longer rely as much on its ocean walls for security.
250
For the first time in the country’s history, the American homeland now seemed vulnerable. Just
how much of a shift occurred in these years is evidenced by the reversals in the views of many
leading figures from before World War II to afterward.
Many of the reversals were stunning. Perhaps most important was the case of Senator
Arthur Vandenberg, who as the last chapter mentioned was known as a stalwart isolationist from
the time he entered office in 1928 to the eve of World War II. In the late 1930s he had argued
tirelessly against American intervention in what he considered a strictly European affair. Making
what was still a common argument at the time, Vandenberg explained as late as February 1940
that the United States could remain on the sidelines of the war by virtue of its continued
geographic remoteness: “even in this foreshortened world,” he argued, “we still can look upon
the two great oceans as the God-given guarantee of our international detachment.”
7

Over the course of World War II, however, Vandenberg’s views changed tremendously.
In a statement on the Senate floor in January 1945 he proclaimed isolationism dead, stressing,
“Our oceans have ceased to be moats which automatically protect our ramparts.” Instead, he
argued in favor of a more internationally engaged America in the postwar period.
8
What is
important about his reversal is not just that he softened his views about non-involvement in
world affairs, but that as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Vandenberg would emerge as

7
Arthur H. Vandenberg, Jr., ed., The Private Papers of Senator Vandenberg (London: Victor Gollancz,
1953), 3–4; Ex-President Hoover and others who would later change their views were making the same
argument. In a speech in Chicago in 1939, Hoover justified his non-interventionist position by arguing:
“The Western Hemisphere is still protected by a moat 3,000 miles wide on the east and 6,000 miles on the
west. No airplane has yet been built that can come one-third the way across the Atlantic and one-fifth the
way across the Pacific. In any event, these dictatorships have nothing to gain by coming 3,000 miles or
6,000 miles to attack the Western Hemisphere. So long as our defenses are maintained they have
everything to lose.” Herbert Hoover, “The Illogic of American Intervention,” in America in the World: A
History in Documents from the War with Spain to the War on Terror, ed. Jeffrey A. Engel, Mark Atwood
Lawrence, and Andrew Preston (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 122.
8
Vandenberg’s remarks were so symbolic that they became known as “the speech heard round the
world.” Quoted in C. David Tompkins, Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg: The Evolution of a Modern
Republican, 1884-1945 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1970), 239.
251
one of the key architects of the country’s muscular foreign policy after the war. Thus the
transformation in his views dramatically symbolized both the death of America’s non-
involvement approach to world affairs and the emergence of the consensus for a more activist
and aggressive foreign policy. Later, his remark that the attack on Pearl Harbor was the day that
“ended isolationism for any realist” would become synonymous with the idea that 1941 marked
the beginning a new era in American history.
9

Second, the aforementioned technological developments in warfare, combined with the
emergence of the cold war, led to the view that a passive foreign policy centered on the Western
Hemisphere would no longer suffice. The United States homeland was now vulnerable and the
country had global interests. Allowing even distant foreign threats to emerge and persist,
therefore, was considered too risky. America needed to project its military power overseas to be
secure. Again, just how much of a shift occurred in these years is evidenced by the reversals
from a passive to an active mentality in many leading figures from before World War II to
afterward.
One such individual who demonstrates this shift was Hanson Baldwin who was the
longtime military editor of the New York Times and an advocate of military preparedness even
before the war.
10
Yet, even as an advocate for preparedness, he advanced a fairly passive view
similar to Vandenberg’s in 1939, as did most non-isolationists. While mindful of the growing

9
Vandenberg, Jr., The Private Papers of Senator Vandenberg, 1. Vandenberg would make this comment
in June 1949 suggesting his transformation had been immediate. But as C. David Tompkins shows, in
reality Vandenberg’s own diary and his actions during the war suggest his transformation occurred more
slowly. See Tompkins, Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg: The Evolution of a Modern Republican, 1884-
1945, 191–240.
10
Baldwin was “America’s best known military writer and analyst.” In addition to his newspaper column
he published nineteen military related books during his career. See Robert B. Davies, Baldwin of the
Times: Hanson W. Baldwin, A Military Journalist’s Life, 1903-1991 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press,
2011), quote on 1.
252
seeds of war overseas, he argued the United States and most of its outlying possessions were
“well-nigh impregnable,” even without the “extraordinary defensive measures” being taken by
Congress. Only “by frittering away our great strength in foreign theatres,” Baldwin contended,
would policymakers “destroy that impregnability which today means certain security for the
American castle.”
11

By 1947, however, Baldwin completely altered his perspective, suggesting that even
those who advocated greater military preparedness in the late 1930s did not at that time fully
comprehend the changes that were taking place in the world. In what would prove an important
contribution to the public debate on postwar foreign and defense policy, Baldwin published The
Price of Power—a book which he described was “born at Hiroshima.” The previous half decade,
he argued, had seen modern communications and military technologies destroy “many of the
barriers of terrain and the handicaps of distance.” The United States now had “‘live’ frontiers”
for the first time and was “more vulnerable to assault than ever before in history.” Whereas
“isolationism was once a logical by-product of [America’s] geographical position,” such a
defensive fortress-America policy was no longer possible. Like so many others at the time,
Baldwin would conclude, “Offense today is by far the best defense.”
12

The notions that the American homeland was vulnerable and that the country needed to
assume an active foreign policy centered on force projection both represented sharp departures
from the earlier views of policymakers. In the two sub-sections that follow, I try to show briefly
how a severe increase in systemic pressure caused them to emerge in such a short span of time
across such a wide spectrum of decision-makers and public intellectuals. In the next section, I

11
Hanson W. Baldwin, “Impregnable America,” The American Mercury XLVII, no. 187 (July 1939): 257,
267.
12
Hanson W. Baldwin, The Price of Power (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947), ix, 4, 17, 19, 24–25.
253
then show that this ideational shift about the nature of the international security environment
foregrounded the ideational shift about the nature of America’s existing institutions for national
security.
Technology and the Problem of Time-Space Compression
The most striking feature of World War II and the postwar period was what the
President’s Air Policy Commission referred to as the “scientific revolution” taking place in
warfare technology.
13
The new weapons growing out of this revolution provided states with both
incredible reach over long distances and a tremendous capacity for destruction. Nothing
demonstrated these dynamics more than the air assault on Pearl Harbor in December 1941,
which was the first serious foreign attack against American territory since the War of 1812, and
the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, which provided a
glimpse into the catastrophic potential of the nuclear age. Questions about the nature of these
technologies, their impact on modern warfare, and their implications for American defense
dominated discussions of the country’s national security requirements among decision-makers
both during and after the war.
Scattered throughout the postwar meeting minutes and policy documents of executive
branch officials, various commission reports, congressional hearings, and books by influential
public intellectuals are concerns about the new warfare technologies transforming America’s
strategic environment.
14
A non-exhaustive list includes more powerful conventional weapons,

13
The President’s Air Policy Commission, Survival in the Air Age (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 1948), 17.
14
See for example “SWNCC 282: Basis for the Formulation of a U.S. Military Policy, March 27, 1946,”
in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, vol. I General: The United Nations (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1972), 1160–65; The President’s Advisory Commission on Universal
Training, A Program for National Security; The President’s Air Policy Commission, Survival in the Air
Age; Baldwin, The Price of Power, chapter 3; On the impact these technologies on military planning see
254
larger and more mobile tanks, long-range bombers, the early development of jet aircraft and
ballistic missiles, the first class of truly submersible submarines, aircraft carriers, biological and
chemical weapons, and most revolutionary of all—the atomic bomb. These weapons, moreover,
were combined with advances in military tactics including mechanized, combined-arms, and
armored warfare, along with an emphasis on the element of surprise, all of which together
favored offense over defense. Some of these technologies were developed in rudimentary form
and used in World War I, but it was not until World War II that they truly began to demonstrate
their transformative potential.
Of most immediate concern after the war was the danger posed by the long reach of new
aircraft. In fact, some military planners believed the United States homeland was already at risk
of a Pearl Harbor-like aerial assault (some even thought invasion).
15
In 1947 President Truman
noted the “rapid development of aviation in recent years has made many of our former concepts
out of date” and established the Air Policy Commission to rethink American security and
governmental organization in light of such changes.
16
In studying the issue, the Commission
concluded, “An air attack could be so terrible that we must at once create the best conceivable
defense against it.”
17

What was most alarming at the time, however, was not the present state of warfare
technologies, but the prospect for their continued development in the coming years. Most
importantly, policymakers recognized almost immediately that the United States would not long
retain a monopoly on the atomic bomb. Reacting immediately to the first strike against

Michael S. Sherry, Preparing for the Next War: American Plans for the Postwar Defense, 1941-1945
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).
15
Sherry, Preparing for the Next War: American Plans for the Postwar Defense, 1941-1945, 85.
16
Harry S. Truman, “President’s Letter Appointing the Commission,” in Survival in the Air Age, by The
President’s Air Policy Commission (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1948), v.
17
The President’s Air Policy Commission, Survival in the Air Age, 11.
255
Hiroshima, Admiral William Leahy confided to his diary: “The lethal possibilities of such atomic
action in the future is frightening, and while we are the first to have it in our possession, there is
a certainty that it will in the future be developed by potential enemies and that it will probably be
used against us.”
18
As postwar planning began, therefore, decision-makers operated under the
assumption that other states would soon follow suit. The first state expected to produce a bomb
was the Soviet Union, with estimates in 1945 ranging from as early as four to as late as twenty
years.
19
By 1948, the National Security Council began to make estimates of Soviet behavior
based on the country developing a bomb in the near future.
20
And in August 1949, the Soviet
Union indeed tested its first weapon just four years after the United States had.
Concerns about the expected development of atomic bombs by other states were coupled
with concerns about associated developments in delivery capabilities. Particularly worrying were
anticipated improvements in both supersonic aircraft and guided long-range ballistic missiles,
both of which would be difficult to intercept and would provide a state like the Soviet Union
with the ability to attack North America without warning.
21
By the close of World War II,
advancements in jet propulsion and aerodynamics made supersonic flight a realistic possibility.
22

18
Quoted in Henry H. Adams, Witness to Power: The Life of Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy (Annapolis:
Naval Institute Press, 1985), 299; See also William D. Leahy, I Was There: The Personal Story of the
Chief of Staff to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman Based on His Notes and Diaries Made at the Time
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950), 441; Michael Sherry notes a similar reaction by General George Patton
at the same time. See Sherry, Preparing for the Next War: American Plans for the Postwar Defense,
1941-1945, 191.
19
See Henry L. Stimson, “Memorandum By the Secretary of War (Stimson) to President Truman,
September 11, 1945,” in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945, vol. II General: Political and
Economic Matters (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1967), 41–44.
20
See “NSC 20/2: Factors Affecting the Nature of the U.S. Defense Arrangements in the Light of Soviet
Policies, August 25, 1948,” in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, vol. I General; The United
Nations, Part 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), 619–621.
21
The President’s Air Policy Commission, Survival in the Air Age, 15–18.
22
According to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, these changes marked the end of one
phase of airplane development and the beginning of a second in which there was no “definite limit to the
256
There were key technical challenges to push aircraft over the speed of sound, but scientists began
to work these out quickly and by October 1947 the first manned supersonic flight test occurred.
23

That same year, it was estimated that within ten years warplanes capable of flying at supersonic
speeds would be in operation.
24
Closely related to developments in supersonic aircraft were
similar achievements in rocketry. During the war, Germany had developed the first ballistic
missiles in the world, the V-2 rocket, and successfully used more than 3,000 of them against
Allied targets. These early ballistic missiles were inaccurate, slow, and limited to a range of
roughly 200-miles. The development of guided long-range supersonic missiles was expected to
take a decade or more. But policymakers fully anticipated such weapons to play “a prominent
role in future warfare,” as the Stilwell Board Report suggested.
25

Finally, though atomic and aviation concerns predominated discussions of American
national security, developments in naval technology also helped drive perceptions of a changing
strategic environment. During the war, aircraft carriers were used to project aerial power, fully
submersible submarines that were difficult if not impossible to track were used for the first time,
and newly designed landing craft were used to conduct the first modern large-scale amphibious
assaults. Expected postwar developments in these areas, and others including missile ships, all
held the potential to eliminate some of the difficulties of projecting military power over vast

speed” planes could reach. Thirty-Second Annual Report of the National Advisory Committee for
Aeronautics, 1946 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1949), 2.
23
On the history and development of supersonic flight see Richard P. Hallion, Supersonic Flight:
Breaking the Sound Barrier and Beyond (London: Brassey’s, 1997).
24
The President’s Advisory Commission on Universal Training, A Program for National Security, 8.
25
The Stilwell Board Report estimated intercontinental missiles capable of traveling 3,000 miles were
“probable within the predictable future.” Estimates given to the President’s Air Policy Commission
ranged from five years for sub-supersonic missiles that could travel 5,000 miles and ten to twenty-five
years for operational long-range supersonic missiles. Report of the War Department Equipment Board
(Stilwell Board) (Washington, DC: War Department, Office of the Chief of Staff, January 19, 1946),
quote on 68, http://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p4013coll11/id/1111; The President’s Air
Policy Commission, Survival in the Air Age, 18.
257
ocean expanses. Policymakers recognized that there were still hurdles in this field but
nonetheless were aware that, as the Air Policy Commission concluded, “the means of waging
transoceanic warfare will some day certainly be perfected.”
26

Together, these developments in warfare technologies gave rise to a “shrinking globe”
view of American foreign policy.
27
The core of the shrinking globe view was what can be
conceptualized as the problem of time-space compression: the idea that technological change
was foreshortening geographic distances and speeding up the time in which international security
competition unfolded. These processes were thought to be rendering the world smaller and
bringing threats closer to the American homeland. As discussed in the last chapter, this view first
emerged in nascent form in the early twentieth century and was central to the thinking of those
like Alfred Mahan.
28
In the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack, however, this view diffused more
widely. In 1942, the noted geopolitical theorist Nicholas Spykman argued that oceans were no
longer “barriers but highways” and that the world was now effectively “a single field of forces.”
The implication for the United States, he argued was that the country could no longer be
considered geographically separated from the Old World. It was in fact “surrounded by [it]
across three ocean fronts, the Pacific, the Arctic, and the Atlantic.”
29
These ideas, moreover,
were reflected in the statements of officials. In his 1943 State of the Union Address President
Roosevelt warned that the reach and destruction of wars was growing “in inverse ratio to the

26
The President’s Air Policy Commission, Survival in the Air Age, 27.
27
The concept comes from Louis Fisher, Constitutional Conflicts Between Congress and the President,
Fifth Edition, Revised (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 257.
28
Walter LaFeber, “The ‘Lion in the Path’: The US Emergence as a World Power,” Political Science
Quarterly 101, no. 5 (1986): 714–715.
29
Nicholas J. Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of
Power (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1942), 447–448.
258
shrinking size of the world as a result of the conquest of the air.”
30
And in his address to a joint
session of Congress following the death of the President Roosevelt in early 1945, President
Truman argued that in “a shrinking world, it is futile to seek safety behind geographical
barriers.”
31

With the beginning of the atomic age, the shrinking globe view became nearly ubiquitous
in both private and public discussions of postwar American national security. In private, for
example, the Joint Chiefs of Staff referred to “the effective shrinkage of the world resulting from
the accelerated pace of technological progress,” as the principal long-term trend affecting world
politics.
32
And NSC-68 three times referred to a “shrinking world” as one of the central problems
necessitating change in America foreign policy.
33
In public, Admiral Randall Jacobs explained to
audiences how “Technology has whittled down time and space until we shall have no leeway.”
34

Public intellectuals such as Baldwin meanwhile talked about “the ‘shrinkage’ of the earth” and
the fact that modern communications had “reduced the time-space factor to such a degree that
two super-states in the same world inevitably jostle each other and step on each other’s toes.”
35

While others like Professor John Millet referred to the emergence of “one world” after 1945.
36

30
Italics added for emphasis. Roosevelt, “Address to the Congress on the State of the Union, January 7,
1943,” 32.
31
Italics added for emphasis. Harry S. Truman, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress,” in
Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, April 12 - December 31, 1945
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1961), 3.
32
Italics added for emphasis. Thomas H. Etzold and John Lewis Gaddis, eds., “JSPC 814/3: Estimate of
Probable Developments in the World Political Situation up to 1957, December 11, 1947,” in
Containment: Documents on American Policy and Strategy, 1945-1950 (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1978), 285.
33
Italics added for emphasis. “NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security,
April 7, 1950,” 241, 263.
34
Italics added for emphasis. Quoted in Sherry, Preparing for the Next War: American Plans for the
Postwar Defense, 1941-1945, 84–85, quote on 84.
35
Baldwin, The Price of Power, 24–25.
36
Millett, “National Security in American Public Affairs,” 525.
259
Regardless of how the problem of time-space compression was articulated, it was widespread
and played a prominent role in framing policymakers’ conceptions of American security in the
postwar period.
There were two interrelated implications of a shrinking globe view for American
security. First, it made the American homeland appear incredibly vulnerable for the first time in
the country’s history. This idea of vulnerability again pervaded both private and public
discussions at the time. “For probably the last time in the history of warfare, General George
Marshall wrote in his war report in 1945, “ocean distances were a vital factor in our defense.”
37

Looking ahead, the Joint Chiefs of Staff noted in its first postwar assessment that the United
States needed to operate under the assumption that there was now “a marked reduction in our
degree of invulnerability.”
38
In October 1945, President Truman informed the country “Our
geographic security is now gone—gone with the advent of the robot bomb, the rocket, aircraft
carriers and modern airborne armies.”
39
Even though experts such as the head of the Office of
Scientific Research and Development, Vannevar Bush, rejected the notion entirely, the specter of
imminent “push button” war perhaps most captured the vulnerability of the United States in the
atomic age.
40
The idea, General Marshall explained, was that “there might be two scientists, one

37
George C. Marshall, “Biennial Report of the Chief of Staff of the United States Army to the Secretary
of War: July 1, 1943, to June 30, 1945,” in Biennial Reports of the Chief of Staff of the United States
Army to the Secretary of War: 1 July 1939 - 30 June 1945 (Washington, DC: Government Printing
Office, 1996), 209.
38
“SWNCC 282: Basis for the Formulation of a U.S. Military Policy, March 27, 1946,” 1161.
39
Harry S. Truman, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on Universal Military Training,
October 23, 1945,” in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, April 12 -
December 31, 1945 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1961), 405.
40
For warnings about “push button” war at the time see “Push-Button War,” Newsweek, August 27, 1945;
Hanson W. Baldwin, “The Atom Bomb and Future War,” LIFE, August 20, 1945; Henry H. Arnold, “If
War Comes Again,” New York Times Magazine, November 18, 1945. Bush argued “such a thing is
impossible and will be impossible for many years.” G. Pascal Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush,
Engineer of the American Century (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 316–317.
260
in Germany...and one in Washington. As each pressed a button, a horrendous explosion would
occur in the other fellow’s territory. This process would continue short of a lucky hit on one of
the scientists and his button establishment.” Marshall was of course attempting to point out the
absurdity and “irrationality” of push button war in his remarks, but they nonetheless captured a
worst-case scenario for the ease with which the United States might be attacked one day.
41

Second, the shrinking globe view made America’s foreign interests appear more
extensive and significant. This was because the danger in a foreshortened world was that even
distant threats could reverberate back to the United States quickly. This reverberation could
occur directly, as it did at Pearl Harbor. The narrative was that one day the Japanese had attacked
Manchuria and the next they were in Hawaii. Thus, if the 1930s and World War II taught the
United States anything, Secretary of State Henry Stimson argued, it was that “aggressive war
anywhere is a direct threat” to the country and had to be stopped before reaching America’s
shores.
42
But such reverberation could also occur more indirectly. American policymakers
believed that the aggression of the 1930s was at least partly rooted in totalitarianism and
therefore the development or persistence of such regimes posed a potential threat the country. As
President Truman explained in his joint address to Congress in March 1947 articulating the
Truman Doctrine, “totalitarian regimes imposed on free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression,
undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States.”
43

41
“Marshall Holds Army Role Grows,” New York Times, October 18, 1945 from Rachel Plotnick,
“Predicting Push-Button Warfare: U.S. Print Media and Conflict from a Distance, 1945-2010,” Media,
Culture & Society 34, no. 6 (2012): 659.
42
Henry L. Stimson, “Advisor’s Letter, January 22, 1948,” in Appendix H: Task Force Report on Foreign
Affairs, by The Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government (Washington,
DC: Government Printing Office, 1949), xi.
43
Harry S. Truman, “Special Message to the Congress on Greece and Turkey: The Truman Doctrine,” in
Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, January 1 - December 31, 1947
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1963), 178.
261
The effect of such an expansive view was to make American interests potentially worldwide.
Indeed by the late 1940s the country’s interests were so extensive that policymakers agreed they
“existed almost everywhere,” according to Melvyn Leffler.
44
Or as the Air Policy Commission
proclaimed, the country’s interests were so wide-ranging that “World peace and the security of
the United States” were now “the same thing.”
45
In just one decade, Americans’ conceptions of
the international security environment were turned upside down.
The Logic of Force Projection in the Postwar World
The greatest impact these revolutionary changes had on American foreign policy was
with respect to the role that force would come to play in the country’s diplomacy in the postwar
period. After World War II, policymakers remained unanimous in their desire for war to be
outlawed one day. As the Air Policy Commission proclaimed, the United States would “be
secure in an absolute sense only if the institution of war itself is abolished under a regime of
law.”
46
Some individuals, moreover, still held out hope for disarmament, international law, and
the new architecture of collective security centered on the United Nations to ensure the postwar
peace. But most policymakers were under no illusion that peace could be achieved through these
mechanisms alone. As the Commission report explained, “even the most optimistic view” of the
United Nations was not one in which the abolition of war could be expected.
47
Instead, the
United States would likely have to maintain a much larger military establishment than anyone
had ever envisioned and protect itself and its interests around the world with force.

44
Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War,
180.
45
The President’s Air Policy Commission, Survival in the Air Age, 4.
46
Ibid., 3.
47
Ibid., 5.
262
To be clear though, how central a role force would play in American foreign policy was
not entirely clear at first. In their respective first postwar assessments in 1945, for example, the
Joint Chiefs of Staff adopted a force-centered conception of foreign policy, while the State
Department defended a more traditional diplomacy-centered conception. The two reached an
impasse of sorts over the issue of force, as the latter questioned the former’s emphasis on the
idea that “[American] security may require extensive military operations overseas.”
48
Even as
greater consensus was reached and the grand strategy of containment came together over the next
couple of years there would remain sharp differences over what role military force was supposed
to play in it. Nothing represented the uncertain role of force in containment more than the
ambivalence of George Kennan who was the original architect of the policy. On the one hand,
Kennan argued in his “Long Telegram” that the Soviet Union was “impervious to logic of reason
and…highly sensitive to logic of force.”
49
His expectation was that the Soviet Union would back
down in most cases when presented with resistance. Containment, for Kennan, therefore, was
predicated on the need for the United States to be willing to confront the Soviets with
“unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the
interests of a peaceful and stable world.”
50
Years later, however, he regretted leaving the

48
“SWNCC 282: Basis for the Formulation of a U.S. Military Policy, March 27, 1946”; “SC-169b:
Action on Joint Chiefs of Staff Statement of United States Military Policy, November 16, 1945,” in
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, vol. I General; The United Nations (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1972), 1123–1128, quote on 1127; See also “Memorandum Prepared in the
State Department, December 1, 1945 [extracts],” in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, vol. I
General; The United Nations (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1972), 1134–39; A.J.
McFarland, “SWN-4096: The Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Secretary of State, March 29, 1946 [extracts],”
in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, vol. I General; The United Nations (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1972), 1165–66.
49
George F. Kennan, “Telegram: The Chargé in the Soviet Union (Kennan) to the Secretary of State,
February 22, 1946,” in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, vol. VI Eastern Europe; The Soviet
Union (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1969), 707.
50
George F. Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” in American Diplomacy, Expanded Edition
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 126.
263
meaning of the phrase “counter-force” unclear. Most policymakers took it to mean military force
and this is indeed how the policy evolved. But Kennan retrospectively clarified his ideas
explaining: “containment of Soviet power was not the containment by military means of a
military threat, but the political containment of a political threat.”
51
He never expected
containment to become so “militarized.”
Though Kennan never expected military force to play such a central role in the country’s
postwar foreign policy, most policymakers did come to that position sometime between 1945 and
the outbreak of the Korean War five years later. Though the most obvious factor during this time
was the emergence of the Cold War, it is important to note that evidence suggests the United
States may have adopted a force-centered foreign policy irrespective of the Soviet Union.
52
As I
explain below, the changing nature of warfare technologies and the fact that they created a new
logic of force dictated this policy shift. The Soviet Union played an important role in facilitating
this shift, but mostly because it served to confirm American policymakers’ worst fears about the
risks of war in the postwar world.
The new logic of force that emerged was centered on two possibilities made conceivable
by the changing nature of warfare technologies. The first was the possibility of “total war”—a
concept that was used widely by both political and military leaders at the time. Total wars are
those in which the weapons used, the locations and individuals targeted, and the goals of the
actors involved are all unrestricted. World War I and World War II showed an increasing
tendency toward this type of conflict. With the new technologies developed during World War II

51
George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1925 - 1950 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967), 354–367, quote
on 358.
52
The authors of NSC 68, for example, pointed out, “Even if there were no Soviet Union...We face the
fact that in a shrinking world the absence of order among nations is becoming less and less tolerable.”
“NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, April 7, 1950,” 262–263.
264
and afterwards, the prospect of total war took on an even greater meaning for American leaders.
They believed that such a war in the future would escalate into a nuclear exchange. Unlike past
wars, moreover, they fully expected the American homeland to be targeted and devastated the
next time around. As the authors of NSC 68 concluded, the logic that determined so many
dimensions of the Cold War was the fact that “every individual faces the ever-present possibility
of annihilation should the conflict enter the phase of a total war.”
53

The second possibility made conceivable by the changing nature of warfare technologies
was of surprise attack. In fact, two factors militated in favor of such a course of action. First,
policymakers believed that any potential aggressors would have learned from Germany and
Japan’s historical experiences of defeat in World War II. The next time a country had such
unlimited aims, they would know the United States needed to be dealt a critical blow before they
could achieve them. Second, policymakers believed the offensive nature of technology at the
time favored a rapid and decisive attack, which would be most effective if done by surprise.
54

This was particularly true against a country like the United States, which historically only built
up its military capabilities once a conflict had begun. With a surprise attack using the new
warfare technologies including atomic weapons, an adversary could effectively knock the United
States out of a war before it had time to ramp up the American war machine.
55

What alarmed policymakers, therefore, was not only the scale of any potential future
conflict, but the swiftness with which it might come. Given these factors, it is important to
outline what they thought a future war would actually look like. In what the President’s Advisory
Commission on Universal Training described as one of the more “restrained” presentations by a

53
Ibid., 237.
54
“SWNCC 282: Basis for the Formulation of a U.S. Military Policy, March 27, 1946,” 1161.
55
“NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, April 7, 1950,” 266.
265
witness, Lt. General J. Lawton Collins provided a view many of those involved with military
planning at the time would have seconded:
We could expect that the war would start very suddenly and come through the air and that
the enemy would try to eliminate the United States at the outset, not making the same
mistake as last time of taking on somebody else first and allowing us to prepare. The
attack would be primarily at the great cities and would cause great destruction both to
physical structures and the people. It might involve atomic bombs, radioactive materials,
biological warfare, and crop-destroying chemicals. The atomic bomb would probably be
used against cities in preference to military targets. We would have chaos, with
communications disrupted, millions of persons sick, wounded and dying, civil disorder,
and sabotage. The initial bombing attack would likely be followed by air-borne troops.
There is also the possibility of long-range submarines popping up offshore and directing
guided missiles to targets on this continent.”
56

In the years after World War II, it was the desire to prevent this type of catastrophe from
occurring, coupled with a fear of being cutoff in such a war from the country’s extensive foreign
interests, that led to the development of a fundamentally new American foreign policy with a
new logic of force projection at its core.
The new logic of force was as follows: the United States had to maintain and be able to
project its military power overseas to prevent the possibilities of surprise attacks and/or total
war from occurring. The implications of this logic were three-fold: First, the country had to build
and maintain substantial peacetime armed forces. On the one hand, it was hoped that such forces
would play a balancing role by deterring aggression against the United States and other
countries.
57
Potentially more important, however, was the fact that if the country were attacked
again, President Truman argued, “there would be no time under conditions of modern war to
develop…latent strength into the necessary fighting force,” as the country had done before.
58

56
Quoted in The President’s Advisory Commission on Universal Training, A Program for National
Security, 13.
57
“SWNCC 282: Basis for the Formulation of a U.S. Military Policy, March 27, 1946,” 1162.
58
Truman, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on Universal Military Training, October 23,
1945,” 405.
266
Whereas in previous wars the United States prepared over periods of twelve or more months, it
would have to be able respond at most in the first sixty days of any future conflict. Even this time
frame was considered too long for many analysts who recognized that a foreign state would
eventually be able to inflict as much damage on the United States in a surprise attack as the
Allies did during the entire three and half years of saturation bombing against Germany in World
War II.
59
As the authors of NSC 100 explained, if the United States did not have the “forces in
being necessary to assure our national survival through the opening, and decisive, months of a
general war, then neither our allies nor ourselves will ever have the opportunity to use the forces
which eventually would play the dominant role in the later, conclusive phase of such a war.”
60
If
attacked, American military forces needed to be large enough and capable enough to “survive the
initial blow and go on to the eventual attainment of its objectives.”
61

Second, the United States needed to shift from a passive policy based on protecting
American interests in the Western Hemisphere to an active policy based on projecting its military
power across the globe.
62
There was a general belief among policymakers and others that, as
General Marshall concluded in his postwar report, “The only effective defense a nation can now
maintain is the power of attack.”
63
Or in Baldwin’s words “the best defense, in fact, the only true

59
The President’s Advisory Commission on Universal Training, A Program for National Security, 16.
60
“NSC 100: Recommended Policy Actions in Light of the Grave World Situation, January 11, 1951,” in
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1951, vol. I National Security Affairs; Foreign Economic Policy
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1979), 16.
61
“NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, April 7, 1950,” 287–288.
62
The emphasis on offense was littered throughout postwar policy planning documents. See for example
“NSC 7: The Position of the United States with Respect to Soviet-Directed World Communism, Taking
Into Account the Security Interests of the United States, March 30, 1948,” in Foreign Relations of the
United States, 1948, vol. I General; The United Nations, Part 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing
Office, 1975), 548; “NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, April 7,
1950,” 282–284.
63
Marshall, “Biennial Report of the Chief of Staff of the United States Army to the Secretary of War: July
1, 1943, to June 30, 1945,” 111.
267
defense, would appear to be a strong offense.”
64
The belief in what the President’s Advisory
Commission on Universal Training called “defense by attack” was motivated by two factors.
65

On the one hand, a forward operating posture centered on a network of foreign bases and secure
lines of communication was needed in part to diminish the reach of modern warfare
technologies. If the United States was to be secure at home, the Joint Chiefs of Staff argued, the
country’s defense “must begin beyond its frontiers…The farther away from our own vital areas
we can hold our enemy…the greater are our chances of surviving an attack by atomic weapons
and of destroying the enemy which employs them against us.”
66
A forward operating posture
could not eliminate the problem of total war, but could at least keep it as far away from
American shores as possible.
On the other hand, the country needed a forward presence not just to defend American
territory but also to conduct an offensive strategy designed to confront and undermine foreign
aggressors. The Joint Chiefs of Staff explained the logic for offense as follows: “When it
becomes evident that forces of aggression are being arrayed against us by a potential enemy, we
cannot afford, through any misguided and perilous idea of avoiding an aggressive attitude to
permit the first blow to be struck against us. Our government, under such conditions, should
press the issue to a prompt political decision, while making all preparations to strike the first
blow if necessary.”
67
The point was not to wage wars of aggression, but to be willing to carry
war to foreign adversaries without necessarily being attacked first.

64
Baldwin, The Price of Power, 16–18, quote on 17.
65
The President’s Advisory Commission on Universal Training, A Program for National Security, 27.
66
“JCS 477/10: Statement of Effect of Atomic Weapons on National Security and Military Organization,
March 29, 1946,” quoted in Melvyn P. Leffler, “The American Conception of National Security and the
Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945-48,” The American Historical Review 89, no. 2 (1984): 350.
67
“SWNCC 282: Basis for the Formulation of a U.S. Military Policy, March 27, 1946,” 1163.
268
Third, the United States had to develop not just a more active policy, but also a repertoire
for offensive action. To begin with, policymakers recognized the need to be able to withstand a
massive attack, and fight and win a total war if necessary. The survival of the United States
necessitated nothing less. But if the country relied only on its atomic arsenal and willingness to
wage total war to conduct its foreign policy, it risked being stuck between two equally
unpalatable options anytime its security or interests were at stake: it would either have “to
capitulate or precipitate a global war.”
68
As I explained in the introduction to the chapter,
policymakers wanted to avoid a total war at all costs. This was not just because of the likely
human toll but also because it would force the United States to become a full-blown garrison
state. At the same time, however, they knew that capitulation to foreign aggressors could not be
accepted after the experiences of the 1930s. Policymakers concluded, therefore, that engaging in
“limited wars” and using other hostile “means short of war” might provide vehicles to back
American foreign policy with force, while also potentially sparing the country a worst-case
outcome. Thus, total war, limited war, and means short of war were conceived of as
interdependent components on a spectrum of force capabilities, all of which required the United
States to develop new instruments, skills, and techniques.
69

The Blurring of War and Peace and the Cold War
The final and general implication of the changing nature of warfare technologies, the
problem of time-space compression, and the new logic of force that developed at this time was
that war and peace ceased to exist as separate categories. World War II gave the country its first

68
“NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, April 7, 1950,” 264.
69
It should be noted, interestingly, that this interdependence created a strange paradox about the emerging
logic of force: To prevent the possibility of total war necessitated engaging in limited wars and constantly
using means short of war. Yet, at the same time, using means short of war and engaging in limited wars
always risked the outbreak of total war.
269
experience with this blurring of war and peace. The United States entered the war on December
7, 1941. The war ended with Germany on May 8, 1945 and with Japan on August 14, 1945.
President Truman, however, did not declare the end of hostilities until December 31, 1946. Even
still, he maintained that the United States was still in “a state of war” and retained the emergency
powers, which had been proclaimed by President Roosevelt in 1939 (limited) and 1941
(unlimited), until April 28, 1952 when he formally terminated them. Thus, as Louis Fisher
highlights, formal hostilities lasted only four years but the war emergency lasted twelve.
70
By the
time that twelve year period ended, moreover, the United States had several hundred thousand
troops fighting in Korea and the Cold War was in full throttle. In a sense, to this day the last time
the United States was truly at peace was 1938.
71

After the war, policymakers routinely referencing this new suspended state of national
existence. Senator Robert Taft, for example, referred to it as “a special state of semi-war.”
72

Importantly, this blurring of war and peace came to be reflected in the way policymakers thought
about the postwar period. The immediate postwar years were characterized as one of “continuing
international crisis.”
73
National security was conceived of no longer as “intermittent but
continuous.”
74
The country had to “ride two horses” simultaneously, according to the Joint
Chiefs of Staff—“one heading towards peace and progress and the other headed toward war
preparation.” As a result, they recommended “the nature of future war…be made a continuing

70
Fisher, Constitutional Conflicts Between Congress and the President, 267.
71
For an interesting perspective on this blurring of war and peace see Mary L. Dudziak, War-Time: An
Idea, Its History, and Its Consequences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
72
Quoted in Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National
Security State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 343.
73
The Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, Appendix H: Task Force
Report on Foreign Affairs (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1949), 37.
74
The Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, Appendix G: Task
Report on National Security Organization (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1949), 28.
270
study.”
75
According to Secretary of War Robert Patterson, the situation was such that the country
could no longer base the “nation’s security establishment…on one organization in peace and
another in war.”
76
And though few officials stated so directly or openly, others noted the
breaking down of the distinction between the normal constitutional powers conferred on the
government during peacetime and the extraordinary ones conferred during wartime.
77

Again, nothing gave life to these postwar ideas more than the Soviet Union and the
emergence of the Cold War. In fact, the term “cold war” came to life at this time in order to
describe this new suspended state of being between war and peace in the post-atomic age.
78
The
term found its way into policy planning documents in the first attempt at a systematic postwar
assessment of American foreign policy in NSC 7 in 1948. The document adopted the phrase
“cold war” to describe the country’s evolving relationship with its previous wartime partner the
Soviet Union and proclaimed the United States could not withdraw from the conflict “short of
eventual national suicide.”
79
As the term was popularized, Robert Lovett described the Cold War
between the two countries as it came to be understood by American policymakers: “We must
realize that we are now in a mortal conflict; that we are now in a war worse than any we have
ever experienced. Just because there is not much shooting as yet does not mean that we are in a

75
Thomas H. Etzold and John Lewis Gaddis, eds., “Brief on the Pattern of War in the Atomic Warfare
Age, December 16, 1948,” in Containment: Documents on American Policy and Strategy, 1945-1950
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 344, 357.
76
Quoted in Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 26.
77
Edward S. Corwin, Total War and the Constitution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), 168–182.
78
George Orwell used the term in an essay in October 1945 to describe the impact of the atomic bomb.
Prophetically, he argued the bomb was likely “to put an end to large-scale wars at the costs of prolonging
indefinitely a ‘peace that is no peace.’” The term was popularized with the publication of Walter
Lippmann’s book of that name in 1947. George Orwell, “You and the Atomic Bomb,” Tribune, October
19, 1945; Walter Lippmann, The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1947).
79
“NSC 7: The Position of the United States with Respect to Soviet-Directed World Communism, Taking
Into Account the Security Interests of the United States, March 30, 1948,” 546.
271
cold war. It is not a cold war; it is a hot war. The only difference between this and previous hot
wars is that death comes more slowly and in a different fashion.”
80
Or as the authors of NSC 68
described it, “the cold war is in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at
stake.”
81
The “war” was described as cold, but in the heads of policymakers it was always in fact
hot.
It is important to note that during the formative stage of the Cold War, the chances for
total war with the Soviet Union were actually considered quite small. Policymakers were well
aware of how much the war devastated the Soviet economy and the Soviets did not test their first
atomic bomb until August 1949. The Cold War was instead driven, at least at first, by
expectations of future war. These expectations, moreover, were compounded by beliefs about the
length of time that might be required to wage it. By 1950, some realized the Cold War might last
decades. In a truly prophetic statement, James Conant told a meeting of the State-Defense Policy
Review Group that the United States would likely have to hold out against the Soviet Union until
at least 1980 when “their absurdities and static system would cause them to grind to a stop.”
82

Again, what is important about this idea of the Cold War as a prolonged conflict was that
policymakers could no longer ditinguish between wartime and peacetime. As the authors of NSC
20/1 explained about emerging Cold War in 1948, “there is no time limit for the achievement of

80
At this meeting of the State-Defense Policy Review Group, Lovett was a consultant. He had resigned as
Under Secretary of State the year before, but would be appointed Secretary of Defense later in 1950.
“Record of the Meeting of the State-Defense Policy Review Group, Department of State, Thursday,
March 16, 1950, 3 P.m. to 6:45 P.m.,” in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950, vol. I National
Security Affairs; Foreign Economic Policy (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1977), 197.
81
“NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, April 7, 1950,” 292.
82
Conant was President of Harvard University and a member of the General Advisory Committee of the
United States Atomic Energy Commission. “Record of the Meeting of the State-Defense Policy Review
Group, Department of State, Thursday, March 2, 1950, 3 P.m. to 5:00 P.m.,” in Foreign Relations of the
United States, 1950, vol. I National Security Affairs; Foreign Economic Policy (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1977), 179.
272
our objectives under conditions of peace. We are faced here with no rigid periodicity of war and
peace which would enable us to conclude that we must achieve our peacetime objectives by a
given date “or else.”” The document concluded that if war and peace could not be separated, then
the government had to mirror that reality and “reduce as far as possible” the gap between its
“peacetime objectives” and “hypothetical wartime objectives.”
83

This blurring of war and peace for an unforeseeable amount of time was radically new for
the United States. Whereas the country had normally expected to be at peace throughout its
history, it now fully expected to be at war at any moment. World War II had forced the United
States to respond to new warfare technologies, a surprise attack, and a close approximation of
total war. But its arrangements to meet these contingencies were ad hoc and had not been
institutionalized. That would not occur until after the war when it was what James Madison
termed the “Constant apprehension of war” that drove institutional changes.
84

Institutional Stress and the Challenge of State-Building for Autonomy
Almost as widespread as the idea that the United States faced a radically different
postwar world was fear that as a democracy America might not survive in it. The country’s
national security institutions failed to prevent World War II and faced tremendous strains during
the war. In the postwar period, they were widely feared to be inadequate for the challenges posed
by modern warfare technologies and the need to adapt to the new logic of force. The institutional
stress generated by these experiences and expectations was perhaps more severe than at any time

83
Thomas H. Etzold and John Lewis Gaddis, eds., “NSC 20/1: U.S. Objectives with Repsect to Russia,
August 18, 1948,” in Containment: Documents on American Policy and Strategy, 1945-1950 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1978), 180, 176.
84
James Madison, “Speech at the Constitutional Convention,” June 29, 1787, in Phillip B. Kurland and
Ralph Lerner, eds., in The Founder’s Constitution, vol. 3 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987),
Article I, Section 2, Clause 3, Document 2.
273
in America’s history. At the least, it was a different type of stress than the country ever faced. In
the past, decision-makers could reasonably expect to get by with ad hoc institutional
arrangements that could be scaled up at the start of war and rolled back at its end. But with the
blurring of war and peace and the emergence of what they expected to be a long and dangerous
conflict with the Soviet Union, this would no longer be possible. They quickly realized that with
few standing forces, fragmented authority over the military, and legislative constraints on
executive war-making, the country would not long survive against a powerful, centralized, and
unencumbered Soviet state. The United States had to adapt its institutions and to some degree
“emulate” its adversary.
It will be recalled that institutional stress occurs when there is tension between existing
domestic institutions and decision-makers preferences for how decision-making structures and
processes should enable them to act. When systemic pressure is severe, institutional stress is also
severe if 1) decision-makers lack the institutional resources required to pursue what they believe
to be in a state’s best interest, 2) national security organizations do not enable them to mobilize
state resources, and 3) procedural norms with respect to national security decision-making favor
broad deliberation over quick and decisive action. In the remainder of the chapter, I attempt to
show how these deficiencies acted collectively to generate institutional change and create the
modern American war-making executive.
Democracy’s Deficiencies and the Need for Institutional Change
As I mentioned in the introduction to the dissertation, a common refrain among
policymakers and public intellectuals throughout the postwar period was that democratic
274
constraints made the conduct of foreign policy difficult, if not impossible.
85
As the journalist
Edgar Ansel Mowrer wrote at the time, the belief was “the greater the democracy, the greater the
difficulty.”
86
This view had historical roots, but in the postwar period it was linked directly to the
perceived policy failures of the 1930s, not only by the United States, but also Great Britain and
France. The prevailing belief was that western democracies had mistakenly disarmed and
weakened themselves after World I. In the 1930s, totalitarian aggressors preyed on this weakness
and were motivated at least in part by the inability of democracies to confront them. Many
documents recovered in Germany after the war in fact contained explicit references to the
military weakness and lack of decisive action on the part of the United States and Great Britain
as a source of motivation for Nazi Germany’s aggression.
87
Policymakers concluded that being
as weak and weak-willed as before the war would again provide “an invitation to extermination”
afterwards.
88

World War II itself, moreover, placed a great deal of stress on America’s state structure
and decision-making procedures. The lack of substantial intelligence capabilities, combined with
problems stitching together what little intelligence the government did gather, contributed to the
attack on Pearl Harbor. Once the United States entered the war, the military was terribly

85
For academic works to this effect see Hans J. Morgenthau, In Defense of the National Interest: A
Critical Examination of American Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1950),
221–242; George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, Expanded Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1951), 93–100; Walter Lippmann, Essays in the Public Philosophy (Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 1955); Dean Acheson, A Citizen Looks at Congress (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), 86;
Hans J. Morgenthau, Dilemmas of Politics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958), 324–339; George
F. Kennan, The Cloud of Danger: Current Realities of American Foreign Policy (Boston: Little, Brown
and Company, 1977), 3–9; Samuel P. Huntington, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 18; Jean-François Revel, How Democracies Perish (New
York: Doubleday, 1984).
86
Edgar Ansel Mowrer, “The Formulation of American Foreign Policy,” in The Strengthening of
American Political Institutions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1949), 118.
87
The President’s Advisory Commission on Universal Training, A Program for National Security, 3–5.
88
Ibid., 5.
275
unprepared to carry the fight to the enemy. Most critically, the lack of capabilities and poor
organization during the first six months caused the military to reel from one defeat to another in
the Pacific.
89
President Truman would later remark that the United States won despite its military
organization, not because of it.
90
Finally, the lack of centralized authority within the government
meant both civil and military leaders were constantly forced to rely on improvised planning and
decision-making arrangements throughout the war. As Thomas Etzold suggests, many
policymakers appeared to long for “war’s end less in anticipation of the blessings of peace than
in hope of a timely opportunity to institutionalize the improvised arrangements of the war years
regarding defense and diplomacy.”
91
In fact this general theme of needing to institutionalize
wartime decision-making bodies and procedures would pervade discussions of postwar foreign
policy. Secretary of State Stimson later explained that with years of emergencies, policymakers
had been “forced to take special measures to reinforce the inadequate structure of our
governmental machinery in foreign affairs.” After the war, he said, it was finally time to deal
with this inadequacy once and for all.
92

In the postwar period concerns about state institutions only grew with the increasing
expectations of future war discussed in the last section. The fact that the Cold War pitted the
United States against the Soviet Union, which policymakers often noted looked and acted just
like Nazi Germany, only helped to exacerbate the institutional stress experienced at this time. As

89
Allan R. Millett, Peter Maslowski, and William B. Feis, For the Common Defense: A Military History
of the United States from 1607 to 2012, 3rd ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012), 374–377.
90
Oral History Interview with Clark M. Clifford Assistant to White House Naval Aide, 1945-46; Special
Counsel to the President, 1946-50, interview by Jerry N. Hess, April 13, 1971,
http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/cliford2.htm.
91
Thomas H. Etzold, “American Organization for National Security, 1945-50,” in Containment:
Documents on American Policy and Strategy, 1945-1950, ed. Thomas H. Etzold and John Lewis Gaddis
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 1.
92
Stimson, “Advisor’s Letter, January 22, 1948,” xi.
276
policymakers eyed up their adversary in the emerging Cold War, they frequently lamented the
fact that the United States was at a serious disadvantage relative to the Soviet Union. They were
particularly concerned about the country’s inability to project military power and use force on
behalf of its foreign policy goals. This view was reflected in public debates as well. In the most
important critique of containment at the time, Walter Lippmann did not question the policy itself,
but whether the western democracies could actually operate it. American constitutional
government, he argued, could not match an authoritarian government and meet force with
counterforce as Kennan argued. Instead, while the Soviets acted, Lippmann explained, Congress
would be “getting ready to hold hearings.”
93

Several examples serve to show how decision-makers thought democracy disadvantaged
them in the Cold War. Before the Soviet Union was named enemy number one, the President’s
Air Policy Commission explained in more general terms that it would be “difficult for a
representative democracy to keep up with an authoritarian state in an armament race in
peacetime.”
94
At the same time, the President’s Advisory Commission on Universal Training
warned: “A nation bent on conquest can plan and prepare in advance for a definite campaign and
type of warfare. It selects its own time, place, and mode of attack. It need not—and in the future
almost certainly will not—formally declare war. It strikes when it is most confident of success.
Under its Constitution, the United States cannot.” The Commission noted that the United States
was not only vulnerable to attack, but that in “shunning aggression” it actually made itself “the
prime target” for aggressors.
95

93
Lippmann, The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy, quotes on 14, 15.
94
The President’s Air Policy Commission, Survival in the Air Age, 8.
95
Italics added for emphasis. The President’s Advisory Commission on Universal Training, A Program
for National Security, 7.
277
Once the Cold War was accepted as fact, policymakers were more explicit in their
comparisons of the United States and the Soviet Union. NSC 68 is littered with such
comparisons. It noted in particular that the fundamental difference between the two countries
was with respect to “attitudes toward the use of military force.” As a democracy, the United
States could only resort to such measures as “a last resort.” The Soviet Union, on the other hand,
would “not hesitate to use military force aggressively if that course is expedient in the
achievement of its design.”
96
Given this discrepancy, the authors of the document argued that
America had no choice now but to adapt its institutions and make force a more useable
instrument of the state.
As I explain below, one of the most revolutionary institutional changes in the postwar
period was the development of an extensive intelligence and covert operations apparatus. In
considering why it was needed, the authors of the Doolittle Report in 1954 argued the country
needed “an aggressive covert psychological, political and paramilitary organization” to counter
similar capabilities of the Soviet Union. The report explained:
It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world
domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game.
Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to
survive, long-standing American concepts of ‘fair play’ must be reconsidered. We must
develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert,
sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective
methods than those used against us.
In a nod to the limits the authors faced in a democracy, they suggested that it might one day be
necessary to tell the American people about this “fundamentally repugnant philosophy” and seek
their support for it. But under the circumstances of the Cold War, the report argued the

96
“NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, April 7, 1950,” 242–244,
quotes on 243, 244.
278
government had no choice but to act in this manner. “[N]o one”—i.e. other domestic institutional
actors—“should be permitted to stand in the way of…this mission,” the authors concluded.
97

Concerns about America’s ability to handle its new postwar responsibilities and survive
the Cold War caused policy-makers across the spectrum to question comprehensively the
country’s national security institutions for the first time since the Founding Period. Though there
were many separate concerns, most of them revolved around three problems. The first problem
was how to maintain the requisite military capabilities in “peacetime” in order to meet the
country’s sprawling worldwide interests and win a cold war that could turn hot at any moment.
This required forces in being to deter a total war, wage limited wars, and conduct an array of
operations short of war. The second problem was how to streamline the country’s historically
fragmented structure of authority in national security. This required organizational reforms,
which on the one hand would create an executive body capable of coordinating and directing
political and military affairs, and on the other hand would integrate the armed forces into a
consolidated apparatus. Finally, the third problem was how to unleash the state so that it could
act with greater speed, flexibility, and force. This required transforming the decision-making
procedures for how military power was employed on behalf on the country’s foreign policy aims.
The three primary institutional problems are summarized below in Figure 6.1. In the next
chapter, I focus on these three different institutional problems and the respective state-building
efforts that policymakers made to resolve them.

97
The report is widely known as the “Doolittle Report” after its primary author. J.H. Doolittle et al.,
Report on the Covert Activities of the Central Intelligence Agency (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence
Agency, September 30, 1954), 2–3,
http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/45/doolittle_report.pdf.
279

Figure 6.1: Institutional Problems in the Postwar Period

1. Lack of Military Capabilities
! Build forces to deter total war and wage limited war
! Build intelligence and covert operations capabilities
2. Need for Reorganization
! Coordinate political and military policymaking
! Military reform
3. Unwieldy Decision-Making Process for War
! Reduce veto players

Executive War-Making Autonomy as a “Solution” for Foreign Policy Flexibility
Before turning to the three aforementioned problems, however, it is necessary to
conclude this chapter by discussing the domestic constraints that remained in the path of state-
building efforts related to national security at this time. Policymakers were under no illusion that
transforming the country’s institutions to give American foreign policy more teeth would
require, in the words of Senator William Fulbright, sacrificing some of the “democratic luxuries
of the past.”
98
To be clear, whether the United States should retain a democratic system of
government was never up for debate. Many feared the United States would have to become a
garrison state in order to survive. But no one advocated such a radical idea. What was up for
debate, however, was the traditional institutional balance that aimed to stifle independent
executive war-making powers. It is important to note that by building greater military
capabilities, centralizing military authority, and reducing the number of veto players involved in
decisions about the use of force policymakers would in effect create a system that favored

98
J. William Fulbright, “American Foreign Policy in the 20th Century under an 18th-Century
Constitution,” Cornell Law Quarterly 47, no. 1 (1961): 7.
280
executive war-making power whether they thought to do so purposefully or not. As the
discussion below suggests, however, they were at a minimum aware of the need to state-build in
a way so as to carve out greater executive autonomy in the face of systemic pressure.
With the problem of time-space compression, many accepted that the country would no
longer have the luxury for a broad spectrum of policymakers to deliberate on questions of war
and peace in the way that had been envisioned in the Constitution. The American state would
need to be able to take quick decisive action and use military force in a range circumstances. The
question was how to find a workable solution to making force more central to American foreign
policy so that democracy could survive without entirely abandoning the institutional arrangement
that had served the country thus far. As has been discussed, in practice this meant shifting many
of the general foreign policy powers to the executive—most importantly the full range of war-
making powers including the capacity to initiate full blown acts of war. In the past, such an
arrangement was avoided at all costs as a derangement of democracy. But given the alternatives
of perishing or being forced to become a garrison state, greater executive war-making autonomy
appeared as both an effective and yet still democratic solution to navigating the country’s
changed strategic environment.
Interestingly, the growth of executive war-making powers at this time coincided with a
strong antistatist trend in the United States.
99
This trend, moreover, was accompanied by an
attempt to rollback the general powers of the Presidency after they had grown to immense
proportions during the Great Depression and World War II. What is important to note is that
these efforts did not for the most part extend to the President’s authority in national security. The

99
For an excellent review of this trend see Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State:
America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000),
40–61.
281
concerns of legislators centered mainly on fears about executive power in the area of domestic
affairs, particularly as it related to interference in the domestic economy. Congress was
particularly eager to bring New Deal agencies under its control and roll back wartime economic
measures so that free enterprise could thrive again. This limited and ultimately prevented many
of the more far-reaching attempts to extend state control over industry for war mobilization. It
also created budgetary constraints on the growth of the national security apparatus, especially at
first. But otherwise the growth of executive war-making powers was met with little challenge so
long as it did not appear to directly interfere with domestic policy. In this sense, the separation
between domestic and foreign affairs heralded in the Curtiss-Wright decision before the war
began to bear fruit afterwards.
What is indicative of the accepted shift toward executive war-making autonomy in this
period is actually how little opposition was raised over it. As will be recalled from previous
chapters, concerns about such powers were widespread throughout American history and
policymakers frequently made concerted efforts to curtail them. Some unease remained in the
postwar period but few spoke out against the readily apparent shift toward executive war-
making. Those who did were marginalized for the most part. The historian Charles Beard, for
example, charged President Roosevelt with having single-handedly taken the country to war and
at the same time upending the Constitution. Now he excoriated others who were attempting to
make the shift toward such expansive powers permanent. He explained:
Since the drafting of the Constitution, American statesmen of the first order have
accepted the axiom that militarism and the exercise of arbitrary power over foreign
affairs by the Executive are inveterate foes of republican institutions…But it is contended
by some…that offense is the best defense that unlimited striking power in the Executive
is necessary to survival in an age of “power politics” and “atom bombs.” Few of them, it
is true, venture to say openly that the Constitution is obsolete and that such centralization
of authority should be, in fact, substituted for the system of limited government fortified
by checks and balances. Yet the implication of their arguments is inexorable:
282
constitutional law and democratic government in the United States is at the end of its
career.
100

Before the war, this was a mainstream argument, which from one of the most influential
historians at the time might have been received as gospel. But after the war Beard was largely
ignored and his attack on Roosevelt and by extension Presidential war-making powers was seen
as out of step with postwar thinking.
Like Beard, the foremost presidential scholar of the period Edward Corwin watched
warily as the pendulum shifted toward executive war-making powers.
101
His critique, however,
focused less on President Roosevelt himself and more on the problem of the twentieth century
Presidency, which he argued was becoming increasingly unhinged from the Constitution. Most
problematic for Corwin was Sutherland’s argument in Curtiss-Wright about external sovereignty
as a source of power for presidential war-making.
102
He argued that this source and others was
transforming what was once a “Constitution of Rights” into a “Constitution of Powers.” In other
words, American government, according to Corwin, was no longer being defined by enumerated
powers, which were limited by the Constitution, but instead by inherent or plenary powers,
which were potentially limitless.
103
This shift, exacerbated by Congress’s willingness to delegate
its own powers to the President, meant the executive was no longer bound by the other branches.

100
Charles A. Beard, President Roosevelt and the Coming of War, 1941: Appearances and Reality (New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003), 573–598, quote on 590–591.
101
On both Beard and Corwin as lonely voices on this topic see Walter LaFeber, “American Empire,
American Raj,” in America Unbound: World War II and the Making of a Superpower (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1992).
102
Edward S. Corwin, “The War and the Constitution,” in Presidential Power and the Constitution:
Essays by Edward S. Corwin, ed. Richard Loss (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), 112; Edward S.
Corwin, “Our Constitutional Revolution and How to Round It Out,” in Presidential Power and the
Constitution: Essays by Edward S. Corwin, ed. Richard Loss (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976),
160–161; Corwin, Total War and the Constitution, 37; Edward S. Corwin, “The Atom Bomb and the
Constitution,” in Corwin’s Constitution: Essays and Insights, ed. Kenneth D. Crews (New York:
Greenwood, 1986), 169.
103
Corwin, “Our Constitutional Revolution and How to Round It Out.”
283
Nowhere was this truer than in the area of war where the Constitution could now be considered
an “expendable” factor.
104
Corwin, as well as Thomas Finletter, saw a potential solution to this
problem in the creation of a joint executive-legislative cabinet or council.
105
But there was little
interest in these types of sweeping parliamentary-style reforms to reign in the growing foreign
affairs powers of the executive.
Perhaps most importantly, Congress did not act to reassert its war-making powers after
the war. Some congressmen tried to rally their fellow members—most notably, Senators Robert
Taft and John Bricker—but ultimately failed in this regard.
106
In speeches and later a popular
book, Taft restated the same arguments that had long informed ideas about the balance of
relations between the executive and legislative branches concerning war. He explained that
history showed “arbitrary rulers are more inclined to favor war than are the people at any time.”
If war powers were taken out of the hands of the people through their representatives in Congress
and given to the President, then war would be “more likely.”
107
The fact that President Truman
single-handedly involved the country in the Korean War and committed American forces to the
defense of Europe by 1951 provided ample evidence of this trend already. Furthermore, he
argued, contrary to Curtiss-Wright, that domestic and foreign affairs could not be separated so
easily. As two of his biographers summarized, Taft opposed America’s entry to World War II
without exhausting all other options because he feared “War would make the American President
a virtual dictator, diminish the constitutional powers of Congress, contract civil liberties, injure

104
Corwin, “The War and the Constitution,” 112.
105
Edward S. Corwin, The President: Office and Powers, 1787-1948: History and Analysis of Practice
and Opinion (New York: New York University Presss, 1948); Thomas K. Finletter, Can Representative
Government Do the Job? (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1945).
106
I discuss the Bricker Amendment arguments from the 1950s below.
107
Robert A. Taft, A Foreign Policy for Americans (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1951),
23.
284
the habitual self-reliance and self-government of the American people, distort the economy, sink
the federal government in debt, break in upon private and public morality.”
108
After the war he
maintained this position as he entered the debate over the country’s foreign policy.
109
What is
important to note is that Taft entered the foreign policy fray only because he believed no one else
had offered an alternative to the emerging consensus about America’s role in the world.
110
He
particularly lamented the fact that there was no real debate about who should make decisions
about war and peace.
111

The same concerns voiced by Beard, Corwin, and Taft about the dangers of presidential
war-making powers were all fairly conventional and popular throughout American history. In the
postwar period, however, their voices would largely drown in a sea of calls for greater executive
autonomy. The widespread view that the executive needed such autonomy in the area of war-
making flew in the face of the country’s traditional ideas about republican government and
shows how just extensively ideas about the relationship between war and domestic politics had
transformed in just a few short years. Whereas potential executive war-making autonomy was
once seen as one of the greatest dangers to American republicanism, it was now seen as its
savior.
Like Senator Fulbright, Baldwin argued that some of the checks and balances that
regulated the country’s political and military institutions had to be “sacrificed to greater

108
Russell Kirk and James McClellen, The Political Principles of Robert A. Taft (New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Publishers, 2010), 163.
109
Taft, A Foreign Policy for Americans, 23.
110
At a speech in 1951, he said “People have accused me of moving into foreign policy.” He rebutted this
by saying “The fact is that foreign policy has moved in on me." Kirk and McClellen, The Political
Principles of Robert A. Taft, 173.
111
Taft, A Foreign Policy for Americans, 21–22.
285
efficiency” in the age of total war.
112
Thomas Bailey said the changes taking place in the world
meant Americans had to be “willing to give our leaders in Washington a freer hand.”
113
Kennan
claimed a good deal of the country’s problems in foreign policy “stemmed from the extent to
which the executive has felt itself beholden to short-term trends of public opinion.”
114
Don Price
explained that the international environment dictated “a more closely knit executive branch than
we have had for more than a century.”
115
Whereas Clinton Rossiter argued “the destiny of [the
United States] in the Atomic Age will rest in the capacity of the Presidency as an institution of
constitutional dictatorship.”
116
Though few resorted to the scary language of Rossiter, these
views were representative of increasingly prevalent ideas among public intellectuals about the
need for greater executive autonomy in the early Cold War.
What is important though is that many congressmen joined in the pro-executive chorus.
While the Senate attempted in theory to maintain Congress’s war powers during negotiations to
ratify the United Nations and NATO treaties, Senator Vandenberg would explain that “the
President must not be limited in the use of force” with respect to fulfilling the country’s foreign
commitments.
117
Vandenberg argued, “Only in those instances in which the Senate can be sure of
a complete command of all the essential information prerequisite to an intelligent decision,
should it take the terrific chance of muddying the international waters by some sort of premature

112
Baldwin, The Price of Power, 185.
113
Thomas A. Bailey, The Man in the Street: The Impact of American Public Opinion on Foreign Policy
(New York: The Macmillan Company, 1948), 18.
114
George F. Kennan, “Diplomacy in the Modern World,” in American Diplomacy, Expanded Edition
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 93.
115
Don K. Price, “The Presidency: Its Burden and Promise,” in The Strengthening of American Political
Institutions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1949), 82.
116
Clinton L. Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948), 288–314, quote on 309.
117
Quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., “Congress and the Making of American Foreign Policy,” Foreign
Affairs 51, no. 1 (1972): 94.
286
and ill advised expression of its advice to the Executive.”
118
Senator Fulbright, who ironically
would later become one the fiercest critics of executive war-making, summarized many of the
views of policymakers over the previous decade in a 1961 paper in the Cornell Law Review.
Fulbright’s primary argument was that the country could not conduct a twentieth century foreign
policy under an eighteenth century constitution. He explained:
The dynamic forces of the 20th century…are growing more and more unmanageable
under the procedures of leisurely deliberation which are built into our constitutional
system. To cope with these forces we must be able to act quickly and decisively on the
one hand, and persistently and patiently on the other. We must make decisions which are
painful and some which do violence to our fundamental values…I wonder whether the
time has not arrived, or indeed already passed, when we must give the Executive a
measure of power in the conduct of our foreign affairs that we have hitherto jealously
withheld.
119

Fulbright pointed to the fact that shifting extensive foreign affairs powers to the President
represented a break with the country’s republican institutional arrangement, but cautioned, “the
price of democratic survival in a world of aggressive totalitarianisms is to give up some of the
democratic luxuries of the past. We should do so with no illusions as to the reasons for its
necessity. It is distasteful and dangerous to vest the executive with powers unchecked and
unbalanced. My question is whether we have any choice but to do so.”
120
Later, Fulbright would
look back with regret at just how unchecked and unbalanced the executive would become. But he
maintained that for policymakers at the time “it was not hard to be persuaded that modern
realities required greater latitude for the President.”
121

118
Quoted in R. Gordon Hoxie, Command Decision and the Presidency: A Study in National Security
Policy and Organization (New York: Reader’s Digest Press, 1977), 311.
119
Fulbright, “American Foreign Policy in the 20th Century under an 18th-Century Constitution,” 2.
120
Ibid., 7.
121
J. William Fulbright, “Forward,” in Constitutional Diplomacy, by Michael J. Glennon (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1990), xi.
287
Those in the executive branch who were primarily responsible for drawing up America’s
postwar foreign policy were mindful of the challenges of reconciling the country’s new
international demands with its domestic values and institutions. First, they valued them as
essential to the very fabric of the United States’ existence and knew they could not be sacrificed
in toto. Second, for whatever short-term challenges democratic foreign policy presented, they
believed democracy was essential to prevailing in the Cold War in the long-term. The authors of
NSC 68 noted that Americans were “confident that the system of values which animates our
society…are valid and more vital than the ideology which is the field of Soviet dynamism.”
Because of its values and institutions, therefore, American society was considered “more
cohesive.” Importantly, unlike in the Soviet Union, there was little to fear from revolution at
home. Moreover, they believed America’s values and institutions were also attractive to millions
of people across the world and thus would be important for preserving and extending the
country’s influence overseas.
122

Yet, for as much as NSC 68’s authors went out of their way to be mindful of domestic
political considerations, they tended to focus on maintaining the country’s core values—foremost
individual freedom—without pointing to the importance of a balanced institutional framework
for ensuring them. This should likely be seen not as an omission, but as an admission of the
predominant role they envisioned for the executive in the postwar world. As I show in the next
chapter, President Truman fiercely worked to expand the President’s national security powers
and cautiously guarded against any attempt by Congress to encroach on them. By the time he left
office, he would proudly note: “…the Presidential Office is the most powerful office that has
ever existed in the history of this great world of ours. Genghis Khan, Augustus Caesar, great

122
“NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, April 7, 1950,” 238, 239, 254–
255, 266, quote on 254.
288
Napoleon Bonaparte, or Louis XIV—or any other of the great leaders and executives of the
world—can't even compare with what the President of the United States himself is responsible
for, when he makes a decision.”
123

123
Harry S. Truman, “Remarks at a Meeting of an Orientation Course Conducted by the CIA, November
21, 1952,” in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, January 1 1952, to
January 20, 1953 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1966), 1061.
289
Chapter Seven

State-building for Executive War-Making Autonomy in the Postwar
Period, 1945-1960

The systemic pressure faced by the United States during and after World War II and the
tremendous stress this pressure placed on the country’s institutions caused policymakers to
engage in state-building efforts designed to make America’s national security apparatus more
streamlined, powerful, and ultimately more autonomous. Yet, though the birth of the so-called
“national security state” appears inevitable in hindsight, it is important to stress that the postwar
transformation of America’s security institutions was a result human choice within the country’s
existing institutional design.
In order to explain why and how policymakers began to reimagine and transform the
country’s institutions, therefore, it is important to remember that they operated under constraints
of both systemic pressure and domestic tradition. Again, as was the case previously in American
history, the American state is best seen in functional-institutional terms. On the one hand,
systemic pressure dictated that certain institutional changes be enacted to better enable
policymakers to wield state resources. Moreover, it ultimately pushed policymakers to adopt
arrangements including greater centralization within both the military and the executive, standing
forces and new instruments for covert war, and executive war-making powers that had long been
resisted by their forbearers. On the other hand, domestic constraints limited the scope of
290
institutional change and helped give shape to the arrangements that did emerge. In some cases
this meant institutional artifacts were built into the national security state. Importantly, this
resulted in parts of it being more poorly adapted to the country’s new security requirements than
they may have been otherwise. This should not be seen as a failure on the part of state-builders
so much as a reflection of the basic fact that states are torn between the functional requirements
of statehood and the institutional bases of state action.
As explained in the last chapter, policymakers had three state-building tasks in the
postwar period to transform America’s state structure and decision-making procedures. First,
they had to streamline the country’s national security organizations to make decision-making
processes more centralized, unified, and flexible. Second, they had to build instruments of
warfare that could be maintained and used in “peacetime.” This meant creating standing forces
that could be employed immediately for foreign wars, as well less blunt tools of statecraft
including intelligence and covert operations capabilities. Third, they had to rebalance
constitutional war powers so that the executive could wield the country’s armed forces with
fewer legislative constraints. As I show, these various state-building efforts collectively resulted
in the growth of executive war-making powers and a considerable degree of institutional
autonomy.

Piecing Together the Fragments of Authority
In this first section, I focus on the tremendous reorganization of the executive branch that
was undertaken after the war. As the Hoover Commission Report explained, reorganization was
required in part because the executive branch had actually “never been organized,” but also
291
because the country’s new global responsibilities required the government, now more than ever,
“to speak and act with unity of purpose, firmness, and restrain in dealing with other nations.”
1

During World Wars I and II, Presidents Wilson and Roosevelt had been given temporary
emergency powers to reorganize the executive in any manner they deemed necessary to aid the
war effort.
2
In both cases, those powers lapsed after the war and the organizational changes
enacted had to be unraveled. After World War II, it was clear that these types of ad hoc and
temporary wartime measures would no longer suffice. The executive as a whole, and the military
establishment in particular, had grown both enormous and unwieldy in recent decades. This
growth, moreover, had been complicated both before and during the war by Roosevelt’s
penchant for administrative improvisation and his preference for withholding plans from
advisors, both of which he believed were necessary for dealing with the tangled bureaucracy of
the American state.
3
Given the more pressing demands of the postwar period, nearly all

1
The Hoover Commission Report on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1949), v, 3.
2
On the Overman Act of 1918 and the First War Powers Act of 1941 see Herbert Emmerich, Federal
Organization and Administrative Management (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1970),
245–249.
3
Roosevelt’s idiosyncratic leadership style is well documented. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. notes that he
“deliberately organized—or disorganized—his system of command to insure that important decisions
were passed on to the top.” He did this in part by keeping “grants of authority incomplete, jurisdictions
uncertain, charters overlapping.” Richard Neustadt adds that Roosevelt not only kept “his organizations
overlapping and divide[d] authority among them, but he also tended to put men of clashing temperaments,
outlooks, ideas in charge of them.” “The result of this competitive theory of administration, “ according to
Schlesinger, “was often confusion and exasperation on the operating level; but no other method could so
reliably insure that in a large bureaucracy filled with ambitious men eager for power the decisions, and
the power to make them, would remain with the President.” Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Age of
Roosevelt, vol. II: The Coming of the New Deal, 1933–35 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 527–
528; Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership
from Roosevelt to Reagan (New York: The Free Press, 1991), 132.
292
observers recognized the need to disentangle and streamline the bureaucracy, and make the
executive less personalized and more institutionalized.
4

In terms of national security organization, what was needed most was to institutionalize
some of the more systematic decision-making bodies and processes from the war and reduce the
fragmented authority within the bureaucracy so that the executive—and by extension, the state—
could act with greater unity and autonomy. In this regard two specific problems stood out that
needed to be addressed. The first was the long-standing problem of how to organize the
country’s armed forces. The fragmented structure of authority over the military and the ad hoc
nature of planning and mobilization had caught up with the United States in the two world wars.
Now with an air force to complicate the matter, policymakers finally needed to make a
comprehensive push to consolidate and centralize authority over the country’s armed forces in a
truly national military establishment. The second was the fact that there was no institutional
mechanism or staff dedicated to coordinating political and military affairs at any level below the
President himself. This was an impossible burden for any individual. As President Truman later
remarked, after the war he “badly needed” an organization “where military, diplomatic, and
resource problems could be studied and continually appraised.”
5

Unification under Fire
As chapter four showed, genuine military modernization in the prewar period was a
difficult—if not impossible—task. The various reforms in the Navy Department and the Root
reforms in the War Department at the turn of the twentieth century helped the United States

4
Reorganization efforts were carried out across the board beginning in the 1930s based on the work of the
Brownlow Committee in 1937 and the two Hoover Commissions in 1947 and 1953. It was in this period
that the Executive Office of the President was created and the modern Presidency took shape. See
Emmerich, Federal Organization and Administrative Management.
5
Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, vol. Volume II, Years of Trial and Hope, 1946–52 (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday and Company, 1956), 59.
293
transition and conduct a more assertive foreign policy during its rise to power. But in
comparative perspective these reforms were weak and did not fundamentally alter the overall
organization of the country’s military establishment. Thus, on the eve of World War II, the
organization of the armed forces still closely resembled the decentralized system that had so
often plagued America’s war fighting capabilities throughout its history.
The United States entered World War II in December 1941 with what the Hoover
Commission Task Force on National Security Organization later described as “the most primitive
rudiments of an integrated security organization.”
6
War and Navy were still two entirely separate
cabinet-level departments that not only struggled to cooperate, but also on occasion openly
competed with one another. The planning capabilities of each had long been stymied by both
formal institutional limits on such activities and internal bureaucratic inertia. Moreover, there
was little effective inter-departmental coordination between the two. The Joint Army-Navy
Board, which had been established in 1903, and aimed, among other goals, to foster joint
planning, was an underdeveloped and underutilized institution.
7
The National Defense Act of
1920 meanwhile had created the Army-Navy Munitions Board to coordinate joint industrial
mobilization for war. In the 1930s, however, its activities were limited by the Nye Committee
investigations into munitions production and a general aversion to preparation for war.
8
Thus, as
the war approached, the policymakers were forced as usual to turn to ad hoc institutional

6
The Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, Appendix G: Task
Report on National Security Organization (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1949), 29.
7
The Joint Army-Navy Board was established in 1903 as part of the Root reforms, but it was a weak
institution and was suspended by President Wilson in 1914. The Joint Board was reestablished in 1919
and did prepare some plans in the mid 1930s that were used in planning for World War II. John A.
Hixson, “Joint Army-Navy Board,” in Historical Dictionary of the U.S. Army, ed. Jerold E. Brown
(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001), 255.
8
See Jeffery M. Dorwart, Eberstadt and Forrestal: A National Security Partnership, 1909-1949 (College
Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1991), 40–41.
294
arrangements that often resulted in disorganization. As Clark Clifford later recounted, there were
several times during the war, for example, when the War and Navy Departments waged
simultaneous competitive bidding campaigns for certain rare commodities, thus increasing the
price for both of them.
9

The incredible stress of World War II produced important institutional responses from
American policymakers to surmount the organizational deficiencies in the military
establishment. The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and the War Production Board (WPB) in
particular emerged as mechanisms for unifying disparate institutional resources and centralized
executive authority. After the war though, policymakers adopted a “never again” attitude with
respect to America’s ad hoc approach to preparing for and waging war. President Truman, in
particular, sought to institutionalize the country’s wartime experience, warning that the country
could never afford to “fight another war with the organization that we had in World War II.”
10

Truman attributed the attack on Pearl Harbor in large part to the country’s lack of a unified
military command. Moreover, as head of the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the
National Defense Program (the Truman Committee) from 1941 to 1944, he was confounded by
the “duplications of time, material, and manpower” created by maintaining separate Navy and
War Departments. He feared this problem would only multiply with the inevitable establishment
of a separate Air Force. With these experiences in mind and postwar challenges looming, one of
his “strongest convictions” upon becoming President, he later recounted, was that the “antiquated

9
Oral History Interview with Clark M. Clifford Assistant to White House Naval Aide, 1945-46; Special
Counsel to the President, 1946-50, interview by Jerry N. Hess, April 13, 1971,
http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/cliford2.htm.
10
Ibid.
295
defense setup of the United States had to be reorganized quickly as a step toward insuring our
future safety and preserving world peace.”
11

As Walter Millis explains, reorganizing the country’s armed forces was so important
because it served as a precursor to solving larger national security problems. Without
reorganization of the military establishment, he argues, it was “impossible to lay down any long-
range military plans or policies, to determine properly the size or structure of the military
machine to be maintained, or to face with any consistency and forethought the underlying
politico-military problems with which that existed to meet.”
12
Yet, though almost all civilian and
military leaders realized the seriousness of the military’s organizational deficiencies, the process
for determining how to solve them would ultimately get tangled in a web of bureaucratic
infighting, presidential prerogative, congressional politics, and continuing fears about the
centralization of military authority. The fact that such unification would occur at all must be
attributed to the severe systemic pressure of the time and the degree of institutional stress this
pressure created.
Plans for creating a unified organization out of the different branches of the armed forces
were discussed as far back as 1923 when President Harding first recommended creating a
merged Department of National Defense. At the top would be a Secretary and Assistant
Secretary of Defense with Undersecretaries of the Army, the Navy, and National Resources.
13

From a purely executive-military point of view, Harding’s proposal for full centralization made
an inordinate amount of sense. It would streamline the armed forces, which had grown unwieldy

11
Truman, Memoirs, 1956, Volume II, Years of Trial and Hope, 1946–52:46–47.
12
Note in Walter Millis, ed., The Forrestal Diaries (New York: The Viking Press, 1951), 153.
13
The plan can be seen in its entirety in Reorganization of the Executive Departments: Report of the Joint
Committee on Reorganization Created Under the Joint Resolution Adopted December 17, 1920, as
Amended by Resolution Approved May 5, 1923 (68th Cong., 1st S., Doc. No. 356) (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1924), 34–39.
296
since 1898, into a single organization under a single cabinet member. There were some officers
in the army who favored such an overarching structure, but in general it was opposed as counter
to the interests of both the War and Navy Departments. Harding’s proposal also faced opposition
within his own cabinet and in Congress, and it was not taken up by his successor after he died
while in office. There were bureaucratic reasons for the widespread opposition to unification, but
also a continuing belief that in the absence of need there was no reason to centralize military
authority. In the 1920s and 30s, some officers in the Army like George Marshall and John
Palmer continued to harbor an interest in unification, as did several congressmen who thought it
would result in a smaller more cost effective military.
14
But it was not until World War II when
such plans became feasible within the broader domestic political arena.
In late 1943, Marshall, now Army Chief of Staff, proposed a plan for the creation of a
“Single Department of War in the Post-War Period,” which would combine the War and Navy
Departments into a single unified organization represented by one cabinet member and one
military chief. Marshall and other unification advocates’ aspirations can best be understood as an
attempt to scale up to the entire armed forces the core idea that had animated the Root reforms in
the War Department earlier in the century. The idea was to allow one civilian secretary, acting on
behalf of the President, to exert control over a unified defense establishment through one military
chief. The military chief in turn would have the authority to carry out the secretary’s will across
the air, land, sea, and supply service functions of the armed forces. The country would have one
military organization, with one brain, acting on behalf of the President, and presenting a common
face to Congress. In theory, this would reduce redundancy and break the service autonomy that

14
Dorwart, Eberstadt and Forrestal: A National Security Partnership, 1909-1949, 71–73; Douglas T.
Stuart, Creating the National Security State: A History of the Law That Transformed America (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2008), 75–76.
297
so often pitted branch against branch. The result would be a more streamlined American defense
establishment capable of planning and fighting as a fully coherent organization. There were
questions about whether or not unification would actually work to this effect, but that was at
least its proponents’ intended goal.
In the face of what seemed like on face a reasonable proposal, however, the navy reacted
vehemently to unification and over the next four years a bitter battle ensued over the future of the
armed forces. It is unnecessary to detail the long and torturous fight over unification.
15
What is
important to highlight are the several dimensions along which the struggle unfolded and the two
coalitions that formed and defined the terms of the debate. At the heart of the controversy was a
basic bureaucratic struggle within the armed forces. On the one hand, the army and advocates of
a separate air force saw unification as a means of advancing their interests vis-à-vis the navy,
which until World War II had been the first line of American defense. Unification offered the
promise of at least making them co-equal branches of the armed forces and likely garnering
greater appropriations for the army. On the other hand, the navy saw unification and the creation
of a separate air force as a general threat to its preeminence and autonomy, and a specific threat
to the marines and the navy’s air-related assets, which it hoped to develop in the postwar period.
Layered on top of this bureaucratic struggle were what Douglas Stuart describes as “two
distinct conceptions of unity of command.” President Truman, the army, and New Deal/statist
civilians believed that a pyramidal scheme of management with a hierarchy of authority running
from the President as Commander-in-Chief through a civilian secretary and military chief would
best embody the country’s democratic traditions and serve its interests. Meanwhile, the Navy,

15
This is well documented elsewhere. See Paul Y. Hammond, Organizing for Defense: The American
Military Establishment in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 186–226;
Dorwart, Eberstadt and Forrestal: A National Security Partnership, 1909-1949; Stuart, Creating the
National Security State: A History of the Law That Transformed America.
298
naval advocates in Congress, and more business friendly civilians believed a corporatist scheme
of management based on newly created institutions that would serve as connective tissue
between the two independent departments and the President would best accomplish these goals.
16

The Eberstadt Report, which formed the basis of navy thinking, called for continued independent
departments acting essentially in confederation through coordinating agencies. Both conceptions
were in keeping with each department’s respective traditions of centralized vs. decentralized
control, but also reflected how they could best pursue their interests in the postwar period.
Finally, as explained in chapter five, this bureaucratic struggle about military
modernization, like previous ones, indirectly pitted the executive and legislative branches against
each other. To be clear, both the Truman/Army plan for unification and the Forrestal/Navy plan
for confederation both envisioned more powerful and autonomous executive action in the
postwar period, particularly with respect to the use of force.
17
Both sides of the debate, therefore,
argued plausibly that the other plan undermined the Constitution; the former for creating a
powerful Secretary of Defense and military chief, and the latter for relying on shadowy and
unaccountable institutions that would impair civilian control over the military. All were
conceived of as potential vehicles for a proverbial “man on horseback” to seize power. The fact
that Congress remained on the sidelines and did not oppose both plans, as it surely would have
before the war, is as Amy Zegart points out the dog that didn’t bark in the unification debate.
18

Nearly all of Congress recognized the need for some type of centralizing reform.
Nonetheless, unifying the armed forces did promise to centralize executive control over
the military establishment and as a result cut many of the lateral connections between the

16
Stuart, Creating the National Security State: A History of the Law That Transformed America, 77–78.
17
Dorwart, Eberstadt and Forrestal: A National Security Partnership, 1909-1949, 125.
18
Amy Zegart, Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC (Palo Alto: Stanford
University Press, 2000), 63–64.
299
services and Congress that I discussed in chapter four. This helps explain why Truman felt
Presidential prerogative would be better served by unification and why subsequent Presidents
likewise supported greater centralization. It also helps explain why Forrestal and his allies in
Congress like the Chairmen of the Senate and House Naval Affairs Committees, Senator David
Walsh and Congressman Carl Vinson, so strenuously opposed unification. The navy had always
enjoyed strong direct relations with Congress that helped balance a tendency toward executive
control over the armed forces. This was, as I have explained, part of the fragmented structure of
authority built into the country’s institutions. Thus the navy could argue with good reason that
coordinating, rather than unifying, the armed forces was “more in line with the principles of our
Constitution, our customs, and our traditions.”
19

After years of debate, policymakers finally reached a basic set of compromises about
military organization that was codified in the National Security Act of 1947. The National
Security Act in many ways reflected the messiness of the debate that preceded it. Unable to
decide between either a unified or coordinated system of military organization, policymakers
chose both. The preamble thus states confusingly that the Act’s goal was, on the one hand, to
provide for “integration,” “unified control,” and “unified direction.” But, on the other hand, it
stressed that the aim was to promote “coordination” between the departments and “not to merge
them.”
20
The Act maintained War (now Army) and Navy (including naval aviation and the
Marine Corps) as executive departments and created a third for the Air Force. A Secretary of

19
From the Eberstadt Report. Quoted in Stuart, Creating the National Security State: A History of the
Law That Transformed America, 88.
20
Act of July 26, 1947 (“The National Security Act”), Public Law 80-253, 61 STAT 495, “to promote the
national security by providing for a Secretary of Defense; for a National Military Establishment; for a
Department of the Army, a Department of the Navy, a Department of the Air Force; and for the
coordination of the activities of the National Military Establishment with other departments and agencies
of the Government concerned with the national security.”
300
Defense was created to head what was conceived of collectively as the National Military
Establishment, which would be tied together and integrated with the rest of the American
national security apparatus through a series of coordinating agencies including the National
Security Council (NSC), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Resources
Board (NSRB), the JCS, a Munitions Board, and a Research and Development Board.
21

The National Security Act was the first comprehensive national security reform effort in
the country’s history since the original principles for maintaining the “common defense” were
first laid down in the United States Constitution. As a result, some of its confusion was inevitable
as policymakers sought to grapple with the gaping holes within the American state along with a
century and a half of institutional drift within and across the parts of the national security
establishment. But much of the confusion was also a result of the still persistent fears about what
the new requirements of national security meant for the country’s domestic institutions.
Concerns that the Secretary of Defense could become a powerful military leader, for example,
led policymakers to require a civilian to hold what was initially constructed as a relatively weak
position. They stipulated that the Secretary not have been on active service as an officer in the
regular army for at least ten years and they counterbalanced his power by ensuring the three
service secretaries would remain heads of executive departments. The JCS, moreover, was feared
as an embryo of the Nazi general staff system. Its creation had been a functional response to
wartime pressure and the need to coordinate American military activities with the British.
22

Policymakers knew such an institution was required permanently after the war, but were

21
This section discusses the JCS. Later sections discuss the NSC and CIA. For a more comprehensive
review of all the aspects of the National Security Act see Stuart, Creating the National Security State: A
History of the Law That Transformed America.
22
Hammond, Organizing for Defense: The American Military Establishment in the Twentieth Century,
159–185.
301
reluctant to give it too much power. The JCS, therefore, was established without a chief, with no
budgetary powers, and with a staff limited to no more than one hundred officers.
Domestic political concerns thus continued to play an important role in the way
policymakers arranged and constructed the country’s national security institutions in 1947. But
they were always weighed against the requirements of national security, which often won out in
determining the need for institutional change in the first place. The following exchange in Senate
hearings on the 1947 Act between Senators McCarthy and Tydings is revealing in showing the
fact that policymakers recognized and frequentlyweighed the tradeoff between the two. When
discussing the arrangement of the JCS, the topic turned to fear that Congress was setting up a
system favorable to a man on horseback. Senator McCarthy expressed the common concern that
they were simply repeating Germany’s organizational structure and “laying the groundwork for a
military dictatorship in time of emergency.” Senator Tydings expressed a similar concern, but
implied the country’s historical preference for fragmented military authority would have to be
put aside in the postwar period. His argument was extensive and provides incredible insight into
the minds of policymakers at the time, including congressmen who recognized how much the
world had changed and their own institution’s limitations within that world. The next war he
explained, would be
…beyond the imagination of any person in this room. I assume it will take place in 10 or
15 or 20 years from now. I do not care how many laws you write. When the atomic bomb
is pretty well scattered in other nations, your one hope of survival will be the strong
authority at the top. It will have to regulate, whether we like it or whether we do not like
it, the civilian as well as the military population.
Recognizing the radical and controversial nature of this argument, he asked only half in jest that
this quote not be used against him in the next election. But more important than preventing a
concentration of military authority, Senator Tydings explained that he was more concerned about
302
how the United States could “survive” given the present conditions in the world and its now
antiquated organization for national security. He continued:
I do not think you should have a model T to fight the next war. I think you have to have a
high-powered, streamlined organization that can go into action and get you where you
want to go. If we lose that war, there will not be a vestige of democracy left. I want it
retained, and I would rather gamble on the good faith of the men that gravitate to the top
to win that war, more so than I would gamble on the ability of Congress to write a law to
apply 15 or 20 years from now to a circumstance they do not even quite visualize.
23

Senator Tydings lamented that this would force Congress to hand over much of its power to the
executive and the country’s military leaders, especially during war.
24
But he did not believe they
had a choice in the matter. If the country could not survive a future war with its existing
institutions, then those institutions had to be modified.
In sum, the compromises reached in the National Security Act of 1947 by no means
represented purely rational and functional adaptations to the challenges of the time. But nor can
the original compromises reached in the Act be explained away solely as the product of
bureaucratic interest as some have suggested. Otherwise, the reforms would have been
nonexistent or piecemeal and narrowly focused, rather than comprehensive and sweeping. As
President Truman would later emphasize, the overall result of the National Security Act was that
“for the first time in the history of the nation an over-all military establishment was created.”
25

The importance of this step was no small accomplishment and should not be underestimated.

23
Hearings Before the Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate, Eightieth Congress, First
Session, on S. 758: A Bill to Promote the National Security by Providing for a National Defense
Establishment Which Shall Be Administered by a Secretary of National Defense, and for a Department of
the Army, a Department of the Navy, and a Department of the Air Force within the National Defense
Establishment, and for the Coordination of the Activities of the National Defense Establishment with
Other Departments and Agencies of the Government Concerned with National Security, Part 1, March
18-April 3, 1947 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1947), 622–623.
24
This was precisely what happened during World War II, he argued, citing the case of General Marshall
asking for a billion dollars with no questions asked. Only three years later did Congress learn it funded
the world’s first atomic bomb.
25
Truman, Memoirs, 1956, Volume II, Years of Trial and Hope, 1946–52:51–52.
303
Particularly when seen in comparative perspective with the prewar period, this constituted a
major transformation of the country’s institutions.
Moreover, 1947 was not the last battle over centralizing military authority. The military
establishment would be subject to nearly constant reorganization throughout the Cold War,
beginning immediately with a series of amendments to the National Security Act in 1949 that
strengthened the Secretary of Defense, created the Department of Defense as an executive
department and took this status away from the three service departments, and created the office
of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Subsequent reorganizations would take place most
importantly in 1953, 1958, and 1986. These efforts were required to further streamline the armed
forces and make the overarching organization between the various branches more centralized as
the National Security Act’s creators originally intended.
Centralizing the Conduct of Diplomacy with Force
With force factored to be a central component of America’s postwar foreign policy, it
became more important than ever to coordinate the country’s diplomatic and military activities.
As the Senate Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery would later explain: “Almost every
leading civilian and military officer who served in World War II concluded that the existing
machinery was inadequate for the formulation of overall national security policy.”
26
The
eventual solution was to create the National Security Council (NSC) system. In many ways, the
creation of this particular system was an accident of bureaucratic infighting.
27
This is particularly

26
Henry M. Jackson, “Interim Report, January 18, 1960,” in Organizing for National Security, vol. 2:
Studies and Background Materials Submitted to the Committee on Government Operations, United States
Senate, By Its Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery (Pursuant to S. Res. 115, 86th Cong., and S.
Res. 20, 87th Cong.) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1961), 11.
27
Secretary of Defense Forrestal was one of the main proponents of the NSC system, but he saw it as an
alternative to the unification of the armed forces discussed in the next section not a complementary
organization. See Alfred D. Sander, “Truman and the National Security Council: 1945-1947,” The
304
true if one focuses on the debates between the War and Navy Departments in the immediate
postwar years. By expanding our view, however, it becomes apparent that the idea behind the
NSC system was long in the making. Similar bodies had been repeatedly proposed and rejected
as far back as 1911, but under the stresses of world war the seeds of coordination were sown.
28

Twelve years after its creation, the Senate Subcommittee concluded, “if there were no NSC, we
would have to invent one.”
29

As mentioned earlier, diplomatic-military cooperation was not institutionalized at any
level below the President himself before World War II. In the lead up to the war, President
Roosevelt convened a War Council regularly, but rather than serving as a coordinating or
advisory body it acted as a platform for the President to announce decisions he had already made
in conjunction with the chiefs of staff of the military services. After the United States entered the
war, he even stopped inviting the Secretary of State and it simply became a wartime strategy
board.
30

During the war, however, the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy began to meet regularly
to coordinate politico-military affairs and over time this informal grouping would evolve into the
seed of the later National Security Council system. With an eye toward planning for the expected
challenges associated with terminating the war and conducting occupations of Germany and
Japan among other issues, the three secretaries eventually realized their informal coordination
needed to be institutionalized in a standing body. In December 1944, the State-War-Navy

Journal of American History 59, no. 2 (1972): 369–88; Zegart, Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the
CIA, JCS, and NSC, 54–75.
28
Paul Y. Hammond, “The National Security Council as a Device for Interdepartmental Coordination: An
Interpretation and Appraisal,” The American Political Science Review 54, no. 4 (1960): 899; See also
Ernest R. May, “The Development of Political-Military Consultation in the United States,” Political
Science Quarterly 70, no. 2 (1955): 161–80.
29
Jackson, “Interim Report, January 18, 1960,” 12.
30
May, “The Development of Political-Military Consultation in the United States,” 173–174.
305
Coordinating Committee (SWNCC) was formed as an “agency to reconcile and coordinate the
action to be taken by the State, War, and Navy Departments on matters of common interest and,
under the guidance of the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy, establish policies on politico-
military questions referred to it.”
31
Permanent members of the Committee included assistant
secretaries from the three departments and associated staff. The SWNCC also coordinated its
activities with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It met weekly and eventually established geographically
focused subcommittees and other ad hoc committees dedicated to facilitating coordination on
issues like peace treaties or the United Nations (UN). When appropriate, decisions of the
Committee were passed on to the President for his approval.
After the war, many decision-makers were keen to institutionalize the functions of the
SWNCC in a more substantial and powerful body. As the implications of the shrinking globe
view, the extent of America’s global interests and commitments, and the central role of force in
the country’s foreign policy became clearer in the immediate postwar years, the need for such a
body was even more evident. Until a more permanent arrangement could be worked out,
however, the Committee served as a bridge of sorts.
32
The SWNCC helped frame questions of
postwar policy regarding issues including occupation policy, military aid to foreign countries,
and participation in international conferences and organizations. It also became a forum for

31
On the formation, intended purpose, and activities of the Committee see “Establishment of the State-
War-Navy Coordinating Committee,” in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1944, vol. I General
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1966), 1466–70; Harold W. Mosely, Charles F.
McCarthy, and Alvin F. Richardson, “The State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee,” The Department of
State Bulletin XIII, no. 333 (November 11, 1945): 745–747, quote on 745.
32
The SWNCC operated until 1947 and the establishment of the NSC. At that time it was changed to the
State-War-Navy-Air Coordinating Committee (SWNACC), which was eventually disbanded in 1949.
306
debating important questions related to the general postwar security requirements and military
policy of the United States and producing policy documents.
33

The issue of creating a permanent diplomatic-military council was taken up in the
National Security Act, which resulted in the most sweeping reorganization of the American
national security architecture in the country’s history. The Act created the modern National
Security Council system comprising: 1) the NSC, which included the President (who would
either preside over meetings or designate someone else to), the Secretary of State, the Secretary
of Defense, the Secretary of the Army, the Secretary of the Navy, the Secretary of the Air Force,
the chairman of the National Security Resources Board, and other executive department
secretaries when designated by the President, 2) an Executive Secretary of the Council, which
later became the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (more commonly known
as the National Security Advisor), and 3) the NSC staff, the size and composition of which was
not specified. The legislation stated that the function of the Council would be “to advise the
President with respect to the integration of domestic, foreign, and military policies relating to the
national security so as to enable the military services and the other departments and agencies of
the Government to cooperate more effectively in matters involving the national security.”
It has been suggested that members of Congress designed the NSC as an “institutional
check” on the President.
34
If that is true, however, then Congress was either terribly blind to the
consequences of the system it was creating or it actually never intended this check to be very

33
See “SWNCC 282: Basis for the Formulation of a U.S. Military Policy, March 27, 1946,” in Foreign
Relations of the United States, 1946, vol. I General: The United Nations (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 1972), 1160–65; “SC-169b: Action on Joint Chiefs of Staff Statement of United States
Military Policy, November 16, 1945,” in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, vol. I General; The
United Nations (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1972), 1123–28.
34
Paul H. Nitze, NSC-68: Forging the Strategy of Containment, ed. S. Nelson Drew (Washington, DC:
National Defense University, 1994), 22.
307
hard.
35
It is almost certainly true that Congress did not anticipate just how autonomous a
decision-making and decision-executing unit the NSC would become—the Iran-Contra
operations in the 1980s stands out in this regard. But the original design of the NSC suggests that
it was meant to serve as an institutional aid for the President—not a check. If anything, the NSC
system was designed purposefully to facilitate executive discretion even if later policymakers
regretted that scheme.
36

Several aspects of the original design of the NSC system help prove this point. To begin
with, Congress might have required a certain number of legislators to be included as statutory
members of the NSC; for example, the Chairmen of the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed
Services Committees, the House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services Committees, or others.
This seems improbable today, but such ideas were floated at the time and were consistent with
others calls for greater joint executive-legislative decision-making collaboration. Including
members of Congress in the NSC certainly would have provided a vehicle for promoting such
collaboration in national security and helped ensure the NSC system did not act too
independently. Even if there were no permanent legislators included in the Council, Congress
could have required greater congressional input into or oversight over the functioning of the NSC
system, which it never did.

35
Congress of course retained at least two hard checks. It could always choose to defund the NSC or
change its mandate through legislation, though these mechanisms are difficult to employ in practice.
36
Even if some thought it might serve as a check at first, by 1960 this was clearly not the case. In it’s
interim report on the NSC, the Senate Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery stated in
unambiguous terms: “The integration of national policy—domestic, foreign, and military—must take
place, first of all, in the President’s mind. The consensus needed to support national policy depends
largely upon his powers of leadership and persuasion. The organization of the executive branch for
making and carrying out national policy should therefore be designed above all to help the President with
the heavy tasks that world leadership has thrust upon him.” Jackson, “Interim Report, January 18, 1960,”
10.
308
Moreover, the Act provided for an Executive Secretary that would be appointed by the
President, but would not be subject to Senate confirmation.
37
This gave the President great
latitude to select the Secretary and staff, ensuring that the organization would be his creature and
his alone. Not only was the NSC staff to be appointed at the sole discretion of the President, but
also its duties were left ambiguous and to be determined by the NSC alone. The Act states only
that the staff would “perform such duties as may be prescribed by the council in connection with
the performance of its functions.” Furthermore, the Act did not require the Secretary or staff
members to testify before Congress. When staff members were requested to testify later,
Presidents could always refuse such request by claiming executive privilege. Nor was the NSC
staff limited in size by the legislation, as for example the General Staff had been earlier in the
century. Thus, though it started out as a small operation, nothing in the legislation prevented it
from swelling in size later, which is indeed what happen. By the 1960s, it included hundreds of
members, effectively turning into what Clark Clifford characterized as “another State
Department” within Executive Office of the President.
38

Harold Koh argues the NSC system was ultimately “operationalized” in a way that its
creators never intended. He explains: “Congress no more designed the NSC to execute national
security policy than it designated the Council of Economic Advisers to print the nation’s
money.”
39
But it is important to note that the design also did not restrict the NSC from
functioning as such, nor—with rare exception—has Congress ever even attempted to pass
legislation to prevent it from doing so. The lack of congressional interest in directly regulating

37
Senate confirmation actually written into an early draft of the bill, but was later dropped.
38
Oral History Interview with Clark M. Clifford Assistant to White House Naval Aide, 1945-46; Special
Counsel to the President, 1946-50.
39
Harold H. Koh, The National Security Constitution: Sharing Power after the Iran-Contra Affair (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 53–54.
309
the Council instead might be seen as a sign that its independence was, or at least over time
became, part of its charter. In fact, the Senate Subcommittee that conducted the first extensive
congressional review of the NSC system explicitly and repeatedly stressed it needed to be an
“adaptable institution,” which Presidents could use at their discretion.
40

These factors notwithstanding, President Truman still distrusted the potential impact of
the NSC on his freedom of action. He accepted the establishment of the NSC system only
reluctantly and especially in the beginning was careful to carve it out as a purely executive and
presidential organization. His concern, however, stemmed less from Congress and more from
within the Council itself. On the one hand, Truman was concerned that some members of the
NSC—notably the first two Secretaries of Defense, James Forrestal and Louis Johnson—aimed
“to turn it into a super-cabinet on the British model” and make Council decisions potentially
binding on the President.
41
On the other hand, he was concerned by the potential lack of balance
between civilians and military officials on the Council, with the latter outnumbering the
former.
42
Truman was quick to quash both issues during the first NSC meeting by stating in clear
terms that he expected the Council primarily to advise him and by naming the Secretary of State
the ranking member in his absence. With a not so subtle hint of disappointment, Forrestal would
note in his diary that day that Truman “regarded [the NSC] as his council…that it would serve as
an advisory body to the President, that he would take its advice in due consideration, but that

40
Jackson, “Interim Report, January 18, 1960,” 9, 10, 11, quote on 11.
41
See Truman, Memoirs, 1956, Volume II, Years of Trial and Hope, 1946–52:60; Clark Clifford, Counsel
to the President: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1991), 162–164.
42
These concerns were also shared by Secretary of State George Marshall. See Hogan, A Cross of Iron:
Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 56–57.
310
determination of and decisions in the field of foreign policy, would of course, be his and the
Secretary of State’s.”
43

Truman would further reinforce these measures by not attending another meeting for ten
months after the first. In total, he participated in only twelve of the NSC’s first fifty-seven
meetings, preferring instead to make decisions with a smaller group of advisors.
44
This
established a precedent for Presidents to use the Council at their discretion. Moreover, though
Forrestal preferred to have the NSC be part of the defense establishment and located close to the
Secretary of Defense, Truman chose instead to place it in the Executive Office of the President
and house it in the Executive Office Building next to the White House. Finally, in 1949, at the
request of the President, the statutory composition of the NSC was changed by an amendment to
the 1947 Act.
45
The three service secretaries were dropped, the Vice President was added as a
member, and with the authority granted earlier Truman authorized the Treasury Secretary to
attend NSC meetings. With these efforts, he ensured that the NSC system would preserve and in
many ways enhance the President’s freedom of action, while ensuring that it would not be
captured by the military.
Though the development of the NSC as a more powerful and independent institutional
actor would take many years, its usefulness became more apparent as the President was forced to
deal with the emerging Cold War. As Douglas Stuart explains, by 1948 the Council began to
serve two important functions. First, during the Berlin Crisis of that year it served as a venue for

43
Millis, The Forrestal Diaries, 320.
44
Stanley L. Falk, “The National Security Council Under Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy,” Political
Science Quarterly 79, no. 3 (1964): 406; Anna Kasten Nelson, “President Truman and the Evolution of
the National Security Council,” The Journal of American History 72, no. 2 (1985): 360, 365–366.
45
Truman—following the Hoover Commission recommendations—actually requested to have all
statutory restrictions removed, with membership left to the President’s determination. But Congress
rejected this proposal.
311
“substantive discussions and crisis management,” as Truman attended meetings for the first time
regularly between July and September. Second, throughout the year it served to facilitate the
drafting of the NSC 20 series discussed above, thus becoming an important forum for policy
formulation.
46
By early 1949, the Council had already taken “over 200 distinct actions” including
“short-range decisions,” “long-range policies,” and creating “carefully outlined alternative
courses in the event of various contingencies,” according to its first Executive Secretary, Sidney
Souers.
47
It was not until the Korean War in 1950, however, that Truman began to use the NSC
system more extensively. With the outbreak of war he directed the Council to meet weekly and
began to preside over its meetings more regularly. Moreover, he reorganized the NSC internally
by creating an NSC Senior Staff composed of officials from each department at the assistant
secretary level with supporting staff and directed by the Executive Secretary. As I discuss later,
the NSC also became a place for the development and direction of psychological and other
covert activities at this time.
48

By the time Truman left office, the NSC system was still an underdeveloped coordinating
organization that lacked essential unitary traits. Nevertheless, it had grown from an uncertain
institution into a potentially powerful and centralized vehicle for Presidents, with the assistance
of other executive officials, to formulate, coordinate, and ultimately execute national security
policy. This evolution would occur under his immediate successors and by 1962 it would serve
as the body that helped decide the fate of the world during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

46
Stuart, Creating the National Security State: A History of the Law That Transformed America, 235–
237.
47
Sidney W. Souers, “Policy Formulation for National Security,” American Political Science Review 43,
no. 3 (1949): 542.
48
Nelson, “President Truman and the Evolution of the National Security Council,” 372–377; Stuart,
Creating the National Security State: A History of the Law That Transformed America, 239–240.
312
Finally, it is important to reiterate just how important a departure the NSC system was for
America’s democratic system of government. The idea that the country needed what essentially
amounted to a permanent war council, which to that point was associated with imperialist or
militarist countries, represented a sharp break with the country’s traditional republican
institutions. As Ernest May explains, before the 1940s most Americans, including policymakers,
would never have accepted “the rationale” behind the NSC system.
49
In fact, as I mentioned
above, they didn’t. Even after its establishment, John Fisher would derisively describe the NSC
as “Mr. Truman’s Politburo” in a 1951 article in Harper’s.
50
But with the changing nature of the
world and the ratcheting up of institutional stress, policymakers, along with the American public,
ultimately changed their views.

Building Old and New Instruments of Warfare
In order to make force more central to American foreign policy, the country needed not
only more centralized national security institutions but also instruments of warfare that could be
employed when required by decision-makers. Originally two sets of instruments were needed
that I discuss below. The first were instruments related to open military hostilities. In practice,
this meant creating standing forces that could be used immediately in a range of contingencies
that might require military action including small-scale interventions and the core personnel and
materials needed for limited wars and total war. The second were instruments for using force by
means short of open warfare. In practice this meant developing less blunt tools of statecraft
including intelligence and covert operations capabilities.

49
May, “The Development of Political-Military Consultation in the United States,” 162.
50
Quoted in Stuart, Creating the National Security State: A History of the Law That Transformed
America, 240.
313
Constructing Standing Forces
Beginning with the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 more than sixteen million
Americans would eventually be mobilized for active service in the armed forces during World
War II.
51
By the end of the war, the country would acquire a vast network of 3,000 distinct
military installations around the globe.
52
The United States not only mobilized an incredible
reservoir of manpower during the war, but also built an extensive base for the production of war
materials. This war-related industrial base was supported by significant development of related
research and development facilities of which the Manhattan Project was the most prominent.
Over the course of the war, American war industry would produce 86,000 tanks, 120,000
artillery pieces, 2.4 million trucks and jeeps, 1,200 combatant vessels, 96,000 bombers, and
88,000 fighters, among other war materials.
53
By nearly any measure, the response by the United
States to build and project military power during World War II was truly incredible and
historically unprecedented.
Yet, almost as soon as the war ended there was pressure to demobilize and return the
government to balanced budgets. Campaigns were started to have soldiers returned “home alive
in 1945.” With a midterm election that year, troops seeking passage home threatened Congress
with calls of “no boats, no votes.” And in December, the White House was barraged with

51
Approximately 11 million served in the Army, 4 million in the Navy, 669,000 in the Marines, and
350,000 in women’s units.
52
Jeffrey Engel suggests the number was closer to 20,000 if based on a looser definition of military
installation. Jeffrey Engel, “Over There...to Stay This Time: Forward-Deployment of American Basing
Strategy in the Cold War and Beyond,” in Military Bases: Historical Perspectives, Contemporary
Challenges, ed. Luís Rodrigues and Sergiy Glebov (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2009), 20.
53
Allan R. Millett, Peter Maslowski, and William B. Feis, For the Common Defense: A Military History
of the United States from 1607 to 2012, 3rd ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012), 381–391.
314
requests to “Bring the Boys Home by Christmas.”
54
Demobilization and reconversion to a
peacetime economy, therefore, began to happen relatively quickly, as it had in previous wars. In
less than two years, total troop strength dropped from 12 million soldiers to fewer than 1.6
million and the country’s war fighting capabilities were rapidly dismantled. When the war ended
in 1945, the United States had 91 Army and 6 Marine Corps combat-trained and ready divisions;
an enormous array of aircraft organized into 213 Army Air Force combat groups; and 1,166
Navy combat vessels. Twenty-two months later, the armed forces stood at 2 combat ready Army
divisions, along with 8 understrength divisions; 2 understrength Marine Corps divisions; 11 fully
operational Army Air Force groups out of a total of 63; and 343 Navy combat vessels.
55

The slashing of the armed forces was driven by the need to end high levels of taxation
after years of extraordinary war spending, and the need to balance guns with butter after years of
sacrifice at home.
56
National defense outlays were steadily cut from $83 billion in 1945 to $42.7
billion in 1946 to $12.8 billion in 1947 to $9.1 billion in 1948. In percentage terms, this
amounted to a drop from a high of 89.5% of federal outlays in 1945 to 30.6% in 1948, or 37.5%
of Gross Domestic Product in 1945 to 3.5% in 1948. Outlays for defense in 1948 were still five
times higher than they had been in 1940. Yet, they were beginning to approach a more
sustainable level.
57
Many of the remaining costs were associated with America’s constabulary

54
Paul S. Boyer, et.al., The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People, vol. II: Since 1865
(Boston: Wadsworth, 2009), 661.
55
Steven L. Reardon, History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, vol. I: The Formative Years,
1947–50 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1984), 12–13.
56
See Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 69–118;
Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War
Grand Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 81–107.
57
Fiscal Year 2014 Budget of the U.S. Government: Historical Tables (Washington, DC: Office of
Management and Budget, 2013), 50–51,
https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2014/assets/hist.pdf.
315
duties overseas, which at this time were still considered temporary and likely to be wound down
shortly.
As a result of demobilization and reconversion, however, a gaping hole began to open
between the country’s shifting foreign policy orientation, which required military power and
force projection capabilities, and its domestic policy objectives, which required rolling back the
American military machine to a minimal level. Even before the war ended, policymakers had
recognized the country could not return to its prewar state of military unpreparedness and that
the United States would have to maintain larger standing forces than ever before in its history.
But in the postwar period, they struggled at first to balance this requirement with both domestic
political pressure and a genuine desire to return to some sense of normalcy at home. The fact that
they struggled to reconcile the two should not necessarily be seen as a failure on their part, but
rather is a testament to the tremendous challenges they faced in simultaneously terminating the
largest war ever fought by the United States and undertaking a paradigm shift in its approach to
international politics.
Concerns about the country dismantling its military capabilities too rapidly or too
extensively were based on both short term and long term considerations. Of immediate concern
was ensuring America’s critical postwar interests were served before the material foundations of
its overseas influence were liquidated. Most importantly, forces were required to enforce the
treaty terms on the former Axis members and transition them into stable states. This meant much
of the postwar military was engaged in occupation duties, not only in Germany and Japan but
also in Austria, Italy, Trieste, and Korea. In a larger sense, military power was also required to
back with force the new international legal architecture that policymakers hoped would
ultimately take the lead in guaranteeing world peace. Nearly all policymakers recognized the
316
League of Nations had failed because it lacked teeth and they were determined to prevent the
United State’s military capabilities from withering to the point that the country could not carry
out its responsibilities under the UN.
Of longer term concern was the need to develop standing forces to balance against and
deter potential aggressors and to conduct “retaliatory or punitive” operations against actual
aggressors.
58
For many policymakers, the need for this type of capacity was apparent even before
the war ended. Afterwards, however, it became even clearer as the Cold War unfolded. American
forces were needed in Europe and elsewhere permanently to deter the ambitions of the Soviet
Union and its allies. In the early stages of the emerging conflict, military power was needed as a
source of leverage, particularly in Europe. It was in this context that Kennan wrote about the
need to meet the Soviet Union with “counter-force” wherever it tried to expand its political
interests. Kennan could argue plausibly that the United States did not need to confront the Soviet
Union militarily in such cases, but had to maintain at least enough military power to ensure its
diplomatic efforts were taken seriously in Moscow.
By 1947-1948, however, it became clear that American military power was needed not
only for leverage but also as an instrument to actively promote the country’s postwar foreign
policy goals. Early in 1947, President Truman announced the Truman Doctrine, which as I
mentioned in the last chapter provided an essentially global view of American interests. This
rhetorical shift, however, was only one piece of the puzzle. To make good on the doctrine, the
United States had to have standing forces available to intervene when necessary on behalf of its
interests. The problem by this time was that military leaders began to question whether the
country had the forces required to defend and advance its core interests in places like Europe—

58
“SWNCC 282: Basis for the Formulation of a U.S. Military Policy, March 27, 1946,” 1162.
317
let alone interests across the globe.
59
Even though the military remained quite large by historical
comparison (even after demobilization ended in 1946), much of it was actually busy conducting
occupation duties and was not available or ready for combat. With further budget cuts proposed
and the end of Selective Service in 1947, the armed forces faced even further weakness.
During this time military leaders and some civilians began to question anxiously the
paradox of American national security policy. On the one hand, the new logic of force and the
Truman Doctrine dictated that the armed forces actively defend America’s commitments and
advance its interests around the world. Yet, on the other hand, political leaders at home were
busy emasculating the military’s capabilities. In connection with the NSC 20 Series in 1948, the
JCS was asked to put together a report on “Existing International Commitments Involving the
Possible Use of Armed Force.” The full catalogue of such commitments ran forty-two pages in
length. In a memorandum, the JCS summarized the country’s forces requirements as stemming
from three primary groups of commitments:
1) Defense of the United States, its territories, possessions, leased areas and trust
territories, other American states, and assistance to other free nations.
2) Pledges of military aid and assistance including occupation commitments, UN
commitments, and other bilateral pledges of aid and assistance pacts with all
countries in the Western Hemisphere, Greenland, Iceland, China, the Philippines, and
possibly countries in Africa.
3) Predetermined military actions to be undertaken if certain events occurred in support
of defense in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East
Additionally, the JCS stressed the importance of maintaining secure lines of sea and air
communication to Europe and Asia. Beyond specific concerns, moreover, they also highlighted

59
By early 1946 Secretary of War Patterson was concerned that the United States had adequate forces in
Europe for occupation duties, but not for “effective influence” over broader continental politics. See
Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 72.
318
the “distinct possibility of global warfare” with the Soviet Union that always lurked in the
background of policy discussions at the time.
60

Recognizing the commitments/interests—capabilities gap, the JCS and others in the
national security establishment warned that the United States needed to stop cutting its military
capabilities and actually start strengthening them. Otherwise the armed forces could only muster
a limited amount military power on behalf of the country’s foreign policy goals. Several
incidents at the time helped prove the point.
61
In the summer of 1948, for example, the UN
Security Council adopted a resolution to bring fighting to an end in Palestine. The military
implications of the resolution were such that in the event the interested parties could not maintain
a cease-fire diplomatically, American forces might be required to help create one with force. The
JCS recognized that it was essential to resolve the issue before Soviet or Soviet-allied forces
entered Palestine, but feared the consequences of committing American forces there. They
explained that an operation of that nature would require the military’s entire ground reserve,
which would send ripple effects throughout the military establishment. Those forces would be
unavailable in the event an emergency occurred elsewhere; the military would lose training
cadres to prepare new units; and the logistical support required for the troops would draw
resources away from military assistance programs for other potential allies.
62
Given the far-
reaching consequences of engaging American armed forces in situations like Palestine, the JCS

60
“NSC 35: Memorandum by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Secretary of Defense on Existing
International Commitments Involving the Possible Use of Armed Forces, November 17, 1948,” in
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, vol. I General; The United Nations, Part 2 (Washington,
DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), 656–62.
61
Crises occurred in Iran, Greece, and Turkey in 1946, Trieste in 1947, and Czechoslovakia and Berlin in
1948.
62
“NSC 27: U.S. Military Point of View for the Eventuality of United Nations Decision to Introduce
Military Forces into Palestine, August 19, 1948,” in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, vol. V
The Near East, South Asia, and Africa, Part 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1976),
1321–26.
319
concluded that every effort possible was required “to avoid actual United States military
commitment…unless and until preceded by adequate preparedness.”
63

The concept of “adequate preparedness” included various factors like maintaining the
country’s vast network of overseas bases and the military’s material capabilities. But it also
meant for the first time in the country’s history the prospect of maintaining substantial standing
forces (a topic I return to below). All of these required substantial increases in funding, which as
I mentioned above was a problem given the domestic political context at the time. Facing a
growing number of crises around the world and deteriorating relations with the Soviet Union,
however, compelled policymakers to begin increasing defense budgets, though President Truman
held the line and stipulated that he would not approve a budget requiring “large scale deficit
financing.”
64
In 1949 the defense budget was raised 44% from the previous year to $13.2 billion
and in 1950 another 4% to $13.7 billion.
65
These increases were far less than what military
leaders requested, but their importance should not be dismissed easily. Placed in context these
budgets amounted to a serious policy shift if observed in historical context. After all other
American wars, defense budgets had largely receded to prewar levels within a few years. Now
three years after World War II, it was being increased by 44% to nearly eight times the size of
the prewar budget.
Nonetheless, there was still a large commitments/interests—capabilities gap. Either the
country had to scale back its commitments/interests or increase its capabilities. Accomplishing
the latter is primarily what NSC 68 was meant to rectify in 1950. As I mentioned in the last
chapter, NSC 68 in many ways rehashed the policy positions that had already been worked out in

63
“NSC 35: Memorandum by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Secretary of Defense on Existing
International Commitments Involving the Possible Use of Armed Forces, November 17, 1948,” 661.
64
Reardon, History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, I: The Formative Years, 1947–50:327.
65
Fiscal Year 2014 Budget of the U.S. Government: Historical Tables, 51.
320
the NSC 20 Series in 1948. What was new in the document, however, was an even greater
emphasis on the existential threat faced by the United States in the Cold War. The purpose of the
document, therefore, was not to mark a new direction in American foreign policy, but to
convince those in government outside of the national security community that a massive increase
in defense spending was required. In the well-known words of Secretary of State Dean Acheson,
“The purpose of NSC-68 was to so bludgeon the mass mind of “top government” that not only
could the President make a decision but that the decision could be carried out.”
66
The document
provided no hard figures for increased defense spending, but its authors circulated estimates
totaling some $50 billion, or more than three and a half times the 1950 defense budget.
67
What
might have happened to NSC 68 in the absence of the Korean War has long been debated, but all
agree that the day North Korea crossed the 38
th
parallel marked the end of holding the line on
defense spending in the postwar years.
68
Beginning in 1951, defense spending would rise
substantially and remain much higher than anyone had ever envisioned for a “peacetime” budget
throughout the remainder of the Cold War.
Placed in context, the allocation of resources to the military in the postwar period was
“historically unprecedented,” according to Benjamin Fordham. This was true not only for the
United States but also historically in world history. The post-NSC 68/Korean War defense
budget would amount to $317.7 billion dollars (in 2000 dollars) on average per year from 1954
to 2002. In comparison, this was more than thirty times the average American defense budget

66
Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: W. W. Norton
& Company, 1969), 374.
67
Gaddis, John Lewis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security
Policy During the Cold War, Revised and Expanded (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 98.
68
Even Acheson later claimed “it is doubtful whether anything like what happened in the next few years
could have been done had not the Russians been stupid enough to have instigated the attack against South
Korea and opened the ‘hate America’ campaign.” Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the
State Department, 374.
321
from 1929 to 1940; eleven times more than Germany spent annually during its buildup to World
War II between 1934 and 1938; or four and a half times as much as Germany, Japan, Great
Britain, and France spent together in each of those years.
69
Over time, America’s defense
spending would represent an increasingly smaller portion of both government spending and
GDP, as both swelled over time. Nonetheless, outside brief periods of actual war, the shift to
build permanent standing forces in the early 1950s marked by far the most severe discontinuity
in American defense spending in the country’s history.
With this increased spending, the United States would maintain roughly 800 military
bases overseas and invest in building new military warfare technologies throughout the Cold
War. Even in the face of traditional constraints against a standing army, moreover, the size of the
regular armed forces jumped from roughly 460,000 active duty personnel in 1940 to an average
of 2.56 million active duty personnel between 1951-1991.
70
Before concluding this section it is
important to turn briefly to consider how the country raised this manpower. As I explained
earlier, nearly all policymakers recognized the need to maintain larger standing forces than ever
before in the country’s history. This shift was still opposed by some individuals and
organizations in the country that wanted the United States to adhere to its traditional policy of
maintaining minimal forces in peacetime. In fact, throughout the hearings on Universal Military
Training from 1945 to 1952 witnesses continued to make references linked back to the Founders

69
Benjamin O. Fordham, “Paying for Global Power: Assessing the Costs and Benefits of Postwar U.S.
Military Spending,” in The Long War: A New History of U.S. National Security Policy Since World War
II, by Andrew J. Bacevich (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 373–374, quote on 374.
70
Millett, Maslowski, and Feis, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States from
1607 to 2012, 683; Stephen Daggett and Amy Belasco, Defense Budget for FY2003: Data Summary, CRS
Report RL31349 (Congressional Research Service, March 29, 2002).
322
about the repugnance of standing armies in free countries.
71
But few congressmen raised such
objections. Even Senator Taft would eventually call for armed forces numbering some three
million by the early 1950s.
72
The fact that policymakers across the spectrum—even those who
had traditionally supported more isolationist policies—recognized the need for larger standing
forces shows just how severe systemic pressure was in this period.
Yet, though the strategic environment at the time dictated the need for larger standing
forces, domestic political factors helped determine the mechanism for generating those forces
and to some degree limited their size.
73
To generate manpower during the run-up to World War
II, the United States had instituted its first peacetime conscription program with the Selective
Training and Service Act of 1940. This program was limited but nonetheless controversial and a
continuation of it 1941 only passed through Congress narrowly. After the war, military leaders,
along with civilians in the executive branch like President Truman, sought to make conscription
a permanent feature of the military. They wanted to extend it, however, from a program of
“selective service” to a program of “universal military training (UMT)” of all able-bodied men in
the country.
74

Advocates of UMT claimed it would solve two problems that had plagued the military for
decades. On the one hand, it would solve the problem of recruitment. General Marshall testified

71
See for example Universal Military Training Hearings Before the Select Committee on Postwar
Military Policy, House of Representatives, Seventy-Ninth Congress, First Session, June 4-19, 1945
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1945), 76–83; Universal Military Training Hearings
Before the Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate, Eightieth Congress, Second Session,
March 17-April 3, 1948 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1948), 123, 286–288, 465, 540,
782–783, 1053–1057, 1096.
72
Clarence E. Wunderlin, Robert A. Taft: Ideas, Tradition, and Party in U.S. Foreign Policy (Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 162.
73
An excellent reference for understanding these debates is Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison
State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy, 149–198.
74
On the proposed program see The President’s Advisory Commission on Universal Training, A Program
for National Security (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1947).
323
during hearings on postwar military policy that before the war the Army had a difficult time
recruiting volunteers to fill out a 175,000-man force. Afterwards, he thought a strong recruiting
campaign and high rates of pay might yield 250,000 volunteer soldiers at most, which would
hardly be enough.
75
On the other hand, it would partly solve the two-army problem by
universalizing and fully federalizing the training of the country’s reserves. This would provide
both more and better-trained reserves thus finally fulfilling the goals of Elihu Root and other
neo-Hamiltonians from earlier in the century.
76
At the same time, advocates like President
Truman reasoned more loosely that universal military training was compatible with the country’s
republican institutions. They argued that it was actually an alternative to a large standing army
because it would only require “comparatively small” standing forces, while relying on a larger
body of well-trained citizen-reserves.
77

As Friedberg explains, if postwar military policy had been entirely up to executive branch
officials, UMT certainly would have been enacted sometime between 1945 and 1952.
78
President

75
Universal Military Training Hearings Before the Select Committee on Postwar Military Policy, House
of Representatives, Seventy-Ninth Congress, First Session, June 4-19, 1945, 576.
76
In fact, by World War I the idea of universal military training had become central to the neo-
Hamiltonian program. See Leonard Wood, Universal Military Training (New York: P.F. Collier & Son,
1917).
77
Harry S. Truman, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on Universal Military Training,
October 23, 1945,” in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, April 12 -
December 31, 1945 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1961), 406; See also the testimonies
of Gen. John Palmer and Maj. Gen. William Tompkins in Universal Military Training Hearings Before
the Select Committee on Postwar Military Policy, House of Representatives, Seventy-Ninth Congress,
First Session, June 4-19, 1945, 489–493, 498–505; and the testimony of Secretary of War Patterson in
Universal Military Training Hearings Before the Committee on Military Affairs, House of
Representatives, Seventy-Ninth Congress, First Session, on H.R. 515, Part 1, November 8-December 19,
1945 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1946), 3–13; Walter Millis argues this position was
misleading because conscription systems were designed historically to generate as much additional
manpower on top of a large standing army immediately in the event of war, not to maintain a small
standing army. Walter Millis, Arms and Men: A Study in American Military History (New York: Putnam,
1956), 307–308.
78
Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand
Strategy, 155.
324
Truman was a strong advocate, and the military establishment itself was not divided over the
program the way it was over unification. Advocates of UMT, however, faced two primary
obstacles. Friedberg stresses the first, which was the “continuing presence of important
ideological and institutional constraints on the extractive powers of the American state.”
79
UMT
required acceptance by Congress where it faced a century and a half of skepticism about
conscription in wartime—let alone in peacetime. The idea of the state forcibly taking “children
from their parents, [and] parents from their children” to fight its wars was decidedly un-
American.
80
Throughout hearings on the subject there were repeated references to compulsory
military training as the road to militarism, which the country had just fought a world war to
defeat.
81
Military leaders tried to assure congressmen and the public that UMT would resemble
peace-loving Switzerland rather than aggressive Nazi Germany.
82
They even tried to sugarcoat it
as a general training program that would improve the moral fiber of the nation, with President
Truman going so far as to suggest that its military function was “incidental” to its civilian
function.
83
But as Russell Weigley suggests, this approach actually worked against UMT in
Congress, “where legislators showed a healthy skepticism about military training as the most
convenient means of fostering citizenship and moral and spiritual values.”
84

79
Ibid.
80
The quote is from an unpublished speech by Daniel Webster. Quoted in ibid., 150.
81
See Universal Military Training Hearings Before the Committee on Armed Services, United States
Senate, Eightieth Congress, Second Session, March 17-April 3, 1948, 158, 292, 455, 761, 1079, 1102.
82
Testimony of Gen. Palmer in Universal Military Training Hearings Before the Select Committee on
Postwar Military Policy, House of Representatives, Seventy-Ninth Congress, First Session, June 4-19,
1945, 489.
83
Truman argued retrospectively that he intended UMT “to develop skills that could be used in civilian
life, to raise the physical standards of the nation’s manpower, to lower the illiteracy rate, to develop
citizenship responsibilities, and to foster the moral spiritual welfare of our young people.” Harry S.
Truman, Memoirs, vol. I, Year of Decisions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1956), 511.
84
Russell F. Weigley, History of the United States Army (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 500.
325
The second obstacle, which Weigley and other stress, was the fact that as World War II
retreated further in time, UMT became less necessary from a national security perspective.
85

Support for UMT as postwar policy had been forged in the bowels of a global war that required
the United States to mobilize sixteen million citizens for active service. During and immediately
after World War II, the country’s political leaders and citizens thought the next conflict might
look similar and the policy therefore enjoyed widespread support as the only means available to
the country. But as the scientific revolution in warfare technologies discussed in the last chapter
became more widely understood, the idea of mass armies in excessive of ten million soldiers
meeting each other on battlefields began to appear antiquated. Instead, at least by the Eisenhower
administration, policymakers came to agree that a smaller professionally trained military was
more appropriate to the country’s security needs.
In the end, a limited draft in the form of continued selective service emerged as a
compromise between the country’s historical reliance on a small voluntary military backed by
the militia system and the far-reaching UMT program. As Friedberg explains, this option was not
so much selected as “backed into” as a temporary measure until a long-term solution could be
arranged.
86
In 1947, selective service was allowed to lapse. But with recruitment numbers falling
it was renewed the following year in new legislation. During the Korean War, which might have
served as a catalyst for UMT as it did for many other Cold War policies, selective service was
reaffirmed again with the passing of the 1951 Universal Military Training and Service Act. The
1951 act endorsed UMT in principle, but as Weigley suggests Congress was only willing do so

85
Ibid. See also Millis who argues UMT was “largely outmoded” by 1945. Millis, Arms and Men: A
Study in American Military History, 308. Friedberg rejects this explanation arguing that the voices
framing UMT as “obsolete” in the nuclear age such as Hanson Baldwin were a minority. Friedberg, In the
Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy, 159–162.
86
Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand
Strategy, 173.
326
because by that time it had no chance of actually being implemented.
87
Selective service would
survive until the end of the Vietnam War in 1973, when it was widely loathed and no longer
needed.
The fact that standing forces and a permanent peacetime conscription program—even if
partial—were proposed and ultimately accepted again is a testament to the tremendous systemic
pressure policymakers felt in the postwar period. The fact that conscription was accepted in only
limited form, however, shows that the country’s domestic constraints against a standing army
continued to matter. What is interesting in the debates about constructing standing forces is the
lack of interest policymakers showed toward its potential impact on the traditional institutional
arrangement between the executive and legislative branches of government with respect to the
war-making power. As will be recalled from chapter three, standing armies were opposed
historically because, once created, they were difficult to rollback and executives could use them
more easily. By not maintaining large forces and by limiting military appropriations to two years,
the Framers of the Constitution had hoped to keep the war-making powers firmly rooted in the
legislature. Building standing forces threatened and indeed did unhinge that arrangement, though
that potential consequence does not appear to have been debated at the time. I return to this issue
in the last section of the chapter.
The CIA as an Instrument for Conducting Means Short of War
If constructing standing forces posed an old problem for America’s domestic institutional
arrangement, building an intelligence institution that could also conduct covert operations posed
a new one that policymakers had little experience with.
88
When war-making powers had been

87
Weigley, History of the United States Army, 500.
88
Clark Clifford would later remark, “those of us who were assigned this task [of creating a peacetime
intelligence agency] and had the drafting responsibility were dealing with a new subject with practically
327
considered previously, it was generally with respect to the ability to commit the country to open
confrontation with uniformed military personnel in traditional war settings. But with new
postwar challenges, policymakers also had to consider how to use force more discreetly. Given
the country’s democratic constraints, this required providing the executive with the institutional
resources and authority needed to carry out such activities with fairly wide latitude.
Intelligence activities had played a role in America’s wars and diplomacy since the
Revolutionary War, but they were limited in nature and tended to wax in importance during wars
and wane afterwards.
89
Beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, the War and Navy
Departments, followed later by the State Department, developed some intelligence capabilities.
Yet, on the eve of World War II such capabilities could still be characterized as “embryonic”:
they were under-developed, decentralized, and limited to information gathering (meaning they
did not include an operational dimension).
90
The lack of a more powerful and centralized
intelligence function was partly due to the fact that there had been little need for one historically.
But American policymakers had also always been wary about the role of intelligence in a
democracy, particularly during peacetime. During his request to Congress for a declaration of
war against Germany in 1917, President Wilson captured this historical wariness by contrasting
the practices of autocratic Germany with democracies:
Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor states with spies or set the course of
intrigue to bring about some critical posture of affairs which will give them an
opportunity to strike and make conquest. Such designs can be successfully worked out

no precedents.” Hearings Before the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to
Intelligence Activities, United States Senate, Ninety-Fourth Congress, Second Session, First Session,
December 4 and 5, 1975, Volume 7: Covert Action (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1976),
50.
89
For a comprehensive overview see Christopher Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only: Secret
Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush (New York: Harper Collins, 1995).
90
David F. Rudgers, Creating the Secret State: The Origins of the Central Intelligence Agency, 1943-
1947 (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2000), quote on 5.
328
only under cover and where no one has the right to ask questions. Cunningly contrived
plans of deception or aggression, carried, it may be, from generation to generation, can be
worked out and kept from the light only within the privacy of courts or behind the
carefully guarded confidences of a narrow and privileged class. They are happily
impossible where public opinion commands and insists upon full information concerning
all the nation's affairs.
91

With war looming in 1941, however, intelligence operations were more centralized first
in the office of Coordinator of Information (COI). This was followed a year later during wartime
reorganization by the creation of the far more extensive Office of Strategic Services (OSS) under
the JCS. The range of activities conducted by OSS during World War II is impressive, but
beyond the scope of this study.
92
What is important to highlight here, however, is that it became
a blueprint of sorts for the organization and function of centralized intelligence after the war.
93

OSS’s wartime activities included foreign espionage and intelligence analysis. Importantly, OSS
also conducted covert operations involving sabotage, subversion, propaganda, and guerilla
warfare.
94
This was the first time the United States ever used such unconventional approaches in

91
Woodrow Wilson, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress Requesting a Declaration of War Against
Germany,” 1917.
92
See R. Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Intelligence Agency (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1972); Bradley F. Smith, The Shadow Warriors: OSS and the Origins of
the CIA (London: Andre Deutsch, 1983); Thomas Troy, Donovan and the CIA: A History of the Central
Intelligence Agency (Frederick: University Publications of America, 1984); See also William Casey, The
Secret War Against Hitler (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1988); Barry Katz, Foreign Intelligence:
Research and Analysis in the Office of Strategic Services, 1942-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1989); Arthur B. Darling, The Central Intelligence Agency: An Instrument of
Government, to 1950 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 3–41.
93
There were many reasons for this including the wartime experiences of key postwar national security
leaders. But it is also important to point out the institutional factors that contributed to some of the
continuity. Harris Smith and Thomas Troy suggest the institutionalization of the ideas of OSS’s
charismatic founder William Donavan played an important role in the early development of the CIA even
though he never led the organization, while Bradley Smith suggests it was more the carryover of so many
veteran OSS agents who brought their wartime experiences to the CIA. Smith, OSS: The Secret History of
America’s First Intelligence Agency; Troy, Donovan and the CIA: A History of the Central Intelligence
Agency; Smith, The Shadow Warriors: OSS and the Origins of the CIA.
94
Covert operations were later defined as those “which are conducted or sponsored by this Government
against hostile foreign states or groups or in support of friendly foreign states or groups but which are so
planned and executed that any US Government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized
329
war. Whether policymakers initially intended to continue these practices later during peacetime
has been a great subject of debate, as I discuss below. At a minimum, however, OSS’s wartime
operations should be seen as at least providing a precedent for such activities.
Again, like so many aspects of the emergent national security state, the development of
postwar intelligence and covert operations capabilities did not follow a “predestined course.”
95

Instead, the type of organization for coordinating and directing these activities was open for
debate. During the war many in the OSS fought to make it, or a closely related successor,
permanent and may have been given the opportunity to do so had President Roosevelt lived.
President Truman’s instinct within weeks of the war’s end, however, was to disband OSS and
transfer its units and responsibilities to the State and War Departments. Foremost in Truman’s
mind was concern with the charge that the government planned to maintain an organization in
the mold of Germany’s “Gestapo” after the war—a claim that was bandied about in the press and
later in congressional hearings.
96
OSS and its activities outside normal channels of war and
diplomacy may have been necessary during the war, but until policymakers could figure out
what a peacetime intelligence organization ought to look like it was disbanded.

persons and that if uncovered the US Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them.”
For the duration of the Cold War, this would include “any covert activities related to: propaganda,
economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation
measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements,
guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened
countries of the free world.” “NSC 10/2: National Security Council Directive on Office of Special
Projects, June 18, 1948,” in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945-1950: Emergence of the
Intelligence Establishment (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1996), 714.
95
Michael Warner, ed., CIA Cold War Records: The CIA under Harry Truman (Washington, DC: Central
Intelligence Agency, 1994), xi.
96
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA and American Democracy, Third Edition (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2003), 30–32. There were also personal considerations between Truman and OSS chief Donovan,
as well as the fact that OSS was tagged for termination as part of the broader effort of reconversion to
peacetime. See Rudgers, Creating the Secret State: The Origins of the Central Intelligence Agency, 1943-
1947, 36–39.
330
Two factors would help shape the eventual establishment and development of the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), which would become the primary institutional actor engaged in
intelligence collection/analysis and covert operations after the war. The first and most immediate
factor was the need to strengthen and better coordinate the state’s intelligence activities, which
can be traced directly to the logic of force described in the last chapter. As mentioned above,
President Truman and others were deeply affected by the attack on Pearl Harbor and what they
believed was the lack of coordinated intelligence that contributed to it. With this historical
experience and the increased concern about surprise attacks in the postwar period, a more
centralized organization was required to coordinate the country’s intelligence efforts against
potential adversaries. Interestingly, whereas policymakers previously saw intelligence as
potentially discordant with democracy, they now embraced it as a necessary part of conducting
democratic foreign policy. As the President’s Advisory Commission on Universal Training
explained, because democracies are “loath and slow to accept evidence of aggressive intent or to
take preventive action, the importance of early information in regard to probable or definite
enemy plans and power is accentuated.” With international politics unfolding at greater speed in
a shrinking world, they argued that greater intelligence capabilities would help compensate for
“the slowness of democratic action.”
97

The second and later more pivotal factor was the emergence of the Cold War and the
need to counteract Soviet capabilities. Quickly after World War II ended, policymakers grew
deeply concerned by the way the Soviet Union began using alternative means of force to
accomplish its aims in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Kennan first highlighted these efforts in
his Long Telegram of February 1946. The Soviet Union, he explained, was effectively

97
The President’s Advisory Commission on Universal Training, A Program for National Security, 22–23,
quote on 22.
331
employing a variety of propaganda methods, as well as violence, to both undermine Western
governments, colonial administrations, and non-communists in foreign countries, and at the same
time advance its own influence and that of its allies.
98
Two years later NSC 20/4 referred to the
dangers posed by Soviet “measures short of war,” which included “espionage,” “sabotage,”
“subversion, infiltration, and capture of political power.”
99
Finally, NSC 68 in early 1950 noted
how the Soviet Union was coupling these measures with military force and the threat of overt
aggression in order to wage war against the United States and others by “piecemeal
aggression.”
100
As this evolution in policy outlook unfolded, policymakers came to recognize the
need for the United States to develop similar capabilities, which for reasons of secrecy and
plausible deniability came to be located in the CIA.
The first factor provided the original impetus for establishing a permanent peacetime
organization that at a minimum would coordinate the already extant intelligence capabilities
located within the State, War, and Navy Departments. Whether that organization would be
centralized and independent or not was—like so many other state-building activities after the
war—subject to bureaucratic skirmishes. It is not necessary to go into detail about those
skirmishes here.
101
What is important to note is that they helped ensure that the temporary
organization, the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), which was created by Presidential directive

98
George F. Kennan, “Telegram: The Chargé in the Soviet Union (Kennan) to the Secretary of State,
February 22, 1946,” in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, vol. VI Eastern Europe; The Soviet
Union (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1969), 696–709.
99
“NSC 20/4: U.S. Objectives with Respect to the USSR to Counter Soviet Threats to U.S. Security,
November 23, 1948,” in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, vol. I General; The United Nations,
Part 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), 664, 667.
100
“NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, April 7, 1950,” in Foreign
Relations of the United States, 1950, vol. I National Security Affairs; Foreign Economic Policy
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1977), 242–244, 262–265, quotes on 263, 264.
101
For a comprehensive study on the debates during these years see Rudgers, Creating the Secret State:
The Origins of the Central Intelligence Agency, 1943-1947.
332
in January 1946, and its successor, the CIA, which was established as part of the National
Security Act in July 1947, both struggled to gain their footing vis-à-vis the executive
departments responsible for war and diplomacy, which had traditionally been responsible for
intelligence operations. The second factor meanwhile played a crucial role in shaping how the
CIA eventually developed into an instrument for covert operations, which is my primary concern
here. Before moving on to the evolution of the CIA, however, it is important first to discuss its
original design in the National Security Act of 1947 and the still continuing debate over the
intentions of its creators.
Questions about the founding of the CIA center on what type of organization it was
supposed to be and what type of activities it was supposed to undertake. In the National Security
Act it was established as an independent agency with a Director of Central Intelligence (DCI)
who would be appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate. The CIA
was given five responsibilities for “coordinating” intelligence. The first three were to “advise”
the NSC with respect to the government’s intelligence activities, make “recommendations” to the
NSC about such activities, and “correlate and evaluate intelligence related to the national
security.” The fourth responsibility was “to perform…such additional services of common
concern” as determined by the NSC, which essentially provided authorization for centralized
intelligence collection and espionage.
102
Finally, the last and most vague responsibility was “to
perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as
the National Security Council may from time to time direct.” It is this last clause that has been

102
CIA legislative liaison, Walter Pforzheimer later explained that the committees “didn’t want the word
‘espionage’ or ‘spy’ or something on that order to appear in the law. They wanted us to do it quietly. They
expected it to be done…But they didn’t want it in the law, or mentioned, or even breathed, in public.
That’s the way the atmosphere was then.” Quoted in L. Britt Snider, The Agency and the Hill: CIA’s
Relationship with Congress, 1946-2004 (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 2008), 140;
Darling, The Central Intelligence Agency: An Instrument of Government, to 1950, 186.
333
the subject of debate. Practitioners interpreted it broadly and quickly relied on it to conduct
covert operations. Others have argued that it was misinterpreted to allow the CIA to morph into
an institution that its creators never intended.
103

At issue is whether the CIA was originally designed as an institution for covert
operations. Much of the problem with determining this is that the record from the period is so
fragmentary. Most discussions were off the record and much of what was documented was either
destroyed or remains classified. Clark Clifford, who was one of the executive branch officials
that helped write the CIA charter, later argued that covert operations were planned from day one.
Clifford states it was decided early that the CIA needed a ““catch-all” clause to provide for
unforeseen contingencies.” The last clause above, therefore, was “carefully phrased” in such a
way to allow the agency to conduct any number of functions. “The “other” functions the CIA
was to perform,” he explained, “were purposely not specified, but we understood that they would
include covert activities.” Clifford argues that these activities were expected to be “limited in
scope and purpose,” but that they were clearly given statutory authorization under the National
Security Act.
104
General Counsel of the CIA at the time, Lawrence Houston, took a more limited
view. He agreed that the clause was subject to “almost unlimited interpretation, provided the
service performed could be shown to be of benefit to an intelligence agency or related to national
intelligence,” but he also believed the intent of Congress had not been to enable covert
operations such as “subversion” or “sabotage.” As a precaution, he advised at least informing

103
Zegart, Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC; Richard H. Immerman, The
Hidden Hand: A Brief History of the CIA (Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 20–21.
104
Hearings Before the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence
Activities, United States Senate, Ninety-Fourth Congress, Second Session, First Session, December 4 and
5, 1975, Volume 7: Covert Action, 50–51; Clifford, Counsel to the President: A Memoir, 169–170.
334
Congress and having it approve such functions.
105
Houston’s memo was written in context and
appears to contradict Clifford. The official CIA historian at the time, Arthur Darling, however,
noted that Houston wrote the memo for DCI Admiral Hillenkoetter who was reluctant to
undertake covert operations and that this was the minority view within the NSC.
106
Thus, though
these views provide important insights into how two policymakers thought at the time, they offer
only partial and anecdotal evidence about the general purposes of establishing the CIA.
Houston’s memo notwithstanding, there are actually good contextual reasons to doubt
that policymakers including those in Congress were so naïve about what types of operations the
CIA would conduct. To be clear, evidence suggests that all policymakers were ambivalent about
a democratic government sponsoring such activities, which explains why there was and still
remains so much secrecy surrounding the agency and its organizational siblings like the National
Security Agency (NSA) that were created subsequently. Moreover, policymakers in both the
executive and legislative branches at the time likely never anticipated the CIA to undertake the
extensive activities it did later. Indeed, Clifford’s remarks indicate as much. But not knowing the
full consequences of giving the CIA ambiguous flexibility in its functions should not be confused
with being ignorant about any of the consequences of doing so.

105
Lawrence R. Houston, “Memorandum From the General Counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency
(Houston) to Director of Central Intelligence Hillenkoetter, September 25, 1947,” in Foreign Relations of
the United States, 1945-1950: Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1996), 622–23. Though at odds with his first memo and based on his
retrospective perspective, Houston later wrote that he was asked to clarify this first memo in a second one
where he advised that “if the President, with his constitutional responsibilities for the conduct of foreign
policy, gave the agency appropriate instructions and if Congress gave it the funds to carry them out, the
agency had the legal capability of carrying out the covert actions involved.” Quoted in John Prados, Safe
for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), 39.
106
Arthur Darling was the official in-house historian who wrote the institutional history of the period in
the early 1950s. His book was originally written in 1952 and was classified until 1989. Darling, The
Central Intelligence Agency: An Instrument of Government, to 1950, 247–250, see also 186–188.
335
If policymakers actually wanted to restrict the activities of the CIA, the elephant in the
room is why didn’t they? If they only wanted to construct an intelligence coordinating agency,
this could easily have been accomplished with the first three clauses of the act stated above. The
last two—certainly the last—were completely unnecessary for establishing that function. In fact,
such vague language can only be read to have been included to grant the CIA flexibility to
conduct other unspecified but well-known activities. By then, Congress knew many of the
wartime operations of OSS and they heard testimony from Donovan and others who argued that
a range of clandestine activities should be continued under the CIA.
107
If they intended to restrict
what those activities included, then why not do so? For example, Congress was deeply concerned
about the possibility of the CIA becoming an “American Gestapo.” To prevent this from
occurring, the act specifically barred the agency from operating at home by stipulating that it
“shall have no police, subpoena, law-enforcement powers, or internal-security functions.” There
were discussions during off the record executive sessions about including other limitations, but
they were never pursued.
108
This omission in the legislation appears particularly striking when
juxtaposed with Congress’s prewar obsession with imposing limitations on any type of
independent executive action in every bill it passed. These factors suggest the CIA was created
with covert operations at least in the back of policymakers’ minds. To believe this was not case
would require a level of ignorance on their part, which is hard to fathom.
Moreover, the immediate post-creation history of the CIA suggests that even if
policymakers had not intended to include covert operations in the organization’s original charter

107
David M. Barrett, The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy (Lawrence, KS:
University Press of Kansas, 2005), 12–13, 21; Rudgers, Creating the Secret State: The Origins of the
Central Intelligence Agency, 1943-1947, 139–140.
108
Barrett, The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy, 15; Rudgers, Creating the
Secret State: The Origins of the Central Intelligence Agency, 1943-1947, 146–147.
336
they quickly sought to fold them into it afterward. Once created the CIA began almost
immediately to conduct covert activities, the purposes of which were outlined in NSC directives
supported by President Truman and other NSC members. As David Barrett’s impressive recent
study shows, Congress was not only well aware of such activities, but some congressmen were
quite “hawkish” about them. Within a few years they were urging the CIA to pursue more
aggressively options falling under the rubric of “psychological warfare,” “special operations,”
and “political warfare.”
109
Congress quickly helped facilitate these activities after DCI
Hillenkoetter testified that the agency’s actions were limited by the traditional red tape most
bureaucracies face. He explained, “It is necessary to use funds for various covert or semi-covert
operations and other purposes where it is impossible to conform with existing government
procedures and regulations.”
110
In the CIA Act of 1949, Congress provided “enabling”
legislation by giving the CIA greater appropriations freedom than that enjoyed by any other
governmental agency.
111

Finally, it should be noted that Congress could have limited the operations of the CIA
through oversight, which it chose not to do. As Barrett explains, Congress purposely developed
“an elite model of legislative oversight” whereby most members outside of a select few learned
little about agency activities and most preferred it that way. There were efforts by some
congressmen to push for greater oversight and in 1956 a bill along those lines was even debated
on the Senate floor. But few changes were made to the “elite model” until after the Church

109
Barrett, The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy, 25–32, Quotes on 460, 30.
110
Quoted in ibid., 41.
111
Among other provisions, the Act stated specifically: “The sums made available to the Agency may be
expended without regard to the provisions of law and regulations relating to the expenditure of
Government funds; and for objects of a confidential, extraordinary, or emergency nature, such
expenditures to be accounted for solely on the certificate of the Director and every such certificate shall
be deemed a sufficient voucher for the amount therein certified.” “Central Intelligence Act of 1949,”
Public Law 110 of June 20, 1949; 63 STAT. 208.
337
Committee investigations in the mid 1970s.
112
Even those charged with oversight, who were
aware of the general nature of CIA activities—some of which “almost chills the marrow of a
man to hear about” Senator Richard Russell remarked—were uninterested in learning too many
details for fear of jeopardizing the agency’s flexibility. “The difficulty in connection with asking
questions and obtaining information,” Senator Leverett Saltonstall explained during the debate
over oversight in 1956, “is that we might obtain information which I personally would rather not
have, unless it was essential for me as a member of Congress to have it.”
113
There were of course
obvious problems with this model, but it was the one authorized and supported by Congress.
Thus, regardless of the original debate over the functions of the CIA, the evidence
suggests that at least within a few years of its creation most policymakers came to see it as a
flexible and secret instrument for using means short of war. Moreover, given the vagueness of
the CIA’s charter and the lack of subsequent congressional interest in its operations, it should
also be noted that the evidence suggests the CIA was established as a creature of the executive to
be used on behalf of “the national security,” however ambiguous that concept was. This fact
would become more obvious and problematic in later years, but it is clear that this was the
intention of policymakers at the time.
The evolution of the CIA into an agency with both intelligence coordination, collection,
and analysis, and covert operations functions occurred fairly quickly as policymakers set out to
go on the offensive in the Cold War.
114
This evolution was quickened by events, such as

112
Barrett, The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy, quote on 22; See also
Snider, The Agency and the Hill: CIA’s Relationship with Congress, 1946-2004, 8–17.
113
Quoted in Barrett, The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy, 231, 230.
114
On the offensive nature of covert operations early in the Cold War see Gregory Mitrovich,
Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947-1956 (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2000); Stephen Long, The CIA and the Soviet Bloc: Political Warfare, the Origins of the
CIA, and Countering Communism in Europe (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014).
338
elections in Italy in April 1948 where communists threatened to win, which began to place
institutional stress on the state’s limited covert action capabilities. Within weeks after the
passage of the National Security Act, the NSC began to think systematically about using “covert
psychological operations designed to counteract Soviet and Soviet-inspired activities” and for
reasons of secrecy and plausible deniability decided to locate them in the CIA rather than the
State or Defense Departments.
115
In June 1948, the purpose and nature of these operations were
spelled out in NSC 10/2. This document, along with nearly all other related documents, cited the
purpose of covert operations as countering “the vicious covert activities of the USSR.” To do so,
the directive created the Office of Special Projects (OSP) within the CIA to conduct “covert
activities related to: propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage,
anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including
assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and
support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.”
116

In 1951, in conjunction with NSC 68 and a more assertive Cold War policy, this directive
was superseded by NSC 10/5, which called for the “immediate expansion of covert organization
established in NSC 10/2, and the intensification of covert operations” designed to 1) “Place the
maximum strain on the Soviet structure of power,…[and] contribute to the retraction and
reduction of Soviet power and influence to limits which no longer constitute a threat to U.S.

115
“SANACC 304/11: Report by an Ad Hoc Subcommittee of the State-Army-Navy-Air Force
Coordinating Committee on Psychological Warfare, November 7, 1947,” in Foreign Relations of the
United States, 1945-1950: Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 1996), 635–37; “NSC 4-A: Memorandum from the Executive Secretary (Souers) to the
Members of the National Security Council on Psychological Operations, December 9, 1947,” in Foreign
Relations of the United States, 1945-1950: Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment (Washington,
DC: Government Printing Office, 1996), quote on 643.
116
OSP was later changed to the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). “NSC 10/2: National Security
Council Directive on Office of Special Projects, June 18, 1948,” 714.
339
security,” 2) “Strengthen the orientation toward the United States of the people and nations of the
free world, and increase their capacity to and will to resist Soviet domination,” and 3) “Develop
underground resistance and facilitate covert and guerilla operations in strategic areas.” As
Gregory Mitrovich explains, these goals were later tempered in NSC 5412/2 in 1955 when
policymakers concluded that covert activities alone would not retract or reduce Soviet power.
117

Nonetheless, they would remain an essential component of American national security policy for
the remainder of the Cold War and thereafter.
The need to develop a new organization for intelligence and covert operations after
World War II posed perhaps a greater problem for American democracy than any other state-
building activity. Policymakers thought it was absolutely necessary, but many were deeply
concerned that they were creating an organization that might one day operate like the German
“Gestapo.” The fact that the CIA later spied on Americans and conducted covert operations at
home suggests their fears were warranted. Others were also concerned by the fact that the first
heads of central intelligence beginning with Donovan all had military backgrounds and were
worried that this practice would contribute to militarism.
118
To guard against the former they
built statutory protections against domestic activity into the original legislation (though they
ultimately failed later), while with respect to the latter they simply expressed the hope that
qualified civilians would one day be capable of running the organization (which did occur).
The larger domestic issue that had always worked to prevent the emergence of any type
of similar institution previously, however, was never dealt with openly and remains a problem to

117
Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947-1956, 160–
169; “NSC 5412/2: National Security Council Directive on Covert Operations, Undated (likely December
28, 1955),” in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950-1955: The Intelligence Community, 1950-
1955 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2007), 206–8.
118
Barrett, The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy, 22–23.
340
this day. This is the fact that such an institution is of necessity incompatible with the practice of
democratic government. Gordon Silverstein explains the crux of the problem as follows: “Covert
action is secret by definition, and yet the American system is predicated on an informed
electorate—or at the very least an informed government—making public decisions. But an
effective intelligence service that is expected to engage in covert activities cannot be judged in a
public forum, at least not prior to taking the action it plans to take.”
119
Policymakers were surely
aware of this problem at the time. The fact that they nevertheless felt the need to construct a
permanent peacetime organization capable of carrying out such activities again should be seen as
evidence of the tremendous systemic pressure of the period.

Rebalancing War-Making Powers
Presidents throughout American history enjoyed some discretion to employ the armed
forces overseas, though mostly for limited defensives purposes and for police-like actions
usually related to protection of citizens and property. In the early twentieth century, Presidents
like Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt stretched this discretion to
new limits and seriously challenged the institutional arrangement whereby the legislature was at
least a co-equal actor in decisions about initiating more offensively-oriented or larger uses of
force. Nonetheless, the original arrangement remained in tact. Throughout the latter half of the
1930s, Congress imposed limitations on President Roosevelt’s ability to involve the nation in
war and for the most part he worked within them. When he departed from those limitations, he
did so by resorting to novel interpretations of legislative acts, never by claiming any inherent
executive prerogative to employ the armed forces of the United States autonomously.

119
Gordon Silverstein, Imbalance of Power: Constitutional Interpretation and the Making of American
Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 148.
341
In the postwar period, however, that arrangement needed to be rebalanced to provide the
executive with greater autonomy to use the country’s armed forces. The need for this shift was
related to two factors. On the one hand, proponents of greater executive war-making powers
argued that time-space compression meant decisions about war and peace could no longer be
deliberated upon leisurely. Alfred Mahan and Theodore Roosevelt had begun to make this
argument earlier in the century, but in more limited terms. In the postwar world, every hour
wasted assembling Congress and considering legislation theoretically threatened to minimize the
country’s chances for success in war or even its survival. Shifting the initiative to the President
was deemed the only way to survive under such conditions. On the other hand, the shift from a
more passive or defense-based foreign policy to one that was more active or offense-based
required fewer constraints on the way the country’s armed forces were employed. As I explained
earlier, the Constitution effectively had a presumption against using force built into the
arrangement between the branches. With both houses of Congress and the President all acting as
veto players, using force, particularly for offensive reasons, was difficult. With the new logic of
force and its implications for American foreign policy, policymakers came to recognize the need
for greater flexibility, which could be achieved by locating at least the initiative for using force
in the executive.
The actual Constitutional process for shifting war-making powers from the legislature to
the executive was awkward at best. The State Department and others compiled problematic lists
of minor actions taken by Presidents earlier in America history, attempting to show historically
that the executive had always wielded the war powers of the government and could now do so
342
freely.
120
President Truman would claim the Korean War—in which nearly 1.8 million American
troops would serve in theatre with more than 36,000 killed—was not in fact a “war,” but a
“police action.” Others would argue that the “declare war” clause was either outdated completely
or now only effectively referred to total wars and therefore was irrelevant. And most importantly,
Presidents and Congressmen alike would cite Curtiss-Wright, as well as reinterpret the
Commander in Chief clause in a novel way, to provide Constitutional grounding for executive
war-making powers.
In this section, I explore the rebalancing of the war powers by focusing on the
Constitutional basis for such change, the actions that elaborated those changes, and the new set
of procedural norms that emerged to govern the use of force.
The President as Commander in Chief
In the postwar period, Curtiss-Wright came to provide the general framework for the
expansion of executive autonomy in the area of foreign affairs as a whole. There was a
potentially problematic gap in Sutherland’s opinion, however, with respect to the executive’s
more specific war-making powers. No executive could claim to initiate a war based on a still
vague extra-constitutional source of authority when the Constitution appeared to explicitly vest
those powers in the legislature. As I mentioned in chapter five, even Sutherland in his earlier
writings did not seem to include the war powers in his grant to the executive.
121
Instead,
executives would eventually use—with the acceptance and support of the legislature—the
Commander in Chief clause of the Constitution as a specific grant of war-making powers. Today,

120
These lists were not only problematic for several reasons, but it also important to note that they served
a poor precedent because none of the actions included in them was comparable in size or scope to those
envisioned in the postwar period.
121
This was true at least in his 1918 lectures, though it is not clear whether or not his views on the subject
evolved between then and Curtiss-Wright. George Sutherland, Constitutional Power and World Affairs
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1919), 70–91.
343
we take this understanding of the clause for granted. But placed in historical context this was a
novel approach.
This exact usage of the Commander in Chief clause did not appear until after World War
II, but its seeds had begun to be sown earlier. As explained in chapter three, the clause was
originally designed to ensure civilian control over the country’s armed forces by creating a
military hierarchy with the President at the top. Alexander Hamilton minimized the significance
of the position by noting that it was meant to “amount to nothing more than the supreme
command and direction of the military and naval forces, as first general and admiral of the
Confederacy” during wartime.
122
Until President Lincoln made it relevant for the first time
during the Civil War, it remained what Edward Corwin called “the forgotten clause of the
Constitution.”
123
During the Civil War, which as Corwin notes provided an exceptional set of
circumstance, Lincoln exercised vast powers as Commander in Chief. This demonstrated the
clause’s incredible potential during periods of war. But afterwards those powers faded away in
the peace that followed. What remained of them thereafter was mainly limited to the direction of
the country’s armed forces.
Following the Spanish-American War, however, the importance of the Commander in
Chief clause began to grow as the consequences of “directing” the armed forces became more
significant. The United States now had overseas possessions and a growing set of foreign
interests. Moreover, for the first time in the country’s history there were now standing forces in
peacetime large enough to be used outside the continent for expeditionary purposes. In practice,
President’s began to use the Commander in Chief clause to deploy these forces overseas not only

122
Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist Number 69,” in The Federalist, ed. George W. Carey and James
McClellen (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), 357.
123
Edward S. Corwin, Total War and the Constitution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), 15.
344
to protect citizens and property, but on behalf of America’s foreign commercial and political
interests. As Elihu Root explained in an address to the Senate in 1912, so long as troops existed,
the President’s ability to direct them meant he could technically send them “into any country
where he considers it to be his duty as Commander-in-Chief of the Army…to protect our
citizens.” Congress could statutorily restrict such deployments, but was unlikely to ever do so.
The only limit, according to Root, was that Presidents could not use such forces “for the purpose
of making war, which of course, he cannot do” constitutionally.
124

The problem, according to William Howard Taft, was that if Presidents could command
the armed forces in this way during peacetime, they could essentially push the country into war
single-handedly even though as Root pointed out they could not do so under the Constitution. He
explained the logic of this argument as follows:
The President [as] Commander-in-Chief…can order the army and navy anywhere he will,
if the appropriations furnish the means of transportation. Of course the instrumentality
which this power furnishes, gives the President an opportunity to do things which involve
consequences that it would be quite beyond his power under the Constitution directly to
effect. Under the Constitution, only Congress has the power to declare war, but with the
army and the navy, the President can take action such as to involve the country in war
and to leave Congress no option but to declare it or to recognize its existence.
125

By forcing Congress into such a position, Taft argued, the President could blur the war powers
provisions of the Constitution. As Commander in Chief, the President could order troops in such
a way to commit what in effect might amount to “an act of war,” which in practice would be
difficult to distinguish from “a war of our aggression.” As Taft pointed out, this is in fact what
happened to some extent with President Polk in the lead up to the Mexican-American War.
126

124
Quoted in Elihu Root, The Military and Colonial Policy of the United States: Addresses and Reports,
ed. Robert Bacon and James Brown Scott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916), 157–158.
125
William Howard Taft, Our Chief Magistrate and His Powers (New York: Columbia University Press,
1916), 94.
126
Ibid., 95.
345
Recognizing the same problem, Corwin later explained that Presidents could use their
powers as Commander in Chief to “stake out Congress’s course by a series of fait accomplis,”
effectively committing the country to war through executive action before Congress had decided
upon such a course. He suggested, in fact, that this is precisely what President Roosevelt had
done beginning in the late 1930s prior to America’s entry into World War II.
127
In fact, part of
the novelty of the Roosevelt administration’s justifications in the well-known bases-for-
destroyers deal and the deployment of troops to Iceland was that the President could take these
actions as Commander in Chief.
These developments notwithstanding, it is important to point out that there is no evidence
that any President or administration official prior to World War II ever claimed that the
Commander in Chief clause granted the executive either extensive or preclusive war-initiating
powers.
128
Though some academics began to entertain such notions, the more limited traditional
understanding of the Commander in Chief clause remained the most widely held view as the
interpretations of both Taft and Corwin suggest.
129
It is worthwhile pointing out that in the run-

127
Corwin, Total War and the Constitution, 22–34, quote on 33.
128
David J. Barron and Martin S. Lederman, “The Commander in Chief at the Lowest Ebb: A
Constitutional History,” Harvard Law Review 121, no. 4 (2008): 1034.
129
The views of John Bassett Moore in 1936 show the traditional perspective was still alive and well in
the prewar period: “I have occasionally heard the suggestion that there can be no objection to conferring
on the President dictatorial powers as regards peace and war because, forsooth, he can, in the exercise of
his constitutional power as Commander in Chief of the Army and the Navy, or in the conduct of
diplomatic intercourse, at any moment plunge the country into war. I utterly deny this. There is only one
case in which the President is empowered to use the military forces for purposes of war without the
express authority of Congress, and that is to repel invasion. The use of any of his powers so as to plunge
the country into war would be a palpable violation of the Constitution and of his oath of office. The fact
that such loose notions can be entertained in the United States of Executive prerogative should of itself be
a solemn warning against the adoption of such legislation as that proposed, since it would remove the last
doubt that the Congress had abdicated its functions as the law-making power and set up an absolute
dictatorship to be exercised when the country is at peace as well as when it is at war.” John Bassett
Moore, “Statement by Dr. John Bassett Moore,” in Neutrality Hearings Before the Committee on Foreign
Relations, United States Senate, Seventy-Fourth Congress, Second Session, on S. 3474, January 10 to
February 5, 1936 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1936), 178.
346
up to World War II President Roosevelt maintained this traditional view even as he struggled to
inch the country closer to war. In fact, as Arthur Schlesinger notes, “the pre-Pearl Harbor
documents are notable for the singular lack of reference to the office of Commander in Chief.”
Attorney General Robert Jackson cited the clause in his opinion on the destroyers deal, but
Schlesinger argues that his opinion is actually indicative of just how “underdeveloped
Commander in Chief theory was in 1940.” He cites the fact that “in 83 press conferences in 1941
up to Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt never once alleged special powers in foreign affairs as
Commander in Chief.”
130

Nonetheless, though Roosevelt never publicly claimed war-initiating powers based on his
office, his actions after Lend-Lease in March 1941 indicate that he was willing to take a broader
view of executive discretion once he had legislation in hand. Corwin argues these actions
eventually would have “produced a serious constitutional crisis had not the Japanese obligingly
come to the rescue” later that year.
131
With the attack on Pearl Harbor and a declaration of war in
hand, Roosevelt quickly moved to use the Commander in Chief clause to almost single-handedly
wage war, reorder parts of the state, and reach deep into the domestic economy. As his Secretary
of State, Cordell Hull, noted Roosevelt even preferred the title Commander in Chief to that of
President during the war.
132
Roosevelt’s use of the clause matched only that of President
Lincoln’s use during the Civil War and helped transform it from what Corwin described as “a
simple power of military command to a vast reservoir of indeterminate powers in time of
emergency.”
133

130
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), 113.
131
Corwin, Total War and the Constitution, 33.
132
Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency, 114.
133
Edward S. Corwin, The President: Office and Powers, 1787-1948: History and Analysis of Practice
and Opinion (New York: New York University Presss, 1948), 317.
347
The prewar period in many ways sowed the seeds of a larger understanding of the
Commander in Chief clause, while World War II once again demonstrated its immense potential
as a source of executive power. But it would not be until after the war that it truly grew in
“peacetime” significance. The blurring of war and peace, the state of nearly permanent
emergency during the Cold War, and the more central role of military force in American foreign
policy, all helped endow the Commander in Chief clause with new meaning in the postwar
period. As I show below, it came to serve as a constitutional source of executive war-making
powers to supplement the extra-constitutional source claimed in Curtiss-Wright, which alone did
not provide a solid foundation. Together, however, the two would be cited as providing postwar
Presidents with both specific and general grants of war-initiating powers that would allow them
to employ the armed forces on behalf of American foreign policy aims with incredible
flexibility.
134
It is important to note finally that, as foreshadowed by Alfred Mahan and others
half a century earlier, this reinterpretation provided a potential means for policymakers to solve
the problem of rebalancing the war powers without undermining the general framework of
limited government in the domestic arena. The President’s powers as President were specific and
could be limited, while those of the Commander in Chief were hard to define and were
potentially unlimited.

134
Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach would later state this most clearly when advising President
Johnson about committing troops to Vietnam explaining, “Under the Constitution the President has the
authority, as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces (Article II, section 2), and as the sole organ of the
United States in the field of foreign relations (United States v. Curtiss-Wright Corp., 299 U.S. 304
(1936)), to deploy and use the armed forces abroad.” “Memorandum from Attorney General Katzenbach
to President Johnson,” in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, vol. II, Vietnam, January-
June 1965 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1996), 752.
348
State-Building in Practice: Korea and the Prospect of Another War in Asia
Rebalancing the war powers, unlike reorganizing state institutions and constructing
standing forces, would not take place through legislation that openly and formally shifted the
initiative from the legislature to the executive. In fact, such change could only be accomplished
Constitutionally. The Constitution, however, is difficult to amend and in fact no one ever
envisioned accomplishing the shift through formal amendment. Rather, constitutional change
would occur informally, as Stephen Griffin explains, “outside the legalized Constitution”
through the establishment of a new “constitutional order.”
135
In practice, this meant
reinterpreting parts of the Constitution like the Commander in Chief clause and setting new
precedents through executive action, legislation, and judicial findings that collectively birthed
and recognized that new order.
The seminal event in the shift to extensive executive war-making powers in the United
States was the Korean War. On June 25, 1950, North Korean forces crossed the 38
th
parallel and
began to overrun South Korean positions.
136
On June 26, the United Nations Security Council
(UNSC) passed Resolution 82 ordering the withdrawal of all North Korean forces behind the 38
th

parallel. After failing to withdrawal, the UNSC passed Resolution 83 the following day
recommending that member states provide military support to the South. President Truman
announced that in keeping with America’s UN responsibilities he was ordering American forces
to support South Korea.
137

135
Stephen M. Griffin, Long Wars and the Constitution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2013), 11–51, quote on 14.
136
Officially the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Republic of Korea.
137
Harry S. Truman, “Statement by the President on the Situation in Korea, June 27, 1950,” in Public
Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, January 1 - December 31, 1950
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1965), 492.
349
The decision-making process behind Truman’s choice, however, was different than any
other similar military commitment in previous American history. On June 25, President Truman
had already ordered General Macarthur to send supplies and ammunition and on the June 27 he
had given the order for American naval and air assets to begin providing cover for South Korean
forces. It is not clear Truman had this authority even under a UNSC resolution, as I explain
below. But even if he did, his actions predated the passage of Resolution 83. By June 30, he
lifted the restriction on the use of ground troops and ordered two divisions to be moved from
Japan to Korea, effectively committing the country to war. All of this occurred without offering
Congress the opportunity to express its own preferences. Instead, when President Truman met
briefly with congressional leaders on June 27 he did so, according to Secretary of State Acheson,
to “tell them what had already been decided.”
138
On July 3, the administration discussed asking
for a joint resolution from Congress, but ultimately decided against it arguing that it might take
too much time, might tie the President’s hands unnecessarily, and might weaken the country’s
actions abroad.
139
It is also clear that Truman, Acheson, and others in the administration were
conscious about setting a precedent to provide greater flexibility to the President, as well as
future Presidents.
140

This was the first time a President had ever unilaterally committed the United States to
large-scale hostilities without any type of congressional input. The President did not seek a

138
“Memorandum of Conversation, by the Ambassador at Large (Jessup) on the Korea Situation, June 26,
1950,” in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950, vol. VII, Korea (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 1976), 182.
139
See these conversations in “Memorandum of a Telephone Conversation, by Miss Barbara Evans,
Personal Assistant to the Secretary of State, July 3, 1950,” in Foreign Relations of the United States,
1950, vol. VII, Korea (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1976), 282–83; “Memorandum of
Conversation, by the Ambassador at Large (Jessup), Meeting at Blair House, July 3, 1950,” in Foreign
Relations of the United States, 1950, vol. VII, Korea (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office,
1976), 286–91.
140
Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department, 413–415.
350
declaration of war, authorization, or even later ex post facto authorization. This was unique,
Francis Wormuth and Edwin Firmage explain, because until then “no judge, no President, no
legislature, no commentator ever suggested that the President had legal authority to initiate
war.”
141
What was so novel and important about the administration’s justification for employing
the armed forces was that it was not framed as a temporary aberration from established
procedures, as other President had claimed earlier during emergency situations. Rather, the State
Department put together a memorandum explaining that the executive has inherent and
autonomous war powers under the Commander in Chief clause. It stated specifically: “The
President, as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States, has full control over
the use thereof.” This prerogative, the memorandum outline, moreover, was “not dependent on
Congressional authority.” In support of this new constitutional interpretation, the State
Department put together a list of eighty-five instances when it claimed earlier Presidents had
acted similarly.
142
There is little need to belabor the point. But as I have shown there is no
evidence that the Commander in Chief clause was ever considered a source of authority to
initiate the use of armed force, particularly on the scale of Korea. This explains in part why the
President initially insisted on referring to operations in Korea as a “police action” when they
clearly constituted an act of war.
143

141
Francis D. Wormuth and Edwin B. Firmage, To Chain the Dog of War: The War Power of Congress in
History and Law (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 28.
142
“Department of State Memorandum on the Authority of the President to Repel the Attack in Korea,
July 3, 1950 [excerpts],” The Department of State Bulletin XXIII, no. 578 (July 31, 1950): 173–178,
quote on 173.
143
Harry S. Truman, “The President’s News Conference of June 29, 1950,” in Public Papers of the
Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, January 1 - December 31, 1950 (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1965), 502; Harry S. Truman, “The President’s News Conference of July 13,
1950,” in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, January 1 - December
31, 1950 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1965), 522–25.
351
In secondary support, the memorandum also pointed to the President’s responsibility to
act under the aegis of the UN. The inclusion of this secondary justification points to the fact that
administration officials were likely unsure about the legal soundness of the first one. The
problem with this second justification, however, was two-fold. First, the initial commitment of
armed forces by the United States predated UNSC Resolution 83, which called for such actions.
Second, and more problematic from a domestic institutional perspective, was the fact that
Congress had specifically included language in the United Nations Participation Act of 1945
restricting the President from unilaterally committing American armed forces to UN actions. The
Act clearly states that unless American armed forces were committed to the UN under an
agreement approved by Congress, they could not be employed without subsequent congressional
authorization.
144
In other words, Congress had never ceded its constitutional duty to initiate war
to the President under the UN Treaty.
145

144
Section 6 of the United Nations Participation Act states explicitly: “The President is authorized to
negotiate a special agreement or agreements with the Security Council which shall be subject to the
approval of the Congress by appropriate Act or joint resolution providing for the numbers and types of
armed forces, their degree of readiness and general location, and the nature of facilities and assistance,
including rights of passage, to be made available to the Security Council on its call for the purpose of
maintaining international peace and security in accordance with article 43 of said Charter. The President
shall not be deemed to require the authorization of the Congress to make available to the Security Council
on its call in order to take action under article 42 of said Charter and pursuant to such special agreement
or agreements the armed forces, facilities, or assistance provided for therein: Provided, That nothing
herein contained shall be construed as an authorization to the President by the Congress to make available
to the Security Council for such purpose armed forces, facilities, or assistance in addition to the forces,
facilities, and assistance provided for in such special agreement or agreements.” “United Nations
Participation Act of 1945,” Public Law 79-264. For the best treatment of the constitutional implications of
the Korean War see Louis Fisher, “The Korean War: On What Legal Basis Did Truman Act?,” American
Journal of International Law 89, no. 1 (1995): 21–39.
145
Department of State Memorandum of July 3, 1950. Truman cited America’s commitment to the UN to
justify his actions, but as Louis Fisher shows: “Nothing in the passage of the Fulbright and Connally
Resolutions [related to UN participation] or the history of the UN Charter supports the nation that
Congress, by endorsing the structure of the United Nations as an international peacekeeping body, altered
the Constitution by reading itself out of the war-making power. Congress did not—it could not—do that.”
See Louis Fisher, Presidential War Power, Third Edition, Revised (Lawrence, KS: University Press of
Kansas, 2013), 84–95, quote on 91.
352
What is perhaps most important about President Truman’s actions in Korea and his
justification for them is the fact that Congress not only did not oppose what easily might have
been construed as an usurpation of its powers, but actively supported it. A few Senators and
Representatives expressed concern. On June 28, Senator Taft took the Senate floor to offer his
vote in favor of a joint resolution supporting the actions in Korea, but worried about the
unfolding process for taking the country to war. He lamented the fact that the President had made
“no pretense of consulting the Congress,” and warned, “the President is usurping his powers as
Commander in Chief…there is no legal authority for what he has done…if the President can
intervene in Korea without congressional approval, he can go to war in Malaya or Indonesia or
Iran or South America.” Recognizing the long-term implications of Congress’s potential
inaction, he perceptively advised, “If the incident is permitted to go by without protest, at least
from this body, we would have finally terminated for all time the right of Congress to declare
war, which is granted to Congress alone by the Constitution of the United States.”
146
Taft’s
concerns, however, were completely ignored until much later when the war began to go poorly.
Instead, congressmen stumbled over each other to take the floor and praise the
President’s actions. Senator Hubert Humphrey lauded the President for “exercising the
leadership and the statesmanship which the people require,” and reminded his colleagues to be
“mindful of what happened in Ethiopia, when there was delay, when there was indecision, and
when there was ineffective action. I think we should be mindful of what happened in the Ruhr
and the Rhineland when Hitler marched in with his legions and took over, and when no effort
was made by the democracies to prevent that kind of aggression.” Noting the widespread

146
Congressional Record, June 28, 1950, 9319-9323, quotes on 9320, 9322, 9323. See also remarks by
Senator Arthur Watkins in Congressional Record, June 27 1950, 9232-9233, and remarks by Senator
Alexander Wiley in Congressional Record, July 10, 1950, 9737-9738.
353
congressional support for the President’s actions, Senator Tom Connally congratulated his
colleagues and warned others not to oppose them, arguing, “We cannot hesitate; we cannot
divide. Any division here, by a speech or by any other expression of sentiment would be
placarded all over the world as evidence that the United States is cautious or is afraid or is
quaking in its boots.”
147

In the most extensive and incisive statement in Congress, however, Senator Paul Douglas
provided what should perhaps be seen as the decisive statement on executive war-making
autonomy in the postwar period. He cited uncertainty over the precise meaning of the “declare
war” clause and presented evidence that Presidents had used force independently previously. But
it is obvious from his remarks that his real concern was the changed nature of the world and the
inadequacy of American domestic political institutions to confront it. On the one hand, he
argued, “the speed of modern war requires quick executive action.” He explained that while war
was a “leisurely…institution” in the Founding Period, which could be deliberated upon in an
equally leisurely way, those days were long gone. “[N]ow with tanks, airplanes, and the atom
bomb,” Senator Douglas insisted, “war can become instantaneous and disaster can occur while
Congress is assembling and debating. For death and destruction can now come to whole cities
and possibly to nations in a matter of seconds.” Only the executive could respond to such
situations.
On the other hand, Senator Douglas argued that the country’s postwar foreign policy now
obliged greater “retail use of force in localized situations,” which required more flexibility in
decision-making. Foreshadowing the arguments of others later, he maintained that short of
“outright war marked by the exercise of tremendous force on a wholesale scale,” i.e. total war,

147
Congressional Record, June 27, 1950, 9223, 9234.
354
the President should be permitted discretion in determining when and how the United States
became involved in such situations. He warned that there were “grave dangers” in giving the
executive wide discretionary powers to use the country’s armed forces, but concluded that there
was no alternative. Only “the sobering and terrible responsibilities of the office of President
itself” and the threat of impeachment could restrain Presidents in the postwar period.
148

As the situation in Korea worsened and ultimately froze into an unpleasant stalemate,
other Congressmen besides Senator Taft would regret having allowed President Truman to
exercise such awesome powers and drag the country into war.
149
Plagued in part by widespread
discontent over Korean, Truman lost the first Democratic primary in the 1952 Presidential
election and withdrew from the contest. Promising to “go to Korea” and end the war there,
Dwight Eisenhower won the Republican nomination and the Presidency. Having learned the
bitter lessons of Truman’s experience in Korea, Eisenhower in part attempted to restore the
traditional institutional arrangement between the executive and legislative branches with respect
to the war-making powers. But as others have noted, Eisenhower’s legacy in this regard is
mixed.
150

In the aftermath of the Korean War, Eisenhower reasoned that large-scale uses of armed
force could not succeed without congressional and public backing. Therefore, he sought to
preserve and entrench the executive prerogative that Truman had done so much to expand, while
at the same time bringing Congress back into the fold in at least some kind of consenting
capacity.
151
In 1954, while contemplating airstrikes and potentially more extensive operations in

148
Congressional Record, July 5, 1950, 9647-9649, quotes on 9648, 9649.
149
See during debates on the Korean War in Congressional Record, May 9, 1951, 5078-5103.
150
Fisher, Presidential War Power, 117–125; Griffin, Long Wars and the Constitution, 104–109.
151
Eisenhower sought to protect executive autonomy with respect to intelligence and covert operations,
and aggressively used the latter in Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia. He likewise protected
355
support of French losses at Dienbienphu in Vietnam, the President gave due respect to Congress
and the Constitution by stating publicly that the country would not become involved in a war
there unless it was as “a result of the constitutional process that is placed upon Congress to
declare it.”
152

Later that year, during administration discussions about a potential war with China over
the small island group around Quemoy in the Formosa Straight, however, it became clear that
Eisenhower’s domestic concerns had less to do with constitutional process and more to do with
making sure the administration had public support for its policies. Secretary of State John Foster
Dulles explained in a memorandum for the NSC that in the aftermath of Korea a war against
China could not be commenced without congressional approval, arguing, “Undoubtedly, there
would be serious attack on the Administration, and a sharply divided Congress and nation, if the
Executive sought to use his authority to order U.S. forces to defend…Quemoy, Tachen, etc.”
153

In discussions about the issue, President Eisenhower echoed Dulles’s concerns. He warned that
defending Quemoy would likely escalate to full-blown war with China and repeated his public
statement about the need to follow some type of constitutional process before getting involved.
Otherwise, he argued there might be grounds for his impeachment. At the same time, however,
he agreed with the JCS that they could “not go into such a war with any arbitrary limitations on

executive control over decisions about the potential use of nuclear weapons. And though not directly
related to the use of force, Eisenhower also established and institutionalized the practice of claiming
executive privilege with respect to administration conversations, communications, and documents. See
Prados, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 97–235; Griffin, Long Wars and the
Constitution, 108; Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency, 156–159.
152
Dwight D. Eisenhower, “The President’s News Conference of March 10, 1954,” in Public Papers of
the Presidents of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 12 - December 31, 1954 (Washington,
DC: Government Printing Office, 1960), 306; On the 1954 decision not to intervene directly in Vietnam
see George C. Herring and Richard H. Immerman, “Eisenhower, Dulles, and Dienbienphu: ‘The Day We
Didn’t Go to War’ Revisited,” The Journal of American History 71, no. 2 (1984): 343–63.
153
“Memorandum Prepared by the Secretary of State, September 12, 1954,” in Foreign Relations of the
United States, 1952-1954, vol. XIV, China and Japan, Part I (Washington, DC: Government Printing
Office, 1985), quote on 611.
356
our forces.” The administration would need congressional backing in any potential war, while
retaining its flexibility to act unimpeded by any constraints such backing might entail.
154

By the end of the year, the administration’s internal discussions became more important
as the situation in the Formosa Straight deteriorated further. In January 1955, President
Eisenhower decided to request a joint resolution from Congress to use force in the unfolding
crisis if necessary. In his message to Congress on the matter he was careful to preserve executive
prerogative, explaining the authority for emergency action was “inherent in the Authority of the
Commander-in Chief.” But, he argued, a resolution would strengthen his hand as it “would
clearly and publicly establish the authority of the President as Commander-in-Chief to employ
the armed forces…for the purposes indicated if in his judgment it became necessary. It would
make clear the unified and serious intentions of our Government, and our people.”
155
After a
brief debate in Congress, Eisenhower received a joint resolution authorizing him to “employ the
Armed Forces of the United States as he deems necessary for the specific purpose of securing
and protecting Formosa, and the Pescadores against armed attack,” which included “securing and
protection of such related positions and territories of that area now in friendly hands and the
taking of such other measures as he judges to be required or appropriate in assuring the defense
of Formosa and the Pescadores.”
156

154
“Memorandum of Discussion at the 214th Meeting of the National Security Council, Denver,
September 12, 1954 [extracts],” in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954, vol. XIV, China
and Japan, Part I (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1985), 613–624, quote on 618.
155
Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Special Message to the Congress Regarding United States Policy for the
Defense of Formosa, January 24, 1955,” in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight
D. Eisenhower, April 12 - December 31, 1955 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1959),
209–210.
156
Public Law 84-4, 69 Stat. 7, January 29, 1955. Was repealed by Public Law 93-475, S. 3473, October
26, 1975.
357
The threat of another war in Asia would prove less consequential in its implications for
the balance of war powers between the legislature and the executive branches than the Korean
War had been, but it was equally important in establishing a new set of procedural norms for war
initiation in the postwar period. With formal authorization from Congress, President Eisenhower
was able to accomplish several goals at the same time. On the one hand, he was able to gain
congressional and public backing for any military actions he might order in this particular case,
while retaining executive prerogative for potential future instances. As later cases would
demonstrate, authorizations for the use of military force do not ensure the public mood will not
sour over time. But at least they appear to follow a constitutional process and offer the prospect
of providing greater public legitimacy for Presidential actions than in the absence of such
authorization. On the other hand, Eisenhower sacrificed none of his flexibility. The authorization
served in effect to delegate whatever war-initiating powers Congress had under the Constitution
to the President thus effectively concentrating all such powers of the national government in the
executive.
157
The timing, scope, and scale of any conflict were left entirely up to him. Such a
conflict might range from a local and limited naval action to full blown nuclear war.
158
In other
words, Congress had no idea what it was actually authorizing the President to do. Several
congressmen raised this objection during floor debates, but the resolution was passed with nearly
unanimous support in both chambers.
159

157
On the potentially problematic nature of delegation see Wormuth and Firmage who argue it is
unconstitutional because it is “tantamount to amendment of the Constitution by statute.” Wormuth and
Firmage, To Chain the Dog of War: The War Power of Congress in History and Law, 201–223, quote on
201.
158
For a variety of reasons, the latter prospect was not far fetched. On the potential for any confrontation
to escalate rapidly see H. W. Brands, “Testing Massive Retaliation: Credibility and Crisis Management in
the Taiwan Strait,” International Security 12, no. 4 (1988): 124–51.
159
Silverstein, Imbalance of Power: Constitutional Interpretation and the Making of American Foreign
Policy, 78–79.
358
1955 and Beyond: A New Constitutional Interpretation
Together, the Korean War and the authorization for the use of military force in the
Formosa Crisis helped established a new set of procedural norms governing the war powers that
would come to dominate the postwar period. Two sets of procedures developed in practice
during the Truman and Eisenhower presidencies that remain the foundation for war powers
today.
First, the Korean War established a foundation for Presidents, based on their inherent
power under the Commander in Chief clause, to independently engage American forces overseas
in large-scale hostilities. This marked a sharp break with previous practice and set a precedent
that all Presidents could, if necessary, follow later. The decision-making process established by
Truman was one of insulated executive officials making authoritative decisions without
congressional input. Congressional leaders were later consulted in an ad hoc and informal
manner, but Congress as whole was cut out of the formal process for initiating the use of force.
The Korean War is the largest conflict in which a President took such action unilaterally, but
these procedures became routine in lesser conflicts or potential conflicts such as in the
Dominican Republic in 1965, Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, Bosnia in 1995, Kosovo in
1999. Several of these cases were cited as emergencies, but in none of them did Presidents seek
or receive post facto authorization. In the case of Bosnia and Kosovo the President even pursued
the use of force in the face of congressional opposition.
Second, beginning with President Eisenhower, Presidents have on several occasions
sought congressional authorization for the use of force. Such authorizations were provided in
1955, 1957, 1964, 1983, 1991, 2001, and 2003. The effect of these authorizations has been to
provide legislative support for whatever policies are ultimately pursued while essentially
359
delegating congressional war-making power to Presidents. These authorizations have been
similar to the ones issued in the early 1800s but have differed in three key respects. First, they
have often been sought once Presidents have already ordered troop deployments to theatres of
potential war, as was the case prior to the Vietnam, Gulf, and Iraq Wars. Second, similar to
during the Formosa Crisis, they have often been broadly defined to provide Presidents with
considerable leeway about why, when, how, and against whom the United States will use
military force. Third, Presidents have always acknowledged such resolutions as expressions of
support for Presidential actions, not authorization from the Congress. In other words, Presidents
have never acknowledged these authorizations as a requirement to initiate military action.

Conclusion
The organizations and instruments of warfare discussed in the first two sections of this
chapter provide what might be called the substrate of executive war-making powers.
Streamlining the country’s armed forces and national security organizations created a more
centralized and coherent “national security state” and helped institutionalize a more tightly knit
process for policy formulation and decision-making. Constructing a large peacetime military and
a new institution for covert operations meanwhile provided a range of instruments necessary to
pursue the country’s force-backed postwar foreign policy. The CIA by definition facilitated
executive autonomy. Presidents were now able to use the CIA, in conjunction with the NSC, to
direct covert operations on behalf of the country’s foreign policy aims. A question remained,
however, about the extent to which President’s could employ the regular armed forces
independently.
360
This latter question was never openly and directly resolved through a formal process of
state-building. Rather, policymakers set about rebalancing the government’s war powers in
practice through a series of crises and in the case of Korea, war, which collectively helped
established a novel interpretation of the Constitution’s Commander in Chief clause and a new set
of procedures for initiating the use of the force. The result of these practices was to establish a
basis for Congress to support Presidential actions by authorizing the use of force, or if necessary,
for Presidents to use force even in the absence of formal congressional support.
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Conclusion

The American War-Making Executive: Theory, Research, and
Practice

At the time of America’s Founding, the leading lights of the War for Independence and
the Constitutional Convention created a republic with a small and constrained foreign policy
executive at its core. This institutional arrangement was informed by ideas about the dangers of
large standing armed forces, centralized military authority, and executive war-making powers.
Such features were considered essential to imperial or militarist states, but potentially destructive
of a republican country that both expected and preferred normally to be at peace with others.
War, if it occurred, was likely to be defensive in nature. Creating a state capable of projecting
military force, therefore, was neither of interest nor need. The original design of America’s
national security state structure and decision-making procedures reflected these domestic
preferences. The Constitution ensured that standing armed forces would be difficult to construct
and that to do so would require legislative consent on a recurring basis; that military authority
would remain fragmented both vertically between the states and the national government, and
horizontally within the latter; and that decisions about war and the use of force would face
multiple veto points including both houses of Congress and the President. As I have shown
throughout the dissertation, this institutional arrangement survived the first century and a half of
! 362
the country’s history largely intact, remaining embedded in the very fabric of the American state
even as it evolved to meet new challenges in the early twentieth century.
The emergence and development of America’s state structure and decision-making
procedures during this period, however, must be attributed not only to domestic preferences, but
also the permissiveness of the international security environment. Separated from potential
threats by vast oceans, decision-makers had the luxury of designing the country’s institutions
around republican ideas and avoiding the construction of an even rudimentary national security
state. The reluctance to build a powerful military, modernize the War Department, and unbridle
the executive in the first four decades of the twentieth century—even after the United States
acquired the greatest latent source of power in the world and began to face increasing security
competition—shows not only the enduring strength of the country’s original institutional
arrangement, but also the continuing security provided by geographic isolation.
Following World War II, however, decision-makers began to rethink and transform this
arrangement in response to a radically changed international security environment. They
undertook extensive state-building activities designed to increase both the capacity and the
autonomy of the country’s warfare institutions, giving rise to what scholars later termed
America’s national security state. The dissertation has attempted to explain why and how these
state-building activities were undertaken at this time—and not earlier—and how such
institutional transformation was related to the need to project military force. To do so, I have
argued, requires a theory of the state as an institutional yet dynamic unit subject to the pressures
and stresses of life in the international system. The remainder of the dissertation summarizes the
key takeaways of this argument, suggests new potential avenues of research based on my
! 363
findings, and concludes by discussing the contemporary consequences of executive war-making
autonomy in the United States since September 11.

The State of War and the Creation of Warfare States
Three plus decades after the now well-worn effort to “bring the state back in” to the
social sciences, international relations theory has yet to fully incorporate the significance of the
statist and institutionalist turns in explaining state behavior. On the one hand, theories that
conceptualize the state as an arena for political competition among societal actors cannot explain
why some states are able to act independent of their societies. Conversely, those that
conceptualize the state as an autonomous and functional passive-military adaptive unit cannot
explain why some states are unable to act independent of domestic constraints. Neoclassical
realists have begun to show in recent years why this is the case. The state is neither an arena nor
a functional unit. Rather, the state is a complex set of institutions, which—depending on
different institutional arrangements—can either empower or constrain decision-makers from
acting autonomously. The fact that “domestic institutions matter” provides a simple but powerful
insight for explaining why state behavior might differ even when states face an equivalent level
of systemic pressure or share a similar regime type, or even across different issue areas within
the same state.
The dissertation begins with the premise that institutional differentiation provides an
important starting point for explaining state behavior as an outcome. But I attempt to move
beyond this point by suggesting we also investigate the origins of such differentiation in order to
account for the two way street that exists between domestic and international politics. Thus,
whereas most neoclassical realists are interested in how unit-level institutional variation projects
! 364
different behaviors upward to the system-level, I am interested instead in how variation in
systemic pressure pushes downward and encourages different types of domestic institutional
arrangements. Accordingly, I focus on the origins of particular institutional arrangements—
particularly those that enable and even favor force projection by providing executives with a
degree of war-making autonomy. I contend that if these types of arrangements are more prone to
war, then explaining why they exist in the first place can help answer one of the central questions
in international relations: why war?
The theoretical contribution of the dissertation is to provide a realist explanation of
institutional formation and transformation, which requires a partial theory of state that can at
least account for the development of national security institutions. I contribute to developing this
theory by first elaborating a new conception of the state and then elaborating a theoretical
framework for studying institutional change. I argue that states are best conceptualized in
institutional-functional terms. This is because they are simultaneously torn between the
institutional bases upon which state action depends and the functional demands of life in the
international political system. The institutional dimension of this conceptualization accounts for
the fact that states at their core are composed of a set of institutions (which may or may not
enable decision-makers to respond to systemic pressure), while the functional dimension
accounts for the fact that—given the challenges of international politics—states are often under
tremendous pressure to ensure those institutions enable decision-makers to act in a strategic
manner. In other words, states are not just institutional or functional units; they are both.
Building on this institutional-functional conception of the state, I then articulate a
processual theory of institutional change and state adaptation. To do so, I turn to the outside-in
logic of bellicist theories of state formation and Peter Gourevtich’s second image reversed
! 365
approach. Drawing on this logic, I construct a theoretical framework using a macro-micro-macro
model embedded with a series of mechanisms to diagram how state behavior at the system level
depends on state-building efforts to carve out greater institutional capacity and autonomy at the
unit level. The model provides a scaffold upon which to map out the causes, obstacles, and
processes of institutional change.
The core of the theory is as follows: When international security competition increases, it
creates systemic pressure on states and causes what I call “institutional stress” when existing
institutions do not enable the state to act. This institutional stress in turn leads policymakers to
undertake two broad sets of state-building activities to transform existing institutions and
improve the state’s ability to respond to greater systemic pressure: First, they attempt to extract
more resources from society in order to create greater military capacity. This includes raising
taxes, conscripting or hiring professional soldiers, increasing industrial production, and
developing new military technologies. Second, they attempt to carve out a greater degree of state
autonomy in order to better project military power when necessary. This includes streamlining
and centralizing national security institutions and decision-making procedures to better insulate
policymakers to do things like initiate the use of force. When systemic pressure is low or
moderate, we should expect indeterminate or incremental institutional change, as existing
institutions (and their related ideational foundations) are often resistant to outside-in generated
stress. When systemic pressure is severe, we should expect institutional change that is more
episodic in nature. It is under these latter conditions in particular that we should expect states to
be constitutively adaptive—meaning they institutionally adapt to malign international security
environments—and thus dynamic.
! 366
One of the general insights of the theory is to show how the international system often
produces and reproduces states in ways that perpetuate its core logic. Thus, if world politics
continues to resemble what John Locke called the “State of War”—a system defined by “force,
or a declared design of force upon the Person of another, where there is no common Superior on
Earth to appeal to for relief”—it is because this proverbial state of war continuously creates
warfare states.
1
In other words, when the international security environment dictates that states
be prepared to meet force with force, they must be designed or redesigned accordingly. While
this insight has been applied with great benefit to explaining historical processes of state
formation, I show that it is also applicable to explaining more contemporary processes state
transformation as well. This is true even of modern democratic states that have strong republican
institutional foundations including the United States.
In the empirical portion of the dissertation, I use the theory outlined above to explain the
causes and timing of the creation of the American national security state, focusing specifically on
the development of the institutions that underpin executive war-making autonomy. The theory
helps account for why the Framers of the Constitution were able to design the relatively national
security-light institutional arrangement they did originally, and why this arrangement proved so
durable for much of American history. It also explains the eventual transformation of this
arrangement in the postwar period. Systemic pressure—driven by technological changes that
threatened to render the Western Hemisphere’s geographic isolation null, coupled with the
emergence of a cold war with the Soviet Union that many observers feared would escalate into a
“total war” of unprecedented size and scope—created an extraordinary amount of institutional
stress and caused policymakers to conduct the most comprehensive review of America’s foreign
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C.B. Macpherson (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing,
1980), 15.
! 367
policy goals and national security requirements since the Founding Period. The most important
consequence of this process was that policymakers decided the country had to remain prepared
for war at all times and make force a more useable instrument. This ideational shift about the
expectation of future war contributed to a process of state-building that ultimately transformed
the country’s long-standing institutional arrangement, creating the modern American national
security state with a war-making executive at its helm.

Potential Avenues of Research
The dissertation provides a first step toward developing a realist theory of state and
institutional change. Several areas of interest in the manuscript, however, remain
underdeveloped, while others areas are altogether unexplored. The purpose of this penultimate
section is to identify some potential avenues of research that stem from the dissertation research
and may be worthy of further investigation. I first offer some suggestions about theory
development and then turn to some case-specific possibilities.
To begin with, though there are important reasons for conducting a longitudinal in-depth
study of the United States, there are also obvious limitations concerning generalizability based
on a single-case study. As I noted in the introduction, the overarching model provides what I
think is a universal framework for studying the relationship between international politics and
domestic institutional change. But the specific explanation offered for the American case likely
does not travel to other cases. In fact, the role in the model played by ideas and their
embeddedness in a country’s existing institutions ensures this is undoubtedly not the case.
Accordingly, while we should generally expect systemic pressure to encourage or reinforce
executive powers, it is possible in cases where such powers are already concentrated that the
! 368
reverse might occur. For example, whereas American policymakers responded to an increased
threat environment after World War II by shifting powers to a relatively weak foreign policy
executive and assuming it was too dangerous to interfere with executive authority in foreign
affairs, French policymakers responded in the opposite manner. Based on their own history with
executive power and a different set of existing institutions, they assumed it was too dangerous
NOT to interfere with executive authority in foreign affairs as a means of better responding to
the country’s security environment. Accordingly, they developed a different set of decision-
making procedures than the United States.
2
Teasing out the similarities and differences in
outcomes across these and other cases requires applying the model to more cases and conducting
comparative research. Such cross-case studies, I believe, would demonstrate the usefulness of the
general model, but also push research about institutional change in new directions. The ideal
would be to use the model as a general framework to develop more nuanced middle-range
theories about institutional change under different international and domestic conditions.
One theoretical concern that is present in the dissertation, but remains underdeveloped is
the need to develop a more sophisticated theory of state socialization in realism. Kenneth Waltz
is one of the few realists who at least has a thin conception of socialization. He explains the
operation of systemic pressure as follows: as security competition waxes and wanes, states are
“socialized” into adopting certain modes (i.e. survival–oriented) of behavior. Again, as explained
earlier, for Waltz this generally refers to the adoption of a combination of external and internal
strategies designed to balance against potential threats. These include forming temporary
alliances and emulating the military practices of leading states by adopting similar technologies
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2
I thank Norrin Ripsman for forcing me to think about this possibility and for pointing out this specific
example.
! 369
and strategies.
3
The dissertation’s findings suggest we may need to deepen our understanding of
realist socialization beyond this simple notion.
Socialization appears to have at least three dimensions. Waltz identifies the first, which is
the behavioral dimension of adapting a state’s alliances patterns, strategies, and practices when
faced with systemic pressure. As I show in the American case, however, internal balancing may
also depend on a second dimension of socialization, which is domestic institutional change. Such
institutional adaptation may be required to make the state better approximate the rational actor
assumption implicit in systemic theories of international politics. Explicit—though perhaps
understated—in the dissertation, however, is a third dimension of socialization, which is
ideational adaptation. This third dimension in some ways foregrounds the other two and can be
seen throughout the dissertation. In the American case there were at least two important
ideational shifts over time. The first was the transformation of America’s self-conception as a
republic with expectations of peace as the normal state of affairs into a great power with future
expectations of war. A related shift was from the idea of war undermining America’s domestic
institutions to potentially preserving them. Explaining how these ideas evolved, diffused, and
enabled institutional and behavioral change would help to flesh out a less elegant but ultimately
better theory of state socialization.
The dissertation also points to the fact that the question of democratic autonomy may
require greater attention. As I discussed earlier, my conception of autonomy relates to other
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
3
Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1979), 74–77, 127, 168.
John Mearsheimer takes a similar approach, but expands Waltz’s perspective on both external and
internal balancing. In terms of the former, he acknowledges that while sometimes states balance they also
pursue a variety of other strategies including buck-passing. In terms of the latter, he highlights the fact
that states not only imitate others; they also “innovate” by “developing new weapons, innovative military
doctrines, or clever strategies.” John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York:
W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), 166–167.
! 370
prominent ones but differs in an important way. Norrin Ripsman and others suggest the measure
of autonomy is defined by the ability of the executive to act even “when faced with public or
legislative opposition.”
4
Again, I agree this is perhaps the strongest test of autonomy, but argue it
unnecessarily limits our understanding of how decision-makers pursue their policy preferences,
particularly in democracies. When possible, decision-makers may prefer to circumvent tests of
their ability to act independently. In the area of national security, they do things like use
deception and resort to using instruments of force that limit or completely evade public attention.
Ripsman suggests this type of deception may be what democratic leaders engage in when they
lack autonomy.
5
This makes sense on face, but I would contend that at a deeper level the ability
to deceive is actually rooted in institutional autonomy. As I show in the dissertation, the
establishment of the Central Intelligence Organization (CIA) after World War II was in part an
effort to develop covert instruments so that the United States could wage war outside of normal
democratic channels. In some ways such instruments might be seen as providing the executive
with the ultimate form of autonomy—the ability to act not in the face of legislative or public
pressure, but without having to face such pressure at all. Expanding our understanding of
autonomy in this way might yield new and interesting perspectives on state behavior.
6

In terms of more case-specific areas of research that might be pursued, my findings
suggest two potentially fruitful avenues. First, the dissertation provides only a first step toward
explaining postwar American foreign policy behavior by looking at the original development of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
4
Norrin M. Ripsman, Peacemaking by Democracies: The Effect of State Autonomy on the Post-World
War Settlements (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 43.
5
Norrin M. Ripsman, “The Politics of Deception: Forging Peace Treaties in the Face of Domestic
Opposition,” International Journal 60, no. 1 (2004-2005): 189–216.
6
Patrick James and Glenn Mitchell, for example, show that when covert operations are included in
assessments of the democratic peace, some of the original findings with respect to the dyadic effect may
disappear. Patrick James and Glenn E. Mitchell, “Targets of Covert Pressure: The Hidden Victims of the
Democratic Peace,” International Interactions 21, no. 1 (1995): 85–107.
! 371
executive war-making autonomy within the national security state in the postwar period. A
necessary second step is to test empirically how that autonomy actually translated into policy
over the course of the Cold War and afterwards. It might be useful, for example, to revisit Eric
Nordlinger’s typology of autonomous actions to examine and classify decision-makers
propensity to use force under different conditions.
7

Second, since the state-building efforts following World War II there has been a
remarkable degree of stability in America’s institutional arrangement. The theory and case
suggest that institutional change in the country’s national security institutions has moved in a
linear direction toward larger standing forces, more centralized military authority, and greater
executive powers in foreign affairs. The question is why has institutional change tended to move
in such a non-reversible fashion in the postwar period? In other words, why, if institutional
change was so profound after World War II, did institutional stasis set in later? This is a
particularly interesting question in light of the desire—but inability—of Congress to eventually
rollback executive war-making autonomy after the Vietnam War. By 1973 a critical mass formed
in Congress in favor of reasserting congressional prerogative. But the War Powers Resolution of
that year in many ways helped cement executive autonomy, rather undermine it. Moreover,
Presidents, Congress, and the Courts have largely ignored the requirements of the resolution
since.
8
It is possible that executive war-making autonomy was required in the period from 1947
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
7
See Eric A. Nordlinger, On the Autonomy of the Democratic State (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1981), 27–31.
8
Gordon Silverstein explains that Congress attempted to reassert itself by gaining influence, but that this
influence largely came at the expense of more formal and meaningful authority. See Gordon Silverstein,
Imbalance of Power: Constitutional Interpretation and the Making of American Foreign Policy (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 123–138. See also John Hart Ely, War and Responsibility:
Constitutional Lessons of Vietnam and Its Aftermath (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 48–
52.
! 372
to 1973 at the height of the Cold War, but then later was less necessary. If this is the case, why
did it persist nonetheless? As the next section explains, this question remains pertinent today.

September 11 and the Question of Institutional Autonomy Today
As the years since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 have passed, the question
of executive war-making autonomy has once again garnered considerable attention. Immediately
following September 11, Americans and their representatives in Congress rallied around the
President in support of an aggressive overseas campaign to combat international terrorism. The
attacks provided a rare moment in American history when the various sources of executive
autonomy—personal, situational, and institutional—combined together to grant the Presidency
nearly unquestioned war-making powers. President Bush’s approval rating soared to 91%
overnight; 86% of the nation supported going to war against any groups or nations associated
with the attacks (93% supported at least some type of military action); and Congress quickly
passed a sweeping joint resolution authorizing the President to use of force against any state,
organization, or individual he determined “planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the attacks
(or harbored those who did), and to prevent any future attacks by such actors.
9
One year later,
Congress passed more specific authorization for the use of force against Iraq.
10

Even though the public and Congress granted Presidents tremendous leeway to use force
against those who attacked or supported the terrorist attacks against the United States, executive
officials since September 11 have relied more substantially on the institutional sources of war-
making powers—precisely the sources of autonomy that I show were carved out in the years
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
9
ABC News/Washington Post Poll, September 13, 2001, N=609 adults nationwide; Authorization for Use
of Military Force, Public Law 107-40, September 18, 2001.
10
Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution, Public Law 107-243, October 14,
2002.
! 373
after World War II. America’s state structure—most importantly the large, extensive, and
centralized set of national security institutions of the American state—has provided the substrate
of such powers. The standing armed forces, alternative instruments of warfare such as the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and special operations forces (SOF), and centralized
organizations such as the National Security Council (NSC) and Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) have
provided the institutional resources necessary for force projection.
Decision-making procedures, meanwhile, have ensured the executive has almost
exclusively determined the use of military force. As Congress debated and passed the sweeping
Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) in the days after September 11, the Justice
Department was sure to safeguard the President’s independence to use force by reaffirming the
post-World War II case for both de facto and de jure executive war-making powers. In one of the
most important documents of the post-September 11 period, Deputy Assistant Attorney General
John Yoo reiterated the right for the executive to use military force abroad with or without
congressional authorization.
11
Yoo described the President’s authority as “inherent,” meaning it
need not be derived from another body, i.e. Congress, and “plenary,” meaning it is unrestricted in
scope and scale.
12
Thus, at the same time that the administration welcomed Congress’s two
authorizations as signs of support for executive war-making authority, it ultimately considered
such legislation incidental to the President’s extant powers, which were conceived of as being
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
11
John Yoo, “The President’s Constitutional Authority to Conduct Military Operations against Terrorists
and Nations Supporting Them, September 25, 2001,” in The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib,
ed. Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 4–24.
12
Reaffirming the postwar argument in favor of executive power, Yoo claimed it derived abstractly from
the nation’s sovereignty (citing Curtiss-Wright) and more concretely from the Constitution’s Commander
in Chief clause. Ibid., 5–10.
! 374
even broader than what the resolutions stated.
13
The AUMF in 2002, for example, stated the
President could only use force against those directly or indirectly associated with 9/11, whereas
Yoo explained the President had the prerogative to “preempt or respond to terrorist threats from
new quarters” as well. This more wide-ranging interpretation has become more relevant in the
years since. In what amounted to one of the clearest statements on executive war-making
autonomy in American history, the memo concluded that no legislation could “place any limits
on the president’s determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be
used in response, or the method, timing, and nature of the response.”
14

America’s large and powerful national security institutions, along with decision-making
procedures that favor executive initiative, have provided the American state with a considerable
degree of war-making autonomy and enabled decision-makers to prosecute a worldwide military
campaign against international terrorists and related state sponsors of terrorism. In the nearly
decade and a half since the September 11 attacks, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
13
Ibid., 23; In the President’s signing statement he acknowledged Congress for recognizing “the authority
of the President under the Constitution to take action to deter and prevent acts of terrorism against the
United States.” Nonetheless, he was clear to state that in signing the resolution he maintained “the
longstanding position of the executive branch regarding the President’s constitutional authority to use
force, including the Armed Forces of the United States and regarding the constitutionality of the War
Powers Resolution.” George W. Bush, “Statement on Signing the Authorization for Use of Military
Force, September 18, 2001,” in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George W. Bush,
2001, Book II, Presidential Documents - June 30 to December 31, 2001 (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 2003), 1125. Before similar authorization was given for use of force against Iraq,
administration officials considered circumventing the authorization process altogether. Official explained
at the time: “We don’t want to be in the legal position of asking Congress to authorize the use of force
when the president already has that full authority…We don’t want, in getting a resolution, to have
conceded that one was constitutionally necessary.” In the end the President did get congressional
authorization, but in a similar signing statement made clear it was not the source of his war-making
powers and therefore not required. Mike Allen and Juliet Eilperin, “Bush Aides Say Iraq War Needs No
Hill Vote,” Washington Post, August 26, 2002; George W. Bush, “Statement on Signing the
Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002, October 16, 2002,” in Public
Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George W. Bush, 2002, Book II, Presidential Documents -
July 1 to December 31 2002 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2005), 1814–15.
14
Yoo, “The President’s Constitutional Authority to Conduct Military Operations against Terrorists and
Nations Supporting Them, September 25, 2001,” 24.
! 375
Obama have waged two major wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; waged more discreet wars in
Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and Syria; conducted smaller interventions in Liberia and Libya;
supported other operations in places like Mali and Niger; and used the CIA and SOF to support
military operations by other countries and conduct an unknown number of covert operations
across the globe.
15
Many of these policies were supported by the public and Congress, but others
were also opposed or not publicly known. The autonomy derived from the American state’s
institutional arrangement, therefore, has proved important because it has enabled the executive to
act quickly, decisively, and flexibly even when Presidential approval fell and when public and
congressional opinion waivered. The ability of President Obama to continue using force across
the Middle East today, even in the face of widespread American aversion to becoming involved
in another war in the region, provides a case in point. This degree of autonomy has not ensured
America’s use of force has always been wise; only that the country’s armed forces have been
wielded more flexibly and decisively than in its absence.
As the extent of the President’s vast war-making powers became increasingly apparent in
the years after the September 11 attacks, congressmen, journalists, scholars, and ordinary
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
15
Executive autonomy in discreet uses of force and covert operations is so extensive that it is difficult to
even track such activities. The scope and nature of these activities can at least be observed indirectly
through media reporting. See Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe, “U.S. ‘Secret War’ Expands Globally as
Special Operations Forces Take Larger Role,” Washington Post, June 4, 2010; David Rhode, “The Drone
Wars,” Reuters Magazine, January 26, 2012, http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/26/us-david-rohde-
drone-wars-idUSTRE80P11I20120126; See also the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s research on
“Covert Drone War” at http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/drones/Jo Becker and
Scott Shane, “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will,” New York Times, May 29,
2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?_r=0;
Several recent books have attempted to track some these activities. See David E. Sanger, Confront and
Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power (New York: Random House,
2012); Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife: The CIA, A Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth
(New York: Penguin, 2013); Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (New York: Nation
Books, 2013).
! 376
American citizens began to question whether there were any limits to such powers.
16
Some
considered executive power a problem attributable to the Bush administration and in the 2008
Presidential election Obama was elected having made a pledge to reverse what he considered the
excessive autonomy of his predecessor.
17
As President, however, this task has proven
considerably more difficult than he perhaps anticipated. Instead, of reversing his predecessor’s
practices, his administration has matched and in certain instances exceeded the practices of the
Bush years.
18
Since September 11, it is safe to say that with respect to national security the
American executive has operated in a political and legal netherworld “without scrutiny, without
the obligation to bargain with parties and adverse interests,” according to Robert Pallito and
William Weaver.
19
In other words, the executive has acted autonomously.
As I have explained in the dissertation, the origins and logic of this executive war-making
autonomy lie in the nature of the international system itself and can be traced back to the break
that occurred in the post-World War II period. In many ways, the attacks of September 11, as
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
16
There is a large literature on this subject. See for example Peter Irons, War Powers: How the Imperial
Presidency Hijacked the Constitution (New York: Metropolitan, 2005); Andrew Rudalevige, The New
Imperial Presidency: Renewing Presidential Power After Watergate (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2005); Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., War and the American Presidency (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 2005); Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, Presidential Power: Unchecked &
Unbalanced (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007); Robert M. Pallitto and William G. Weaver,
Presidential Secrecy and the Law (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Charlie
Savage, Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy
(New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2007); Michael J. Glennon, National Security and Double
Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
17
At a town hall meeting in 2008 Obama stated: “I taught constitutional law for ten years. I take the
Constitution very seriously. The biggest problems that were facing right now have to do with George
Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all,
and that’s what I intend to reverse when I’m President of the United States of America.” Barack Obama,
Town Hall at Lancaster, PA, March 31, 2008. For his pre-Presidential views on executive war-making
powers see Charlie Savage, “Barack Obama’s Q&A,” The Boston Globe, December 20, 2007.
18
Bruce Ackerman, “Obama’s Betrayal of the Constitution,” New York Times, September 11, 2014; Jack
Goldsmith, “Obama’s Breathtaking Expansion of a President’s Power To Make War,” Time, September
11, 2014; Glennon, National Security and Double Government, 1–3.
19
Pallitto and Weaver, Presidential Secrecy and the Law, 8.
! 377
well as other attacks since, have reinforced and amplified American policymakers’ fears about
the reach of modern warfare technologies and the blurring of war and peace that first occurred
during the Cold War. Today that same suspended state of national existence—a permanent state
of semi-war—continues to characterize policymakers’ beliefs about America’s international
security environment in a new era where international terrorism is the defining feature. Given the
country’s present circumstances, Yoo argues, “the demands of the international system promote
vesting the management of foreign affairs in a unitary, rational actor. The rational actor can
identify threats, develop responses, evaluate costs and benefits, and seek to achieve national
strategic goals through value-maximizing policies.”
20
In the American system, the President
comes closest to resembling that rational actor and that fact is unlikely to change. Thus, if
President Obama has found it difficult to rollback executive war-making powers—as Congress
did during the Cold War—it is because present circumstances advise against doing so even if his
own understanding of America’s founding ideas and history tell him otherwise.
At the height of the Cold War in 1959, the eminent legal scholar Louis Henkin wrote one
of the most evocative passages penned about the changed nature of the world following World
War II and its implications for executive foreign affairs powers. He explained:
Many will have deep sympathy for those who dream of old days thought good, or better;
who yearn for decentralization even in foreign affairs and matters of international
concern, for limitations on federal power, for increase in the importance of the states;
who thrill to a wild, poignant romantic wish to turn back all the clocks, to unlearn the
learnings, until the atom is unsplit, weapons unforged, oceans unnarrowed, the Civil War
unfought. The wish remains idle, and the effort to diminish power in this area for fear that
it may not be used wisely is quixotic, if not suicidal. It is not the moment to attempt it
when all ability, flexibility, wisdom are needed for cooperation for survival by a
frightened race, on a diminishing earth, reaching for the moon.
21

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
20
John Yoo, The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2008), 20.
21
Louis Henkin, “The Treaty Makers and the Law Makers: The Law of the Land and Foreign Relations,”
University of Pennsylvania Law Review 107, no. 7 (1959): 936.
! 378
The context and the conflict have changed, but the tone of the passage still rings true. America’s
strategic environment changed in some ways permanently in the decades before Henkin penned
his words. Ever since, it has indeed been an impossible dream “to turn back all the clocks.” The
republican ideas that had long informed America’s institutions remained alive—though under
tremendous pressure—at the time, as they are today. The challenge for policymakers both then
and now has been to adapt America’s institutions without sacrificing altogether the values that
give them meaning in the first place.

! 379
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Executive autonomy is a critical factor for explaining foreign policy behavior because states with less constrained executives are often able to act more quickly, decisively, and flexibly. Yet, while IR scholars have studied the role autonomy plays in foreign policy behavior, less attention has been paid to its origins. What are the institutional sources of autonomy and why and when are such institutions likely to crystallize? The dissertation constructs a theoretical framework to study these questions using a macro‐micro‐macro model embedded with a series of mechanisms. Based on a second‐image reversed approach and drawing on bellicist theories of state formation, the dissertation then develops a theory of the state as a dynamic set of institutions that decision‐makers attempt to redesign when interstate security competition increases. In democracies, this entails building and streamlining national security decision‐making organizations and processes, and centralizing decision-making authority in the executive. The dissertation uses this theory to explain the development of executive war‐making autonomy in the United States. Using a longitudinal research design, it focuses on comparative case studies of three temporal phases—1787‐1890, 1890‐1941, and 1941‐1960—to observe the relationship between security competition, institutional stress, and state‐building. The research shows that the three periods vary in terms of the systemic pressure faced by the United States and that this variation in turn helps explain three distinct institutional logics: institutional formation in the first period, institutional resistance in the second, and institutional adaptation in the third. The dissertation shows theoretically how international security competition produces and reproduces states that are prone to war. Empirically, it shows the importance of America’s original institutional arrangement for national security, but also the profound transformation that arrangement underwent in the postwar period and the continuing relevance of that transformation today.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Hamilton, Eric J. (author)

Core Title International politics and domestic institutional change: the rise of executive war-making autonomy in the United States

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Politics and International Relations

Publication Date 07/24/2015

Defense Date 06/11/2015

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag domestic institutions,executive autonomy,international politics,OAI-PMH Harvest,U.S foreign policy

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor James, Patrick (committee chair), Rathbun, Brian (committee chair), Ripsman, Norrin (committee member)

Creator Email ehamilton57@yahoo.com,ejhamilt@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-606793

Unique identifier UC11301504

Identifier etd-HamiltonEr-3689.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-606793 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-HamiltonEr-3689.pdf

Dmrecord 606793

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Hamilton, Eric J.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA