A Hidden-Hand Garrison State?

Abstract

Book reviewed in this article: Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America's Antistatism and its Cold War Grand Strategy Aaron Friedberg's ambitious book will help readers understand reactions to the September 11, 2001, attacks, including the bitter debates in Congress over whether to federalize airport security and perhaps much else that transpired after this review was written in November 2001. Since his book draws (fairly) on and, in title, echoes my work,1 a review of it is also an occasion for me to reflect on the issues involved. And it is a welcome occasion, because Friedberg draws impressively on scholarship from history, political science, international relations, and science and technology, supplemented by primary sources (albeit mostly ones scholars have previously tapped), and because he advances clear, important, and well-buttressed arguments. “Antistatist influences” powerfully shaped and constrained America's Cold War institutions and strategies of national security, he argues, and even extreme national emergency only partially offset them. Moreover, those influences probably “contributed to the Cold War's eventual outcome. By preventing some of the worst, most stifling excesses of statism, these countervailing tendencies made it easer for the United States to preserve its economic vitality and technological dynamism, to maintain domestic political support for a protracted strategic competition and to stay the course in that competition better than its supremely statist rival” (p. 4). The United States waged and won the Cold War without becoming more of the “garrison state” that presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower persistently and publicly dreaded, and in Ike's case resisted with considerable success. Under Lyndon Johnson, however, “American statism was finally, if only briefly, unbound,” with “results … deeply damaging to the nation's foreign policy, economic performance, and social cohesion” (pp. 350–51).