Crimefighting and Warmaking since the Vietnam War

Abstract

In the growing domestic debate about police brutality and mass incarceration in the United States, scholars of U.S. foreign relations hear echoes of the antiwar movement, from the Vietnam War to current preoccupations over Washington’s “forever wars.” This has been a welcome development, particularly as historians develop revisions of the well-worn thesis regarding U.S. imperial wars coming home to produce cycles of crime and punishment from the late 1960s onward. Pushing back on this argument, some of the more innovative literature contextualizes punitive blowback within longer transnational histories of U.S.-led global policing: the pursuit of runaway enslaved people in Indian Country, the hounding of overseas fugitives at the turn of the century, the interwar training of Caribbean national guards, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s World War II activities in Latin America, and the late 1950s launch of overseas police training programs through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Office of Public Safety.1 According to much of the new work, the United States’ punitive approach to crime is well-rooted in the country’s political culture, and its exponential growth after the Vietnam War represented less of a fall from grace than a return to form. Of the recent contributions to historical literature connecting U.S. approaches to warfare and to domestic criminal justice, including counterterrorism and immigration enforcement up to the present day, Michael Sherry’s wide-ranging book comes closest to the traditional thesis of foreign wars coming home.