ABSTRACT On 31 August 1949, the National Security Council prepared an internal draft that would later inform the USs' foreign policy towards Cold War Asia. About a decade later, after the 1950–53 Korean War and the establishment of the Korean Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), the popular US Army-produced documentary TV series The Big Picture released an episode entitled ‘Korea and You.’ It starred a fictionalised American soldier stationed near the Korean DMZ. My essay reads these two texts together. In doing so, I show how NSC’s ‘Asia’ draft, which informed official US foreign policy towards Cold War Asia for decades to come, proposed a self-reflexive, transactional, and sentimental form of militarisation that would hopefully move decolonised Asia to align with the US. As I will historicise, this liberal form of militarisation found a material and discursive home just a few years later in the ‘neutral’ space of the DMZ. I call this union of the NSC’s vision of a multilateral militarisation and the DMZ’s multinational neutrality, ‘de/militarisation.’ I then use ‘de/militarisation’ as my transnational analytic to close-read the racialized, gendered, and sexualized meanings produced by ‘Korea and You.’ In doing so, I argue that the perception of the US as a violent, racist, and isolated empire – alert to its enemies, yet alone in the world – was partly transformed through a shared borderland and an imperfect border guard whose sentimentalized rehabilitation by his South Korean hosts created the appearance of an alert and inclusive guardian of Cold War Asia.