Since inauguration day, the Trump White House has routinely evoked a deep-rooted Cold War framework for expressing America’s relationship with war. This framing sits at odds with the president’s inaugural address in which Mr. Trump, conjuring Richard Nixon, argued that his “proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.”

From January 2025 on, the administration has instead engaged in a steady drumbeat of aggressive militaristic taunting, threatening real and perceived enemies, foreign and domestic alike. From ordering 1,500 active-duty troops to assist with border patrolling and deportation missions, to the secretary of defense censuring the nation’s armed forces for not focusing enough on “lethality,” the Trump administration is reviving a decades-long trend within an increasingly militarized U.S. foreign policy — a faith in and fear of war and its consequences.

Since the end of World War II, Americans crafted and then embraced a rather disjointed relationship with war, exhilarated by its possibilities to transform the world and make them safe, while also fearing wars they could not prevent or, perhaps worse, win. This tension between faith and fear has haunted Americans and led to a persistent failure to align ends and means in carrying out US foreign relations.

Of course, ideals, interests, and power matter when it comes to foreign policy. Cold War commentators insisted that international politics was a “struggle for power.” True, some critics worried about the consequences of using “raw power” to achieve global dominance while overestimating threats. They fretted that wielding power might actually produce foreign policy crises rather than solve them.

But in the decades following the Second World War, many Americans feared that if the United States “lost” the burgeoning Cold War, their nation might not even survive. It was a tense time. World War II gave Americans the world…and the faith necessary to rule it. But seemingly new evils emerged that gave pause to policymakers and the general public alike.

Here were inklings of a relationship between faith and fear that would inform U.S. foreign policy ever since. I talk about this in my new book, "Faith and Fear: America's Relationship with War since 1945." A secular faith in war to solve any foreign policy problem, coupled with fears of America’s enemies bringing destruction to the nation’s shores, indelibly shaped policy choices when it came to containing communism around the globe.

In short, Americans largely held faith that war would always be utilitarian, a “rational means” for attaining their desired ends.

In such a cognitive framing, war might bring chaos in the dangerous world of which realists warned, but it also lured with the promise of influence, even dominance, the chance to reshape or control whole swaths of the globe. (...)

by Michael Holmes | Aug 1, 2025 | 8 Comments

Paul Chamberlin’s masterful new book, Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II, is a vitally important work that fundamentally reframes our understanding of the twentieth century’s most devastating conflict. It meticulously dismantles the comfortable and enduring narrative of a simple “good versus evil” struggle, replacing it with a more complex and unsettling truth: World War II was, at its core, a catastrophic clash between rival, racist, and relentlessly brutal empires. While Chamberlin, an Associate Professor of History at Columbia University, makes it unequivocally clear that the Axis powers were an abominable evil and their defeat a necessary cause for celebration, his book brilliantly demonstrates that the Allies were far more similar to their enemies in their motivations, strategies, and criminality than standard histories admit. This review will explore the book’s monumental thesis: that World War II is best understood not as an ideological crusade for democracy, but as the bloody, pivotal turning point in the global history of empire—a conflict where all major powers fought to build or preserve their own imperial dominance.

Chamberlin’s argument is a persuasive indictment of the imperial hubris that defined the era. With the precision of a scholar and the narrative grip of a master storyteller, he situates the conflict within a much longer story of the rise and fall of world empires, a context that traditional accounts have often downplayed. He challenges the conventional wisdom by arguing that the war’s immense moral clarity—the righteous victory over fascism—has paradoxically stifled historical debate and obscured the uncomfortable truths about its origins and conduct. Scorched Earth is not a polemic, but a forensic audit of how the imperial ambitions of all belligerents, cloaked in self-serving ideologies, plunged the world into an abyss of violence and paved the way for a new, American-led global order. (...)