Introduction:

From the trenches of the Western Front to the jungles of Vietnam and the geopolitical standoff of the Cold War, the 20th century transformed the United States through a succession of conflicts whose effects reshaped nearly every dimension of American life. Military history did not merely accompany the development of modern America: it drove it. Charles Tilly’s well-known dictum—“war made the state and the state made war”—captures the essence of the American experience: the United States amassed unprecedented administrative, fiscal, and coercive capacities through wartime mobilization, each crisis expanding federal authority and leaving behind institutional residues that redefined the relationship between citizens and their government. Yet this immense growth of state power occurred within a political culture that continued to champion liberty, limited government, and a distrust of centralized authority. One of the central paradoxes of 20th century U.S. history is that wars waged in the name of defending freedom simultaneously entrenched a permanent national-security bureaucracy, strengthened the executive branch, and transformed the meaning of citizenship, all to the detriment of the espoused cause.

Traditional diplomatic and military historians have often presented these developments as the necessary burdens of global leadership. Allan Millett and Peter Maslowski, for instance, interpret warfare as a crucible that forged national unity and affirmed American democratic purpose. Consensus historians such as Richard Hofstadter and Henry Steele Commager similarly framed American state expansion as the benign outgrowth of a liberal political tradition responding to external threats. Strategic thinkers like George Kennan and John Lewis Gaddis cast the Cold War in particular as an unavoidable contest between rival belief systems, with American actions framed as largely defensive and reactive. Within this interpretive orbit, military conflict appears as a reluctant but essential obligation of a nation thrust into world leadership.

Revisionist historians, however, rejected this narrative. Influenced by the Vietnam War and earlier critiques of American empire, scholars such as William Appleman Williams, Gabriel Kolko, and Lloyd Gardner argued that U.S. foreign policy reflected internal imperatives—corporate capitalism, ideological universalism, elite political consensus—rather than external necessity. Libertarian and public-choice scholars such as Murray Rothbard and Robert Higgs deepened this critique by emphasizing the structural incentives of crisis. Higgs’s “ratchet effect” demonstrates how wars permanently expand federal authority, as emergency powers, bureaucratic agencies, and fiscal mechanisms persist long after peace returns. In this telling, modern American foreign policy is not chiefly a response to foreign dangers but a mechanism of state-building.

Social, cultural, and transnational historians added further complexity by showing how wars reshaped American identity, social hierarchy, and civic life. Lizabeth Cohen, Mary Dudziak, and Michael Sherry demonstrate that mobilization for global conflict required ideological narratives of unity and freedom that, paradoxically, spotlighted the inequalities of race, gender, and class at home. These tensions accelerated civil-rights activism, reshaped immigration policy, transformed gender norms, and redefined what counted as full citizenship in a democratic society. In this sense, the domestic and international spheres were never separate: foreign policy pressures remade internal governance, while domestic struggles over race, rights, and identity heavily influenced America’s conduct abroad.

This essay argues that across World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War, military conflict was the foundational engine of 20th century American state formation, producing the imperial presidency, the national-security state, and a durable ideology of American global leadership. The United States did not simply react to external dangers; its political institutions, economic structures, and ideological commitments evolved through the interaction of foreign and domestic pressures. Wars expanded federal authority; normalized executive unilateralism; linked citizenship to military service; and transformed national identity through narratives of sacrifice, exceptionalism, and global mission. By synthesizing traditional, revisionist, post-revisionist, and cultural approaches—and grounding the analysis in the Tilly–Rothbard–Higgs framework—this essay contends that the United States became a paradigmatic case of war-driven state-building, and that the domestic consequences of militarized global engagement continue to define the political order of the twenty-first century.

World War I and the Birth of the Modern American State:

World War I stands as the decisive rupture between the constitutional republic of the 19th century and the national-security state of the 20th. If the Spanish-American War announced America’s imperial ambitions, it was the First World War that institutionalized the federal government’s capacity for mass mobilization, surveillance, economic planning, ideological management, and coercive administration. The conflict inaugurated what Robert Higgs would later describe as a permanent “ratchet effect,” in which temporary wartime measures established precedents, agencies, and expectations that endured long after the armistice. Through conscription, the expansion of federal bureaucracy, the mobilization of industry and labor, and the suppression of dissent, the Wilson administration transformed both the domestic political order and the ideological foundations of American foreign policy. In doing so, it supplied the templates—organizational, constitutional, and ideological—for every subsequent conflict of the twentieth century.

Traditional diplomatic historians emphasized the idealism of U.S. entry into the war. Thomas Bailey and Samuel Flagg Bemis viewed American participation as the reluctant fulfillment of a moral obligation to defend democracy against autocracy. This interpretation treated the war as a largely external crisis—an unfortunate but necessary intervention that strengthened America’s international role and laid the groundwork for Wilson’s liberal internationalism. Yet this narrative, centered on high diplomacy and Wilsonian rhetoric, largely ignored the sweeping domestic transformations that accompanied the conflict.

Revisionist historians offered a starkly different account. Charles Beard, Harry Elmer Barnes, and later William Appleman Williams argued that the war reflected deeper structural imperatives rooted in the domestic political economy. As Williams suggested, the United States’ expanding commercial interests and commitment to Open Door liberalism made neutrality untenable in a world of competing empires. The war thus became the first major instance in which American foreign policy was justified as a defense of global economic order, a pattern that would recur throughout the century. Revisionists further emphasized that the war enabled extraordinary expansions of federal authority—drafting millions into military service, reorganizing industrial production, and subordinating labor under the National War Labor Board. These developments foreshadowed the rise of the modern administrative state.

Libertarian and public-choice scholars, especially Murray Rothbard and Robert Higgs, stressed the coercive transformation of American governance during the war. Higgs identified World War I as the first great “crisis opportunity” in which the federal government vastly expanded its fiscal and regulatory capacity through new agencies, taxation policies, and emergency powers. The Espionage and Sedition Acts, the imprisonment of dissenters such as Eugene Debs, and the pervasive propaganda of the Committee on Public Information revealed the extent to which wartime mobilization required ideological conformity enforced by the state. Rothbard described the Wilson administration as overseeing “one of the most draconian assaults on civil liberties in American history,” a development that permanently altered the constitutional landscape. These insights place World War I at the foundation of America’s modern security bureaucracy.

Post-revisionist historians have sought to balance these perspectives by examining the complex interplay of ideology, geopolitics, and domestic structure. Recent scholarship has emphasized how Wilsonian internationalism was both sincerely held and strategically useful—reflecting a mixture of moral vision and national interest. Yet even within this synthesis, the war appears as a moment in which global ambition and domestic mobilization became mutually reinforcing, whatever any other intentions. The United States emerged from the conflict not only as a creditor nation and budding world power but also as a polity accustomed to large-scale federal intervention.

More recent cultural and social historians have revealed how World War I reshaped American identity, citizenship, and the relationship between the state and society. Christopher Capozzola’s work on “coercive voluntarism” demonstrates how wartime mobilization blurred the lines between state direction and civic pressure, creating a culture in which loyalty became a public performance and dissent carried severe social penalties. Nancy Bristow and Jennifer Keene further highlight how the war redefined gender roles, race relations, and expectations of civic participation. African American participation in the war, for example, intensified demands for full citizenship while simultaneously provoking white backlash during the Red Summer of 1919. In these accounts, the war becomes a crucible for the contested meanings of American democracy.

Taken together, the historiography of World War I reveals a consistent pattern: the conflict fundamentally transformed the American state and permanently altered the trajectory of U.S. foreign policy. Whether portrayed as a reluctant intervention, a product of economic imperatives, a strategic calculation, or a cultural rupture, historians across multiple schools agree that the war introduced a new relationship between citizens and the federal government—one defined by conscription, surveillance, economic planning, ideological management, and executive authority. It was the moment when the United States first mobilized on a total scale and discovered the administrative, fiscal, and coercive capacities it would repeatedly employ throughout the 20th century. In this sense, World War I was not simply the first major conflict of the century: it was the foundational moment in the rise of the American national-security state.

The Great Depression, New Deal, and World War II—Crisis, Mobilization, and the Consolidation of the National-Security State:

The intertwined crises of the Great Depression and the Second World War formed the central crucible in which the modern American state took shape. Although the New Deal is often narrated as a domestic policy revolution and World War II as a foreign policy and military event, the two were profoundly interdependent. The administrative capacities built during the 1930s made total war possible, while wartime mobilization transformed the provisional New Deal state into a permanent national-security apparatus. In this sense, the 1930s and 1940s constitute a single arc of state formation—one that fundamentally altered the relationship between federal power, the economy, the citizen, and America’s role in the world.

Traditional historians such as William Leuchtenburg long depicted the New Deal as a transformative moment that rescued American capitalism, restored faith in democracy, and inaugurated a more humane social order. Alan Brinkley, in a more nuanced assessment, emphasized the ideological diversity and contingency of the New Deal but still portrayed it as an unprecedented federal response to economic collapse and social dislocation. These accounts, though attentive to politics and policy, tended to treat the Depression and the war as distinct episodes: one domestic, the other international; one a crisis of capitalism, the other a geopolitical struggle against fascism.

Revisionist and political-economy scholars, however, have stressed the structural continuities between the New Deal and wartime mobilization. Gabriel Kolko portrayed the New Deal not as a challenge to corporate power but as a means of rationalizing and stabilizing it, forging new alliances between business and the federal government that would mature during the war. Ellis Hawley’s classic work on the National Recovery Administration similarly showed how the New Deal’s regulatory experiments laid the administrative groundwork for the War Production Board and the Office of Price Administration. In this perspective, the New Deal created the procedural, bureaucratic, and ideological tools necessary for centralized mobilization during World War II. The war did not break with the New Deal—it consummated it.

Robert Higgs’s state-capacity framework places this period at the very heart of the “Leviathan” story. According to Higgs, the Depression and the war together produced the greatest peacetime–wartime ratchet in American history. The proliferation of federal agencies, unprecedented deficit spending, wartime taxation, conscription, and planning mechanisms permanently reconfigured fiscal and political expectations. By 1945 the federal government’s share of GDP and administrative capacity dwarfed its 1930 levels. Even after demobilization, the institutional architecture—federal economic management, executive agencies, and emergency powers—remained in place, prepared for, and indeed ready to sustain itself, for rapid reactivation during the Cold War.

World War II further accelerated these transformations, marking the full maturation of the administrative state into a national-security state. Traditional military historians, such as Allan Millett and Peter Maslowski, described the war as a triumph of American industrial strength and democratic unity. Yet this achievement required astounding levels of centralization. The federal government controlled prices, wages, and production; allocated raw materials; regulated labor relations; and deployed propaganda through the Office of War Information to mold public opinion. The boundary between civilian and military planning virtually disappeared. This was war as a total social project, mobilizing not only soldiers but entire communities, industries, and demographic groups.

Social and cultural historians have illuminated the profound changes in American identity and citizenship set in motion by these mobilizations. Lizabeth Cohen famously argued that wartime planning and postwar consumption combined to create a “Consumers’ Republic,” in which mass purchasing power, rather than civic republican virtue, became the cornerstone of democratic participation. The war’s labor demands facilitated the Great Migration’s second wave, transformed expectations of women’s work, and reshaped the political geography of cities and suburbs. Yet these developments also intensified racial and gender contradictions, reinforcing segregation even as African Americans and women contributed indispensably to the war effort. Ira Katznelson has shown how wartime social policies—especially the GI Bill—were implemented through local structures that systematically advantaged white Americans, an imperative of the Democratic coalition, deepening racial inequality even as national rhetoric proclaimed universal freedom.

The ideological dimension of the war, most forcefully articulated through Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms and later enshrined in the Atlantic Charter, provided the moral scaffolding for America’s postwar global role. David Kennedy has argued that World War II, far more than the New Deal, ended the Depression, unified the nation, and forged the political conditions for Cold War liberalism. The war established the United States as the world’s preeminent industrial power, creditor nation, and military superpower. But equally important, it produced an American citizenry accustomed to centralized authority, bureaucratic oversight, and the moral language of global mission.

Revisionist foreign policy scholars, including Williams and Kolko, contend that the United States emerged from World War II not merely victorious but ideologically and institutionally committed to global hegemony. American policymakers interpreted the lessons of the 1930s—economic nationalism, autarky, and weak international institutions—as failures that only U.S.-led global integration could remedy. The result was the creation of the Bretton Woods system, the United Nations, and a vast overseas military presence. These developments were not determined solely by postwar circumstances; they grew organically out of the administrative and ideological frameworks established during the Depression and deepened during the war.

Taken together, the historiography shows that the Depression and World War II inaugurated the central dynamic of 20th century American state formation: crisis-led expansion, militarization of administrative capacity, consolidation of executive power, and the normalization of federal intervention into economic and social life. The war did not merely end the Depression—it transformed the New Deal state into the national-security state. It established the fiscal, bureaucratic, and ideological foundations upon which the Cold War system would be built, including the rise of the imperial presidency, the entrenchment of global commitments, and the redefinition of citizenship along militarized and consumerist lines. In this sense, the Depression and World War II were not separate chapters but a single watershed in which internal and external pressures fused, forging the modern American state and setting the trajectory for the remainder of the twentieth century.

Korea and the Institutionalization of the National-Security State—The Cold War, Global Commitments, and the Making of the New American Right:

If the Depression and World War II created the administrative and ideological foundations of the modern American state, the early Cold War—especially the Korean War and the adoption of NSC-68—completed its institutionalization. In this period the United States moved from episodic wartime mobilization to permanent global military commitments; from emergency administrative capacities to a standing national-security bureaucracy; and from an older conservative skepticism of centralized power to a newly forged militarized conservatism that embraced global intervention. Korea did not merely extend World War II: it transformed the wartime state into the Cold War state, embedding executive dominance, worldwide basing, intelligence institutions, and open-ended ideological conflict into the constitutional and political fabric of the nation.

NSC-68, drafted in 1950 before Korea but implemented because of it, stands as the blueprint for this transformation. Historians such as John Lewis Gaddis and Melvyn Leffler describe the document as a decisive shift from ad hoc postwar policy to a “doctrine of global containment,” one that called for massive peacetime armament, worldwide commitments, and a tripling of defense spending. Though framed in the moral language of resisting totalitarianism, NSC-68 also reflected new institutional imperatives: a Pentagon and intelligence community capable of shaping policy; an executive branch whose authority had expanded dramatically during the Depression and World War II; and an American public acclimated to centralized planning and ideological mobilization. The Korean War provided the political justification for implementing NSC-68’s recommendations, immediately increasing defense expenditures, expanding U.S. troop deployments abroad, and inaugurating the system of global bases that became the backbone of Cold War strategy.

Traditional Cold War historians tended to present Korea as a necessary response to aggression, a defensive effort to preserve the postwar order. But revisionist historians—drawing on economic, ideological, and geopolitical critiques—argue that U.S. engagement in Korea reflected broader structural aims, including securing Japan’s economic revival, demonstrating credibility to European allies, and ensuring American dominance of the Pacific basin. In this perspective, the Korean War marks the moment when the United States accepted a permanent global military role, one no longer tied to immediate wartime necessity but to the open-ended logic of containment. As William Appleman Williams emphasized, the Cold War represented the global extension of the “Open Door” framework—an effort to shape world order to secure American economic and ideological objectives.

Libertarian and public-choice scholars further highlight how Korea accelerated the rise of the imperial presidency. Robert Higgs identifies the Korean War as the key ratchet that normalized presidential war-making without congressional declarations, legitimized massive defense budgets, and permanently embedded the intelligence and national-security bureaucracies created during World War II. The conflict’s “police action” framing became the template for later interventions—from Vietnam to the Middle East—where executive authority superseded legislative oversight. This institutional shift also reshaped domestic politics, redefining patriotism as support for global intervention and marginalizing dissent as vulnerability to communist influence.

Cultural and social historians situate Korea within the broader ideological transformation of American society. Michael Sherry argues that the Cold War infused everyday life with a sense of permanent emergency, creating a political culture in which military solutions became the default response to international and domestic problems. Mary Dudziak’s work on Cold War civil rights further shows how global ideological competition produced domestic change: racial segregation undermined U.S. credibility abroad, pushing policymakers to support incremental reforms. In these accounts, the Cold War is not merely a geopolitical confrontation but a social order—one that linked global leadership to domestic conformity, military preparedness to civic virtue, and ideological discipline to national identity.
This period also witnessed a profound re-shuffling and reconstituting of the American Right that further reinforced the national-security state. Prior to the 1950s, the Old Right—figures such as Senator Robert Taft, John T. Flynn, and the America First movement—remained deeply skeptical of militarism, executive expansion, and global intervention. Yet the rise of William F. Buckley Jr., National Review, and the emerging conservative intellectual movement recast anti-communism as the defining principle of the Right. Buckley openly argued that defeating communism justified large federal expenditures and a strong executive, even if it contradicted older conservative principles of limited government. This ideological shift effectively killed the Old Right, replacing its restrained foreign policy vision with a militant conservatism that endorsed NATO, permanent defense buildup, and ideological confrontation. As George Nash and Rothbard demonstrate, this fusion of traditionalism, libertarianism, and staunch anti-communism created a new conservative coalition that normalized global intervention and provided political support for the expanding national-security apparatus.

By the mid-1950s, the institutional architecture of the national-security state was firmly in place: a global network of military bases; a reoriented economy tied to defense spending; a presidency with unprecedented unilateral authority; intelligence agencies capable of covert intervention; a political culture shaped by existential ideological conflict; and a conservative movement that had embraced rather than resisted militarized global leadership. In this sense, the early Cold War marks the point where the United States fully transitioned from a mobilized wartime republic to a permanent warfare state. The Depression and World War II built the administrative capacities; Korea and NSC-68 institutionalized them; the ideological realignment of the Right legitimized them; and the global Cold War entrenched them. The result was a political order in which foreign policy and domestic governance became inseparable, and in which militarized global leadership defined the contours of American political life.

Vietnam, the Imperial Presidency, and the Road to Economic Crisis—War, Global Commitments, and the Transformation of the American Political Economy:

If Korea and NSC-68 institutionalized the national-security state, the Vietnam War revealed its structural contradictions. Vietnam was not only a geopolitical and ideological confrontation, but the culminating expression of an imperial presidency empowered by emergency authority. It exposed the economic fragility of a global order financed by military primacy, ultimately contributing to the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, the abandonment of the gold standard, and the profound economic crises of the 1970s. Historians increasingly see Vietnam not as an aberration but as the logical consequence of the Cold War state built since the 1930s: a fusion of global ambitions, domestic centralization, and economic policies oriented toward sustaining worldwide military and political commitments.
Traditional historians tended to frame Vietnam as a tragic but earnest misjudgment—an overextension of containment prompted by flawed credibility concerns or misreadings of nationalist revolution. Revisionists, by contrast, emphasized structural forces: the preservation of American hegemony in Asia, the protection of Open Door access, and the broader logic of the national-security state. From this perspective, Vietnam reflected the same imperatives that animated NSC-68 and Korea—maintaining the architecture of global credibility and suppressing perceived challenges to the American-led order.

At home, Vietnam accelerated the consolidation of the imperial presidency. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. argued, the executive had long been accumulating power through crises, but the secrecy, unilateral escalation, and bureaucratic autonomy exhibited during Vietnam marked a new phase. Robert Higgs places Vietnam squarely within the “ratchet effect”: war-induced expansions of executive authority and military expenditure that never fully recede. Lyndon Johnson’s ability to wage large-scale war without declaring one—using the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution as a blank check—set precedents for future conflicts and normalized the circumvention of congressional oversight. The war thus embedded emergency powers into the regular operation of the state, eroding the constitutional constraints that had once governed American warmaking.

These political transformations were inseparable from the economic consequences of war and global commitments. As numerous economic historians have noted, the United States in the 1960s attempted a historically unprecedented combination of expansive domestic spending (“guns and butter”), massive military outlays, and fixed international exchange rates. Vietnam’s fiscal and monetary strain exposed the limits of the Bretton Woods system. Persistent balance-of-payments deficits—fueled in part by the worldwide basing network and military expenditures that underwrote American hegemony—triggered gold outflows that made the dollar’s convertibility increasingly untenable.

By 1971, facing inflation, declining competitiveness, and monetary pressure exacerbated by Vietnam, Richard Nixon suspended gold convertibility, effectively ending the international monetary order the United States had crafted after World War II. Far from being a purely economic decision, the Nixon Shock grew directly from the fiscal and geopolitical burdens of empire.

Vietnam also helped catalyze the structural economic shift that historians such as Judith Stein have described as “trading factories for finance.” With rising costs, declining industrial competitiveness, and growing foreign claimants on U.S. gold reserves, policymakers increasingly turned toward financial liberalization, dollar diplomacy, and global capital flows rather than industrial strategy as the basis of American economic leadership. In Stein’s analysis, the 1970s marked the moment when U.S. officials—forced by the contradictions of Cold War commitments—abandoned manufacturing-centered economic policy for a financialized model that better supported a global military and geopolitical footprint.

The oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 further revealed the connection between foreign policy and domestic crisis. The first oil embargo was not a random act of commodity manipulation; it was a geopolitical response by Arab states to U.S. support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War. In this sense, the energy crisis represented the domestic blowback of Cold War alliance patterns. The embargo triggered inflation, recession, and political instability—confirming what libertarian scholars such as Rothbard long argued: that foreign intervention carries domestic economic costs borne by citizens who seldom shape the foreign policies that generate them.

Cultural and social historians emphasize that Vietnam destabilized not only institutions and economies but national identity. The war shattered the Cold War consensus, delegitimized official narratives, and produced a public increasingly distrustful of government authority. The credibility gap, combined with the trauma of televised warfare, reshaped civic culture, fostering skepticism toward militarism even as the national-security state remained entrenched. Yet paradoxically, as Lisa McGirr and others show, the backlash also energized the emerging “New Right,” which recast anti-statism and patriotism into a populist critique of liberal governance—even while supporting the expansion of the military-industrial complex.

Thus, Vietnam marks the hinge between mid-century Cold War liberalism and the fractured, crisis-ridden America of the 1970s. It exposed the contradictions of empire—between global commitments and domestic democracy, between military primacy and economic sustainability, between an empowered executive and a disillusioned citizenry. The war revealed that the postwar order could not be maintained indefinitely without profound structural adjustments, and those adjustments—monetary transformation, the rise of finance, political polarization, and ideological realignment—defined the last decades of the twentieth century. In this sense, Vietnam did not merely end in 1975; it reshaped the trajectory of American political economy and foreign policy for decades to come.

Reaganism and the Maturity of the Fiat-Backed National Security State:

The rise of Ronald Reagan is often narrated as a dramatic ideological rupture—a conservative revolution that repudiated the crises of the 1970s and restored confidence in American global leadership. Traditional political historians emphasize Reagan’s revitalization of military strength, his rhetorical challenge to Soviet power, and his reassertion of national purpose after the “Vietnam syndrome.” Yet when placed within the longer arc of 20th century American state formation, Reaganism appears less as a departure than as the culmination of tendencies already entrenched: a national-security apparatus empowered by decades of emergency policymaking, an imperial presidency accustomed to unilateral action, and a global military posture now fully detached from monetary or fiscal constraints thanks to the transition to fiat money after 1971.

In this sense, Reaganism represented the maturity of the very system that Wilson, FDR, Truman, and Johnson had successively built—only now capable of sustaining unprecedented peacetime military mobilization without the discipline once imposed by gold convertibility. As Robert Higgs notes, the removal of monetary constraints did not diminish the wartime state but enabled new forms of deficit-financed militarism. The late Cold War thus fused Hayekian rhetoric about “limited government” with an expansive military Keynesianism that rested on the unique privileges of the dollar as global reserve currency.

Revisionist and post-revisionist scholarship situates Reagan’s foreign policy within deeper structural imperatives. Scholars such as Melvyn Leffler and John Gaddis argue that Reagan’s buildup reflected long-standing American concerns about credibility and geopolitical competition rather than personal ideology alone. Others, in a more critical vein, contend that Reagan amplified the very interventionist impulses that characterized earlier administrations—supporting anticommunist insurgencies, expanding the covert toolkit of the national-security state, and wielding executive authority in ways that further eroded congressional oversight. The Iran-Contra affair, as historians often note, stands as a vivid example of the imperial presidency operating with near-total secrecy, justified by global commitments that had once been temporary but were now permanent features of American governance.

Reagan-era militarism also existed within the emerging financialized political economy Judith Stein describes. The United States increasingly relied on global capital flows to finance deficits, military spending, and tax cuts—an arrangement made possible only because foreign states had powerful incentives to hold dollar-denominated assets. Instead of restraining the national-security apparatus, the post-gold international monetary system allowed it to expand dramatically. Defense spending surged—from $134 billion in 1980 to over $253 billion by 1989—without provoking the balance-of-payments crises that bedeviled Johnson and Nixon.

Social and cultural historians highlight the political uses of militarism in the Reagan era. The revival of patriotic symbolism, celebration of military technology, and reframing of Vietnam as a noble cause lost for want of will helped legitimate new interventions. This cultural turn complemented the New Right’s broader project: connecting anti-statism to martial nationalism, opposing domestic welfare programs while embracing massive defense budgets, and reframing empire as the vehicle of freedom. Thus, Reaganism did not shrink the state but reweighted it—away from domestic regulation and toward coercive global power projection.
Transnational and global historians add that Reagan’s policies intensified America’s role in shaping political, economic, and security structures abroad. Support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan, backing right-wing governments in Central America, and aggressive naval expansion in the Pacific reflected a militarized global activism that exceeded earlier Cold War patterns. These strategies, though rhetorically anti-government, relied on a dense infrastructure of intelligence agencies, defense contractors, and permanent deployments—the institutional architecture of a fully realized national-security state.

In short, Reaganism completed the transformation of the American polity initiated in the first half of the twentieth century. It consolidated an executive-led system capable of global intervention at scale; redefined fiscal and monetary norms to accommodate enormous military budgets; and fused popular anti-statism with the reality of an expansive security apparatus. The United States entered the late Cold War not as a republic chastened by Vietnam but as an empire whose military reach was now sustained by a fiat-backed financial order. In this way, Reaganism was less a break from the past than the logical endpoint of the militarized political economy forged across the century—a system in which war no longer merely “made the state,” but in which the structures of the state increasingly demanded war.

Conclusion:

Across the 20th century, the United States was transformed by war more profoundly than by any other force. From World War I to the Reagan era, military conflict and the institutional legacies of global engagement reshaped American political development, economic structures, national identity, and the architecture of governance. If the 19th century confirmed Charles Tilly’s axiom that “war made the state,” the 20th century revealed the fuller corollary: the modern American state made war—and in making war, continually remade itself. Each major conflict expanded federal authority, strengthened the executive, entrenched national-security institutions, and habituated Americans to levels of peacetime militarization once considered unthinkable.

Traditional diplomatic and political historians underscore how these wars elevated the United States to global leadership. Yet revisionist, post-revisionist, and cultural historians highlight the costs and foundations of that ascent: an imperial presidency born of emergency powers; the rise of a national-security apparatus insulated from democratic oversight; and a political economy increasingly organized around the requirements of global military power. From Wilson’s wartime repression to Roosevelt’s managerial mobilization, from Truman’s permanent national-security state to Johnson’s Great Society–Cold War contradiction, war repeatedly extended the administrative and coercive reach of the federal government. The Cold War completed this transformation by institutionalizing perpetual mobilization and framing global engagement as the precondition of national survival.

The Vietnam War exposed the contradictions of this system—its constitutional strains, its economic fragility, and its corrosive effects on public trust. Yet rather than dismantle the national-security state, the crises of the 1970s prompted its structural evolution. The abandonment of the gold-exchange standard and the embrace of financial globalization freed policymakers from the limiting mechanisms that had once constrained military spending. As Judith Stein and others have shown, the United States chose to “trade factories for finance,” enabling deficit-financed global commitments even as domestic industry declined. These economic transformations were not incidental: they were the monetary and structural foundations for sustaining a security apparatus that required worldwide bases, alliances, and interventions.

Reaganism was the culmination, not the repudiation, of this long trajectory. While invoking small government, Reagan presided over a dramatic expansion of military spending, a renewed assertion of executive power, and a global activism that intensified the patterns established during World War II and the Cold War. By the 1980s, the United States operated a national-security state no longer tied to the fiscal discipline of convertibility or the democratic constraints of formal declarations of war. The methods of empire—surveillance, secrecy, crisis governance, and executive centralization—had become routine features of American political life.
Social and cultural historians remind us that these changes reshaped not only institutions but identities. Wars forged new definitions of citizenship, expanded and contested civil rights, and produced shifting cultural narratives about sacrifice, patriotism, and dissent. The experience and memory of war became central to American civic mythology, even as each conflict generated counter-memories of trauma, injustice, and disillusionment. In this sense, the culture of twentieth-century America cannot be disentangled from the wars that structured its politics and economy.

Taken together, the historiography demonstrates that American development in the twentieth century was inseparable from military conflict and the institutions created to wage it. War expanded state power, entrenched global commitments, facilitated economic transformation, redefined social relations, and sustained the ideological architecture of national identity. If the United States entered the twentieth century as a continental republic, it exited as a global empire—its domestic and international orders fused by the logic of national security.

By evaluating these processes across multiple interpretive schools, one sees not a simple story of triumph or tragedy, but a dialectic between war and state-building that shaped every dimension of American life. Military history was not merely a component of the nation’s development; it was the central axis around which political authority, economic strategy, cultural identity, and global leadership revolved. The institutions, assumptions, and structures forged through war continue to define the United States in the twenty-first century, testifying to the enduring truth that the American state—and the American century—were made in the crucible of global conflict.


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