How Decades of Privatization Unleashed Trump’s Warmongering

It used to be that the president of the United States tried to persuade the public to go to war. Franklin Roosevelt’s speech asking Congress to enter World War II produced one of the most famous phrases in American history: “December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy.” Lyndon Johnson’s administration lied about the Vietnam War, but Johnson at least asked Congress for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. George W. Bush sent Colin Powell to pitch the Iraq War at the U.N. in 2003. Over the last century, presidents have increasingly waged war without congressional approval, in violation of the Constitution. But even presidents with an appetite for unilateral warmaking have usually felt the need to bring the public along—to provide a justification, however pretextual, for their foreign policy plans.As with so many other laws and norms, President Donald Trump has shattered that tradition. The war he launched against Iran in February 2026 involved no effort to explain to voters why we were fighting. Even after the fact, Trump showed little belief that there was any need to persuade the public that he was justified or correct. It was a war of pure presidential whim.The President’s Echo System: How Foreign Policy Is Sold to Americans Harvard University Press, 288 pp., $39.95 Trump’s illegal and unconstrained warmongering stems, in part, from his contempt for democratic decision-making—and a toxic stew of racism and Islamophobia. But his belligerence is also fueled by crony capitalism. After invading Venezuela in January 2026, Trump made his motives stunningly clear, crowing that “Venezuela will be turning over between 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels” of oil, and the “money” from it “will be controlled by me.” He repeated that move with Iran, declaring that “if it were up to me, I’d take the oil.” Indeed, Trump’s basic approach to foreign policy is to enrich himself, his family, and his advisers through investment deals and free planes. Trumpian foreign policy is bribery, white supremacy, and authoritarianism all the way down.There is, of course, a long history of capitalist greed driving U.S. foreign policy. The Marine Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, for example, who led military interventions throughout the Western Hemisphere in the early 1900s, later lamented that he “helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in” and “helped make Mexico … safe for American oil interests.” Taking the oil has always been the goal. Trump is, in some ways, a supercharged version of the kleptocracy that came before.Pentagon Capitalism: How the Cold War US Military Modeled Itself on Private Business by A.J. Murphy Harvard University Press, 272 pp., $39.95 Two new books helpfully illuminate the sordid business of U.S. foreign policy and show how the system became vulnerable to the unchecked militarism and flagrant corruption of Trump’s presidency. A.J. Murphy’s Pentagon Capitalism tracks how the military “modeled itself on private business” and ultimately privatized national security. Chad Levinson’s The President’s Echo System reveals how the White House secretly manipulates seemingly private outside experts and think tanks to “sell” foreign policy to the public. Both of those trends have increasingly privatized foreign policymaking and placed foreign affairs beyond democratic control. The question is whether we can democratize foreign policy in the future.Without a large and well-armed military, presidents wouldn’t have the ability (or the temptation) to deploy force at will. And to control that enormous military apparatus, the United States has gravitated toward the model of private enterprise, organizing the national security state on the template of a multidivision, for-profit corporation. These days, military officers who want to get promoted earn MBAs to round out their résumés. It’s the accountants scattered throughout the sprawling defense bureaucracy who often set policy for the most powerful military in history.As Murphy brilliantly narrates in Pentagon Capitalism, the national security state increasingly embraced corporate-style management in the wake of World War II. To compete with the Soviet Union, the United States established a huge standing Army for the first time in its history and maintained hundreds of bases around the world. But the cost of that new defense establishment created tension. During World War II, the United States was willing to spend whatever it took to win. In the quasi-peacetime of the Cold War, the military no longer got a blank check. In the late 1940s, Murphy explains, conservative politicians who were opposed to the “expanded government capacity” of the New Deal state attacked defense spending as “creeping socialism” and “a betrayal of the free enterprise foundations of the American system.” In response, “the architects of the Cold War defense apparatus increasingly invoked business as both a practical resource and a legitimizing model for organizing American military power.” Defense planners rearranged the military like a private enterprise to make it more efficient and to fend off charges that centrally planned defense spending was state socialism.The heart of that project was a revolution in how the Pentagon managed money. In 1949, a commission appointed by President Harry Truman reported that “the most disturbing aspect” of the national security state was its “enormous cost.” Fixing how the military managed its budget, the commission said, could “make the difference between democracy and totalitarianism.” The technical details of financial accounting methods carried existential, world-historical stakes.Congress agreed. The National Security Act Amendments of 1949 reorganized how the Pentagon handled funds. In particular, the military shifted to “consumer funding.” Under this new model, instead of unit commanders requisitioning as much materiel as they could get, each unit—say, an Army base—received a set amount of funds. That unit could then use its funds as a “consumer” to buy gear from other military units—say, a supply depot with food or winter coats. Supply units wouldn’t receive any funding directly from the federal budget: Their funds would only come from “selling” supplies to other military units. This system simulated a free market, shaped by supply and demand, and it theoretically increased efficiency by incentivizing bases to “buy” only what they needed and supply depots to stockpile only what they could “sell.”These new types of budgeting also required financial experts to implement them, in the form of military comptrollers. In the early 1950s, the Senate Armed Services Committee recommended “immediate and aggressive action” to train accountants for “the vital work of comptrollership.” Military comptrollers quickly ballooned. Bases ran weekend and night schools to teach financial management, and management schools took off. Syracuse University created an Army Comptrollership Program and an MBA for the Army. George Washington University ran a comptroller training program for the Navy. And the Army Management School, founded in 1954, borrowed methods from Harvard Business School to teach high-ranking officers “the ins and outs of the military’s new financial system.” By 1957, 100,000 defense employees worked in financial management. Murphy calls the comptrollers spread throughout the defense bureaucracy “the foot soldiers of modernized military finance.” Higher up the org chart, at the Army Management School, colonels and generals “relaxed in executive-type lounge chairs” discussing business school case studies with their professors, fostering “a culture of executive identity” among top brass.The sudden centrality of accounting turned military officers into corporate managers. Generals who had led combat troops in World War II now found themselves balancing budgets at bases, choosing how to spend limited funds on equipment, housing, or medical care. As a result, officers began trying to maximize the productivity of their workers, using popular new techniques for managing personnel. Starting in the 1940s, business school professors and management consultants developed theories for how to control the increasingly large and decentralized corporate conglomerates that dominated the U.S. economy—multidivision companies like GE. These business intellectuals achieved surprising cultural salience in the 1950s—as Murphy says, “management celebrities disseminated their ideas far and wide.” The military listened.Military officers studied new management techniques in business schools, then applied them to their personnel. They embraced the methods of Frederick Winslow Taylor, the pioneering theorist of industrial manufacturing, for tracking and controlling workers. In Taylorist fashion, they timed each movement workers made on the job, then added up how long each task should take. For example, the Pentagon’s Defense Work Measurement Standard Time Data Program found that “mopping in a lightly soiled room full of furniture, using a damp mop, and making four strokes forward and back on each spot” took “twelve seconds for every ten square feet.” Officers believed such control boosted efficiency. “Local supervisors” at one base, Murphy reports, “were particularly pleased with the results in the laundry facility, where a change in the method of folding socks and sorting incoming clothing was leading to appreciable speed increases.”Workers didn’t like this intrusive control. In fact, laborers at the Watertown Arsenal had gone on strike in 1911 when the Army tried to introduce Taylorist production controls, leading Congress to temporarily ban such management techniques in federal workplaces. But as the post–World War II military expanded, it hired more female workers, and as the United States built hundreds of bases abroad, it hired local workers for jobs like cooking and cleaning. The white male officers overseeing this increasingly female and nonwhite workforce sought to extract maximum productivity from the people under their control. Murphy concludes that both “racialized views” and gender politics “structured the military’s Cold War transformations” into a businesslike bureaucracy. Racialized and gendered systems of workplace power built the infrastructure for U.S. military hegemony.All this focus on businesslike efficiency changed how the United States went to war. In 1961, Robert McNamara, an executive at Ford who had both studied and taught at Harvard Business School, became secretary of defense and accelerated the adoption of management thinking. Under his leadership, for example, economists from the Pentagon-linked think tank Rand moved into official comptroller positions at the Defense Department and, as Murphy puts it, “set out to measure, quantify, and price more military functions than ever before.” Statistics would shape defense policy.That process reached its infamous apotheosis during the Vietnam War, when the Pentagon used a “body count” metric of enemy deaths to track progress. Critics have argued that the body count metric both encouraged “indiscriminate violence” and “blinkered American military leadership to the realities of the war” by treating statistics on total deaths as a proxy for strategic gains. Similarly, Gen. William Westmoreland, who studied at Harvard Business School and commanded U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, launched a program in 1967 to bring down the “high cost per individual casualty” (at the time, it took six tons of munitions to kill one enemy combatant). Westmoreland called this economizing project “a matter of highest priority.” It produced such tangible results as “changes to the process of sweater procurement.” President Johnson praised the program for employing “innovative management improvements” amid the “most trying conditions conceivable in a combat zone.” At least LBJ had his priorities straight.After Vietnam, the officer corps turned against some forms of technocratic managerialism. In one survey, Army generals called the body count metric a “great crime.” But in the 1970s and 1980s, economistic logic became even more embedded in national security. The libertarian economist Martin Anderson, who later shaped Ronald Reagan’s economic policies, pushed Richard Nixon to end the draft, and some reformers saw the end of the draft as a chance for the Pentagon to privatize more military functions by hiring outside contractors. When Nixon did end the draft in 1973, he said the military would now “compete in the job market” for employees. As the military became an all-volunteer force, human relations became more important. Officers were urged to “enrich” each service member’s job to help productivity. One military theorist, Col. John Boyd, blended management with a countercultural spirit when he advocated “The Art of Success,” a mindset meant to “shape or influence events so that we not only magnify our spirit and strength but also influence potential adversaries as well as the uncommitted so that they are drawn toward our philosophy and are empathetic toward our success.” The Marine Corps’s “Warfighting” doctrine still draws on Boyd’s ideas, and both military leaders like Jim Mattis and corporate titans like Jamie Dimon cite Boyd.Indeed, contemporary business practices have been influenced by the history of managerialism in the military. Management consulting firms used defense work during World War II to build their cachet, while Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program, which still trains executives today, grew out of a program for defense management in World War II. In the 1960s, budgeting techniques that were developed in the military to control costs spread to other parts of the federal government, bringing what Murphy calls “military-incubated economic analysis” to bear on public “health, education, welfare, and housing.” At a more pervasive, ideological level, key elements of neoliberal economics, including an infatuation with rational choice theory and cost-benefit analysis, trace their lineage partly to Rand and the experiences academic economists had with the military. The Defense Department, Murphy writes, “served as a breeding ground” for the ideas that shaped neoliberal capitalism and its radical free-market beliefs.At the same time, Murphy argues, the neoliberal free-market economy in the United States, far from eliminating any role for the government, “has in fact relied on an active and massive state, including a massive military.” Military power secures “overseas markets and resources,” while the Pentagon pumps capital into large corporations, which contract with the military to provide services, including weapons production, that the military itself often used to carry out. Military spending, Murphy concludes, is “part of the essence of American neoliberalism.” We live in a market-fundamentalist system that strips benefits from the public at large while channeling immense sums into the state-run Department of Defense and its cozy corporate contractors.The use of military contractors to fight the war on terrorism is another product of the trend toward privatization that Pentagon Capitalism narrates. The drive to cut costs that inspired new methods of “sweater procurement” in Vietnam also led to the deployment of mercenaries in Afghanistan and Iraq. As Murphy emphasizes, this “outsourcing changed the nature of war,” because private contractors are less accountable for causing civilian harm, and they enable the public to ignore the wars being fought in our name. Privatizing the infrastructure of war incentivizes more war.Even as the expanding national security state made it easier for presidents to wage war, they still needed to sell their hawkish foreign policy to the public. That’s where Levinson’s book The President’s Echo System comes in. Levinson traces how the White House surreptitiously orchestrates nonprofit groups outside the government to run public relations campaigns. Those ostensibly private mouthpieces make it look as if independent experts support the president’s foreign policy plans, when they are really just echoing the president’s line.This “echo system” arose because federal law bans domestic propaganda. The U.S. government ran propaganda campaigns in both world wars—the poet Archibald MacLeish famously worked in the Office of War Information in World War II. But Americans have been wary of state propaganda. Since 1919, an anti-lobbying statute has barred the executive branch from using federal funds to pay for any “advertisement, telegram, telephone, letter, printed or written matter, or other device, intended or designed to influence in any manner a Member of Congress … to favor, adopt, or oppose” any “law” or “policy.” As a result, the White House can’t run publicity campaigns to pressure Congress. To get around that, Levinson shows, presidents have built an entire ecosystem of private groups that “launder” the president’s foreign policy proposals as their own.The modern version of that “laundering” started in the late 1930s, as President Roosevelt tried to mobilize the public for war. After World War I, many Americans came to believe that big banks and arms manufacturers had duped the United States into war to line their pockets. That led to a wave of isolationism, epitomized by books like Merchants of Death and the Senate Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry. Congress therefore passed a series of Neutrality Acts. Roosevelt himself signed the Neutrality Act of 1935. But by 1937, he favored intervention—his “Quarantine Speech” urged the United States to act more vigorously abroad.Facing an isolationist Congress, Roosevelt used outside groups to promote his plans like “cash-and-carry” and “lend-lease.” In particular, the Committee to Defend America, or CDA, placed articles and ads in newspapers across the country. The White House helped manage that campaign. At one point, one of FDR’s aides asked the CDA to delay a petition, and the CDA said it was “very glad to comply” and would take “no action on it until such time as mutually agreed.” FDR himself thanked the CDA’s chair for a “grand job” on cash-and-carry. After Pearl Harbor, the CDA shut down. But the CDA’s director, Clark Eichelberger, in close consultation with the White House, ran the American Association for the United Nations, or AAUN, to generate public pressure on Congress to ratify the U.N. Charter. One of the last things Roosevelt did before he died was to release a statement, written by Eichelberger, backing the AAUN’s work.Later presidents made similar moves. When the Truman administration proposed the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, Eichelberger recommended creating an outside lobbying group, the Committee for the Marshall Plan, or CMP. Dean Acheson, the undersecretary of state who helped design the Marshall Plan, resigned from the government and founded the CMP to lobby for his own proposal. The CMP printed 1.25 million texts, including petitions and postcards for citizens to fill in and send to Congress. Then, when Truman sought to boost defense spending after 1950 to implement a more confrontational Cold War strategy, the CMP reformed as the Committee on the Present Danger, or CPD. The State Department and the Defense Department both coordinated with the CPD, even sharing confidential military information. The CPD called for more military aid to Europe, and it ran a weekly, nationwide radio show to circulate its views.The foreign policy echo system intensified during Vietnam. In 1967, as the antiwar movement took off, White House aides organized the Committee for Peace with Freedom in Vietnam, or CPF. The CPF was co-chaired by former presidents Truman and Eisenhower and endorsed Johnson’s conduct of the war. The White House aide who steered the project told LBJ that ­Eisenhower’s involvement helped because it “automatically takes suspicion off the White House.” That same aide wrote that “for obvious reasons,” it would be “wise” to keep the CPF files “locked up.”Nixon doubled down on the secrecy and manipulation. Charles Colson, Nixon’s special assistant for public liaison, organized Americans for Winning the Peace, which ran a marketing campaign to defeat a congressional attempt to end the war. Colson also helped raise $25 million for the American Enterprise Institute, or AEI, then a relatively minor think tank, which backed Nixon on the war. Those funds helped make AEI a major player, but the White House masked its ties to AEI—one White House aide warned of risks “should evidence of any of our activities surface.” Colson himself went to jail for Watergate. But President Gerald Ford created the Office of Public Liaison to formalize the job Colson had done. Jimmy Carter used the Office of Public Liaison to coordinate with outside groups on the Panama Canal and arms control. Ronald Reagan’s Office of Public Liaison worked with think tanks like AEI and the Heritage Foundation to try to get Congress to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. When Congress refused, Iran-Contra was the result.The war on terrorism followed a similar script. In 1992, the CIA provided startup funds for the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmed Chalabi. Then, in 2003, Chalabi helped justify invading Iraq. George W. Bush promoted the invasion in a speech at AEI a month before U.S. bombs started to fall. Dick Cheney praised the Iraq War two months later at the Heritage Foundation. Private organizations that owed their power, prestige, and sometimes their very existence to government backing proceeded to support the White House’s plans for war.Levinson convincingly argues that this echo system naturally tends toward hawkish policies. The White House turns to outside groups when it needs to manufacture support for ambitious plans, which means that presidents tend to ally with groups that favor robust interventionism. Those groups then get privileged access to policymakers and information, which gives them insider advantages in subsequent foreign policy debates. The intellectual ecosystem for foreign policy ideas therefore becomes systematically biased toward interventionism. Levinson’s book can be a bit dry—it often reads more like a political science lecture on scope conditions and independent variables than like the sharp story of political intrigue it should be. But Levinson reveals a critical history of presidents constructing clandestine, privatized propaganda networks that keep dragging the United States into war. Maybe, after his book, we’ll learn our lesson.Since at least Eisenhower’s farewell address, critics have worried about the military-industrial complex capturing government policymaking and funneling ever-increasing funds to private defense contractors. Between them, Murphy’s and Levinson’s books highlight new and different facets of the public-private partnership that fuels America’s addiction to war: The national security state modeled itself on private enterprise, ultimately outsourcing war, while the presidency came to rely on private organizations to launder interventionist plans to the public.The Trump administration has radically embraced that privatization. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is using private companies to build and run mass immigrant detention centers. Trump proposed removing Palestinians from Gaza so that the United States could “own” it and construct a “Riviera” on “a beautiful piece of land.” Trump-aligned companies like Palantir have won huge contracts with the Defense Department and ICE. Trump donor—and defense contractor—Elon Musk headed the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, potentially contributing to hundreds of thousands of deaths abroad. After the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” demanded a “review” of “all general and flag officer promotions” to weed out “critical race theory” and concern for “climate change” in the military, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has begun purging women and nonwhite officers from the upper ranks.What to do? Levinson’s somewhat thin solution to the foreign policy echo chamber is better elites. Because “citizens take cues from elites,” he argues, we need to clean up our “marketplace of ideas” to make sure foreign policy experts aren’t just White House puppets. It’s crucial, of course, to halt government manipulation or censorship of the media. But beyond focusing on elite discourse, perhaps grassroots antiwar movement–building and a more active role for Congress—the people’s representatives—might improve foreign policy legitimacy and results.More broadly, it will be necessary to combat the ideology of privatization that has swallowed foreign affairs. Democracy is not a private enterprise. If we want to rein in the excesses of the national security state, we will need to reawaken the sense that foreign policy is a public good.