This dissertation “To Balance the World: The Development of the U.S. National Interest, 1935 – 1963” traces the transfer of American geopolitical thinking from military intellectuals inside the War Department in the 1930s to university defense intellectuals who began to set strategic agendas in the 1950s and 1960s. I study the concept of balance of power not as an idea or a theory but as an ideology in the Cold War through the twin rise of the military intellectual and the defense intellectual as policymakers. I argue the balance of power ideology animated the thinking of international lawyer Frederick Sherwood Dunn and U.S. geostrategist Nicholas Spykman in the 1920s and 1930s; political scientist Arnold Wolfers in the 1940s; career U.S. Army officer and strategic planner George A. Lincoln in the 1950s; and defense intellectual Henry Kissinger in the 1950s/1960s as they crafted national security policy.
I work against the presumption that grand strategy serves as an intellectual architecture for policymaking. Rather, I argue grand strategy is a closed ideological circuit determined by a “strategic field” of planners and practitioners consisting of individuals like Dunn, Spykman, Wolfers, Lincoln, and Kissinger. Retired general disarmament activist Tasker A. Bliss served as an important and early voice of dissent to the balance of power ideology in the interwar period. The balance of power ideology, the belief that a single powerful state maintained the balance between states, guided their discussions as they agreed on the U.S. assuming responsibilities to guarantee international order and stability from the British Empire. Over the decades, balance of power colored their perceptions of any changes or transformations within the international system. “Order” and “stability” were their watchwords. Grand strategy subsequently serves as the “laboratory” for national interest. The balance of power ideology led to the strategic field’s adoption of survival as the U.S. national interest. The strategic field subsequently employed limited war as the policy of choice to “preserve” the United States’ survival. My findings highlight the antidemocratic principles within the design of grand strategy, particularly as they relate to the unequal power dynamic between the military-academic nexus and the U.S. public. / 2026-03-26T00:00:00Z
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/48506 |
| Date | 26 March 2024 |
| Creators | Case, Sean Michael |
| Contributors | Schulman, Bruce J. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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