Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

The Race to Destruction
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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of intervention. Notice further that Nitze’s two arguments for civil
defense—facilitating a first strike and interventionist policies—carry over
directly to Star Wars, which, Reagan argues (and some of his more
fanatic cohorts apparently believe), would protect the US population.
Nitze remains today a leading adviser on National Security issues,
though he is considered insufficiently militant—a measure of our
progress in the past 30 years; he has been described in the press as a
proponent of flexibility and “it’s affected his credibility” with the
President, one of his subordinates commented. 81
Here we see the first real reason for the vast and constantly
expanding military system: to permit free exercise of our Cold War
policies of intervention and subversion, in accord with the overriding
geopolitical conception. There is also a second good reason. The
Pentagon system has become our system of state intervention in the
economy. The state quite naturally turns to this method when it is
necessary to “get the country moving again,” to “reindustrialize,” in
Kennedy-Reagan rhetoric.
In each of the three periods of major military expansion just reviewed,
there was concern over domestic economic stagnation. In a modern
industrial society, there is one primary idea as to how to deal with this
problem: state intervention to stimulate the economy. This was the
lesson taught by the failure of the New Deal and the success of the
wartime mobilization in overcoming the depression. The war, business
historian Alfred Chandler observed, “brought corporate managers to
Washington to carry out one of the most complex pieces of economic
planning in history,” thus lessening “the ideological fears over the
government’s role in stabilizing the economy.” The vast government
expenditures, dwarfing the ineffectual New Deal, laid the basis for “a
period of prosperity the like of which had never before been seen,”
teaching the Keynesian lesson that the government should act as a