The Apotheosis of Hidden Power:
Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe; Military, Inc; Absolute Destruction; Stalin as Warlord; Castleview
Why is the United States of America not governed by its military?
This question might appear surprising. Why should the United States of America be ruled by its military?
Yet if we think over the question in the light of history, things get rather murkier. And if we (as is often useful) rub out the lines of our familiarity with America, our unthinking assumptions about what America is and how it is governed, and merely treat it as a distant and foreign historical object, the reasons we might expect America to be a military state multiply rather quickly.
First, America has been since before its founding a remarkably militaristic society engaged in almost constant wars: beginning with the violence of settlement itself, the wars with France that defined the 18th century globally, extending into the Revolutionary War itself, leading into the numerous low-level "frontier wars" with American Indian tribes and tax rebellions and even more colonial conflicts with the British and French and Spanish, and climaxing in less than a century in the enormous, devastating mass-conscript campaigns of the American Civil War. The 20th century saw two back-to-back World Wars followed by the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the Gulf War, and ended with military interventions in Eastern Europe and Africa, while the 21st century so far has seen campaigns against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, ISIS, Venezuela, and now Iran, as well as significant proxy wars in Syria and Ukraine.
For much of that time, America has been governed to a significant degree by military officials and in service of military goals. During the Revolutionary War, George Washington was effectively the dictator of all that existed of the American state--the principal reason why his relinquishing of power after the war was seen as so remarkable not just in America but around the world. Under Lincoln, the United States was a thoroughly military government, though one led by a civilian; and while the Civil War was still within living memory, Woodrow Wilson plunged the country into World War 1, in the process again transforming America into a mass-conscription military regime led by a civilian that reached deep into the most remote parts of the country to find soldiers, train them, equip them, and ship them across the world.
A mere twenty years after WW1, FDR and Truman again exercised nearly dictatorial powers to build perhaps the greatest military-logistical system in global history, one capable of conscripting men and constructing goods in unthinkable amounts and transporting them rapidly more or less anywhere in the world on extremely short timescales. Of course, the "military-industrial complex" that emerged from this conflict was not an army as anyone before WW2 would have recognized it, but an entire society in itself, a largely self-governing institution capable not just of fighting wars but of organizing and directing entire civilian societies in economic and cultural and scientific production, recruiting and training and incorporating into the populations of entire continents, manufacturing buildings, goods, and equipment in unimaginable quantities, and bringing all of the above to bear in overwhelming force at nearly every point from the Philippines to France to the islands of the Pacific and back again.
Nor did this society go away when WW2 concluded: even as the United States of America gave back most of the territory it had conquered, let go some of its former colonies, and demobilized most of its own population, the basic infrastructure of American global military government, including factories and corporations and stores of munition and recruitment and training centers and ships and planes and military bases scattered across the world and capable of striking more or less every point within it, has continued to the present day, sustained by the Cold War and periodically built back up through the 1950s and '60s for mass-conscription wars in Korea and Vietnam and the more or less continual arming and funding of anti-Communist states and terrorist organizations and militaries throughout the Third World.
We tend to forget, now, that a lot of the fears of the post-Soviet-Union era in America centered around the idea that the end of the Cold War would lead to massive drawbacks in American military spending and competence--drawbacks that would not only prove devastating to the large sectors of America directly or indirectly dependent on the military-industrial complex, but might also leave America vulnerable to new, unimaginable threats.
Of course, that hidden malevolence soon took the rather strange form of the elegantly-turbaned head and performatively unkempt beard of the heir to a Saudi construction company and founder of a CIA front against the Soviet Union. The transformation of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden into a generalized "War on Terror" provided once again a proper enemy for the American military to build guns and tanks and bombs and develop new technologies and employ security corporations and train and arm and fund terrorist groups to defeat.
Still, what is by far most striking about the entire era of the "War on Terror" in retrospect is the degree to which, in popular imagination, the "enemy" against whom soldiers and cops and spies and superheroes struggled continued to be entirely amorphous.
The relatively straightforward Islamist ideology of Sunni mujahideen groups like Al-Quaeda--whose roots rather paradoxically lie both in the Deobandi Pakistani madrasas and in the rival Salafi ideology of the Saudi Arabian state, but more immediately in the American government's anxious interest in sponsoring and funding anti-nationalist and anti-Communist strains of Arab thought during a period when Soviet-inspired Arab Nationalism and Ba'athism were at their height and the Soviet Union was looking to assert itself as a sponsor to the Arab world--was never that I can tell portrayed or addressed in American popular media, or even in middle-brow intellectual discourse.
The distinguishing claim of 'Islamism' as an ideology is simply that most existing secular and nationalistic Muslim governments are more or less illegitimate insofar as their laws are insufficiently based on Muslim Scripture and traditional Muslim jurisprudence. As it turns out, this belief is shared in some form or fashion by a huge number of Muslims around the world, and almost certainly by a sizeable majority of the citizens of most contemporary Muslim states--and is not easy to disentangle, as I have argued, from the more basic failures of the post-colonial state in general and Islamic Modernism in particular.
An America also facing a legitimacy crisis, with laws and methods and basic ways of life alike all challenged continually by both secular and religious critiques, might well have found in 'Islamism' a profound and perhaps transformative mirror and challenge; but, with a very few exceptions, did not. Instead, what America found in the 'War on Terror' was mostly just a faceless, nameless, utterly mysterious sense of threat--never better embodied than in the Joker as portrayed in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, a man from nowhere, with no face or name and no ideology, driven merely by a desire to 'watch the world burn.'
Of course, the truth is that one cannot understand an organization like Al Qaeda solely or primarily in terms of Islamist ideology any more than one can understand an organization like the United States military sole or primarily in terms of the doctrines of the Founding Fathers. Islamist terror organizations as we know them are more than anything else creatures of the modern, global military-industrial complex. They are hierarchical para-military organizations whose structure and activities are defined at every level by 1) easily-accessible and advanced weapons and explosives, 2) instant and untraceable communication technologies, 3) international financial institutions capable of transferring huge amounts of money instantly around the world, 4) the colonial and post-colonial adoption of modern Western military training methods and hierarchies, and 5) in most cases some form of direct assistance, training, or organization by Western intelligence or government agencies.
In this way, too, the threat of Islamist terrorism might have been a profound challenge and mirror for America and the West: but also was not. For while American popular art again and again created narratives where the heroes and villains were similar sorts of militarized vigilantes, members of similar trans-national clandestine organizations, or in short more or less the same sort of people wearing similar clothes and wielding similar arms--they never that I can see ever seriously interrogated the reasons behind those similarities, or seriously questioned why one group of para-military vigilantes were the good guys and another the bad-guys.
All of this is not, of course, to deny that there are real and determining differences between Islamic and Christian societies, or even between Islamic and modern secular societies: and that these differences might have been the inspiration for a genuine popular war or even a religious or secular crusade against the Islamic world and/or Islamism. This, too, however, did not happen.
In any case, the War on Terror ultimately wore itself out in the failure of America to successfully govern its new colonies of Afghanistan and Iraq, in the failure of the 'Arab Spring,' in the rise and fall of ISIS, and above all in the gradual, creeping realization, driven probably more than anything else by the disaster of the Syrian Civil War and resulting European migration crisis, that the simple narrative of the War on Terror might in fact be a mask for blundering interventions into an extremely complex and many-sided conflict among different Muslim groups, none of which were from an American perspective all that sympathetic--with the brutal secular-cum-military-cum-financial Sunni Muslim governments with which America has generally allied against Shi'ite Iran and various strains of Islamism being perhaps the least likeable faction of them all.
Still, as I write this in 2026, America is of course once again fighting a large-scale war in the Middle East--a war, however, that was launched on something approaching a whim, whose goals and justifications and proposed timelines have constantly changed and contradicted themselves, and where it is clear that not even the highest levels of American leadership, let alone elites or the populace at any large, has any clear idea of why the war is being fought or what for.
The truth, then, is that for all the destruction and pageantry of the War on Terror, America has never in fact found a meaningful way to justify its conflicts with Muslim states and organizations--at least not one that has ever been acceptable to most of the population or even most elites.
All we have found, in fact, is a series of nameless, faceless, remote, alien enemies--enemies that are acceptable precisely because they are not opposed or understood in any consistent moral terms. And when one understands that, one begins to understand that the underlying reality here has nothing in fact to do with the Muslim world and its continuing and accelerating crisis of legitimacy and religious and political collapse, and everything to do with the American military.
To me, one of the most remarkable things about the United States of America as a society is how popular the American military has been and continues to be with the general public, and this despite the fact that, unlike during WW2 and its aftermath, very few Americans now live their lives in and around the institutions of the military or depend on the it for their livelihood. The total number of people to have ever served in the military at any time is now the lowest it has been since WW2 at around half of one percent--making this in almost an entirely different country from the mass-conscription regimes that defined 20th century American life.
Still, public approbation for the military has if anything only gotten stronger as people's direct attachment to the military has atrophied. As measured by Gallup, public confidence in the US military reached its absolute peak in 2003 and again in 2009 at 82%, and remained with one exception over 70% until 2020 before dipping again. In 2025, it held at 62%, a significant reduction that still leaves the United States military six times more popular than Congress (10%), more than twice as popular as the Office of President (30%) and the Supreme Court (27%), and easily crushing its more distant rivals organized religion (36%) and the police (45%). Indeed, polls show quite consistently that the US Military is the only governmental institution to be reliably trusted by a majority of the US population--a rather remarkable state of affairs.
If, as I argued recently in this space, the United States is in the middle of a basic crisis of legitimacy, then it must be the case that, as the only governmental institution to possess anything approaching public legitimacy, the American military is the governmental institution most capable of exercising public political power. Hence, we would expect prima facie and a priori for the US military to take on more and more public power, and for something resembling a publicly and officially military regime to emerge in America.
Of course, things are not quite that simple. For one thing, it is very likely that a huge portion of the American military's popularity comes from it being the only governmental institution to not yet be drawn into the hyper-partisan symbolic warfare that has come to constitute the bulk of popular and elite political life. The Supreme Court had majority confidence, roughly speaking, until after Bush vs Gore; and the downfall of Congressional legitimacy cannot be disentangled from the constant, bruising public partisan battles and government shutdowns now endemic to the system. The military suffered a precipitous drop in public confidence during the conflicts over the Iraq War (from 82% in 2003 to 69% in 2007), when support or opposition for the war and therefore "the troops" was to a significant degree made into a partisan political issue; and it is difficult to see how a military regime could avoid being drawn into some kind of similar partisanship trap.
Still, even at the height of the Iraq War, the military retained something like 70% public confidence; and if polls are to be believed, it has regained most or all of that public confidence over the last few decades.
Moreover, it is insufficiently noted that one of the main legitimizing factors for military governments around the world has been precisely their nonpartisanship, their separation from ideological and elite conflicts in the broader society. Not only need military regimes not be partisan, they have in fact normatively posed themselves precisely as unification governments bringing peace to internal quarrels and establishing a new unifying sense of national purpose. And with the continual rise in America both of hyper-partisan polarization at every level of government, and popular hatred of that polarization and of inevitably partisan liberal-democratic politics more basically, we have yet another reason to see a military government as likely.
And, of course, regardless of its popularity or lack thereof, the American military remains an almost unimaginably powerful institution, retaining among other things a status as arguably the primary driver of scientific and technological development in the world, a very effective global transportation and communication infrastructure, a vast surveillance and intelligence apparatus, a powerful industrial base, and, of course, a vast military force and direct control over nuclear weapons capable of killing millions and ending the world. If the US military as a collective force wanted to rule America and the world, they certainly would--though for how long, and how successfully, is quite another matter.
All of the works reviewed below bear directly or indirectly on the theoretical question of the role of the military in American life, as well as the more practical question of whether or if or how the military might come to dominate America and the world. In the process, we will travel very far afield indeed, to Pakistan, Stalinist Russia, Medieval Europe, and Fairyland; the question of the future of America and the American military is not, however, far afield, but present and immediate for every person in the world today. I ask you to remember this in all of what follows.
