Abstract
Gregory A. Daddis is one of the foremost military historians working today. With a wealth of experience on the battlefield and in the classroom, he is equally adept at both the ‘operational’ and ‘war and society’ approaches to the field. On the former, his now-classic, three-volume history of U.S. tactics and strategy in Vietnam – No Sure Victory (2011), Westmoreland's War (2014), and Withdrawal (2017) – is a brilliant analysis of what went wrong for the American military in Southeast Asia. On the latter, his highly innovative book Pulp Vietnam (2021) analyses the gendered tropes of midcentury men's magazines to show the reciprocal relationship between war and American culture.
With his latest book, the magisterial Faith and Fear: America's Relationship with War since 1945, Daddis brings together the two sides of military history in an elegant, insightful, highly readable synthesis. He is not the first to offer such an overview, but his argument is so fresh and compelling that Faith and Fear confidently takes its place in the canon alongside existing syntheses by the likes of Andrew Bacevich, Paul Chamberlin, Mary Dudziak, David Fitzpatrick, Michael Sherry and Marilyn Young.
For such a wide-ranging book, Faith and Fear's core argument is deceptively simple: Americans were motivated simultaneously by a faith in, and fear of, the power of war. Daddis is of course not the first scholar to examine the role of either faith or fear in US foreign and military policies – his copious and generous sourcing, across nearly 120 pages of endnotes, is testament to the extent of the scholarship – but his examination of the two together is arrestingly novel. Faith and fear are each headily powerful in their own right, but Daddis shows that their toxic formula combined to produce an unrealistic vision of the world, and what Americans could achieve, for themselves and others, at the barrel of a gun and the drop of a bomb. After victory in World War II – in large part because of the nature of how the United States entered the war in 1941 and then attained victory in Europe and Asia in 1945 – Americans possessed both a misplaced faith in the ability of warfare to create and maintain a world order friendly to the United States and an exaggerated fear that others could suddenly bring war to American shores.
Daddis's interest is not in religious belief per se, but in ‘a secular faith’ (p. 6) that encompassed American policymakers’ ‘unwavering trust and confidence in war, as a vital tool for achieving their strategic objectives’ (p. 7). But Faith and Fear is not simply a top-down political history. Daddis also pays careful attention to war as a popular phenomenon, and to the ways in which waging war overseas ‘could be crafted as a redemptive social and cultural force’ (p. 7). Readers of Pulp Vietnam will be familiar with Daddis's impressive skills as a cultural historian, and those same skills are deployed on a much wider canvas in Faith and Fear.
Daddis is just as enlightening on the other side of his equation. ‘Alongside this essentialist faith in war,’ he argues, ‘hovered a fear that nearly all national security threats, both external and domestic, were existential’ (p. 9). The manner in which the United States entered World War II – with the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor – and the manner in which the war ended – with two atomic bombs – infused postwar military planning with an indelible dread of the worst-case scenario and a misplaced assumption that Americans would have virtually no warning of the next catastrophic attack. With the advent of the Cold War, anxieties about a surprise nuclear threat combined with an unusually intense ideological fear of communism, which threatened the American way of life as well as US physical safety, to produce a zero-sum mindset to foreign policy and military planning.
Once established in the book's introduction, the faith-and-fear matrix provides a stable foundation for re-interpreting US actions abroad and political culture at home between the end of World War II and the launch of the ‘forever war’ since 9/11. After reading Daddis's new interpretation in Faith and Fear, otherwise puzzling decisions for war in Vietnam, Iraq, and elsewhere become more comprehensible. So too do explanations for US defeat in wars since 1945. Before World War II, the United States was slow to enter foreign overseas wars, but once it became a belligerent it was able to devise a realistic grand strategy to apply decisive force in the pursuit of victory. By contrast, from the end of World War II right up to the present era, the United States has been all-too quick to enter foreign overseas wars. A strategic culture that exaggerates both American capabilities and enemy intentions has created a worldview that is at once unrealistically ambitious and unrealistically fearful.
Gregory Daddis's Faith and Fear therefore offers something rarely found in the historiography: a fresh and invigorating new look on a seemingly familiar topic. Scholars of American warfare, foreign relations, and political culture are in his debt.
