How Decades of Privatization Unleashed Trump’s Warmongering

Two new books illuminate how U.S. foreign policy became vulnerable to unchecked militarism and flagrant corruption.

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.

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.

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.

Military officers who want to get promoted earn MBAs. It’s the accountants 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........

© New Republic