The war that changed everything

Ted Grimsrud—October 31, 2025

The American embrace of World War II as the “Good War” played a major role in the shaping of my embedded theology and its uncritical nationalism. This embrace hid from me the realities of that war and its impact. Due to World War II, the American Empire embraced a vocation of world dominance. The US government established three pillars of domination during the war—the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the nuclear weapons regime. These pillars played a central role in the transformation of America into a national security state—with disastrous consequences.

Early in the 20^th century, the US moved to the brink of being a world power. However, the final step proved to be difficult. It would take some major world-shattering events before the country crossed that brink. In World War I, the Americans played a secondary role. They remained reluctant to get “entangled” in global affairs after the war ended. They refrained from joining the League of Nations. American momentum toward colonial expansion at the end of the 19^th century slowed a great deal.

When global tensions intensified in the 1930s, the US remained mostly on the sidelines. The tensions did finally reach a breaking point. Japan’s violence towards China led to a full-on war. Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, followed by declaration of war by Great Britain and France. President Franklin Roosevelt made clear that the US sided with Britain and China but still insisted that the US would not participate beyond providing military and economic support. Finally, the US did join the war full-on—and that war changed everything.

Preparing for engagement

The Americans greatly accelerated their arms production and in other ways readied to go to war during the two years after the European war’s start. During that time, Roosevelt sought to persuade the country to move toward full engagement. As part of that effort, he articulated what were, in effect, purpose statements for America’s entry into the war. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech in January 1941 was followed by the Atlantic Charter a few months later.

In Roosevelt’s January 1941 State of the Union address, he spoke of plans to ask Congress to approve weapons for Britain. He introduced the “the four essential human freedoms” he sought to further: freedom of speech, of religion, from want, and from fear. These ideals, widely expressed, soon became a shorthand for America’s war aims and remained central in pro-war propaganda. As Roosevelt discussed each “freedom,” he claimed to seek their realization everywhere in the world. This idealistic aspiration mobilized popular support for the nation’s engagement in the wars against Germany and Japan. It then animated calls US leaders made for continued military preparations and interventions in the years after World War II.

In August, Roosevelt and British leader Winston Churchill created the Atlantic Charter that outlined the Allies’ war aims. It shaped what the Allies said about their purposes for fighting and shaped the postwar world. The Charter’s key points included to eschew territorial aggrandizement and to affirm “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live” and equal terms of trade to all nations. Together, the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter state the ideals that American leaders would claim to seek to fulfill.

Entering the war

As Japan became more aggressive in China in the early 1930s, the US increased its support for the Chinese military. A couple of key moments closer to the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 pushed the tensions to a breaking point. The US imposed an economic embargo on Japan that led Japanese leaders to panic regarding their access to vital materials. Roosevelt also ordered the American Pacific Fleet greatly to expand its presence in the Pearl Harbor base located in the American colony of Hawaii—an expansion perceived by the Japanese as highly provocative.

Though looking for opportunities to escalate the conflict, Roosevelt likely did not anticipate that the American fleet would be devastated by a sudden attack on December 7. Japan’s aggression led to a transformation of American opinion. Congress approved Roosevelt’s request for a declaration of war on Japan on December 8. For a brief moment, uncertainty remained about war with Germany. Adolf Hitler, though, ended the question whether Congress would declare war on Germany when he declared war on the US on December 11.

With the Pearl Harbor setback, the US only slowly responded militarily. In time, given their significant advantages in resources and their resolve to retaliate, American forces inexorably moved toward Japan. By the summer of 1945, the Americans had all but won their victory as Japan’s military was in shambles and its air defenses non-existent.

Hitler’s declaration of war had surprised American leaders. They were not prepared for an immediate military response. In fact, not until June 1944 did US troops land on European shores at Normandy despite Joseph Stalin’s pleas for a sooner engagement. In the meantime, the main theaters for the European wars were on the eastern front following Germany’s surprise attack on Russia in June 1941. Eventually, though, the Soviets managed to slow and then repel the attack. By the time of Normandy, it had become clear that the Allies would defeat Germany.

Becoming a national security state

The strong links between the military and corporations as they expanded the military transformed the country. When the US had earlier gone to war (e.g., Civil War and World War I), it moved into war footing and then out of it when the conflict ended. This did not happen with World War II. Though the expansion of the power and wealth of the military-related corporate world did slow when the war ended, leaders found ways to keep the country militarized and corporate profits high. Roosevelt saw democratic checks on his power as a problem to overcome rather than an inherent limit to be respected. American military leaders also sought expanded power. These desires led to expanded war-making capability with fewer democratic limitations. Many moves resulted from unilateral presidential actions without passing through legislative processes. Thus, the US went from being a democracy to being what we may call a “national security state.”

A pillar of the national security state began when the Pentagon was built. Work began on September 11, 1941 (before the US formally entered the war), and the building opened in January 1943. Originally, this building, built on the Virginia side of the Potomac River, was intended temporarily to house the military leaders during the time of “emergency.” Following this time of emergency, the government would turn it to civilian purposes and military offices would return to near the White House and Congress. By the end of the war (during which the American military grew from 250,000 soldiers under arms to roughly fourteen million) such plans had been long forgotten. The Pentagon became the government’s true center of power—with limited accountability to democratic processes. It has remained such ever since.

During the war, Roosevelt established what became the second pillar of the national security state. Originally called the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), this wartime agency gathered intelligence to aid the war effort. Roosevelt intended that the OSS would cease to exist at war’s end. He died in April 1945 leaving it to President Truman to terminate the OSS. OSS supporters outmaneuvered him. Congress created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to succeed the OSS. Truman and his successors came to embrace the CIA as a resource to bypass constitutional checks and balances in order to pursue foreign policy objectives.

A third key pillar, the nuclear weapons program, also damaged American democratic traditions. Nuclear physicists persuaded Roosevelt in June 1941 to create a top-secret program to construct these weapons. The Manhattan Project absorbed massive resources—all hidden from congressional scrutiny. By the time the rushed effort to make the bomb finished, the Allies had all but won the war. Nonetheless, the Americans chose to drop two bombs due, it seems, to American elites’ desire to establish their nation as the world’s superpower that intended to remain such. The decisions to expand America’s nuclear arsenal in the years since, to engage in an “arms race” with the Soviet Union, and to share nuclear weapons-making capabilities with various countries (most notably, Israel) have all been made outside of democratic processes.

White supremacy and empire

Throughout the war, Americans expressed ambivalence about fighting the Germans, who seemed a lot like Americans of European descent. In contrast, the hostility toward the Japanese stayed strong. A major element of the animus toward Japan followed from racial differences. For a long time, white Americans had felt race-linked hostility toward East Asians. American World War II propaganda played on racial stereotypes and fueled racist antipathy. America’s racialized war against Japan followed many earlier racialized wars. In turn, it anticipated coming racialized wars waged on Korea, Vietnam, various Latin American nations, and Iraq. It may not be accurate to reduce these military engagements to the dynamics of white supremacy. Still, the elite who direct American policies have exploited the perceived racial differences. Such exploitation surely reinforced a sense of superiority among the Americans. That sense, in turn, contributed to a greater level of comfort in coercing and even killing those designated as “enemies.”

Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech and the Atlantic Charter emphasized that World War II had as one of its main justifications furthering political self-determination “everywhere in the world.” However, the immediate aftermath of the war made it clear that these were empty ideals. They did not apply to non-Europeans, especially those who were part of the Europeans’ colonial possessions. Vietnam and Indonesia provide two telling examples. Vietnam had been a French territory and Indonesia Dutch. In both cases, active independence movements had challenged the colonialists in the years before the war. Japan drove out the Europeans in the early years of the war but proved to be uninterested in self-determination for the Vietnamese or Indonesians.

After World War II, such movements hoped for support for their self-determination from the victorious Americans. Those hopes were soon dashed when instead the Americans supported French and Dutch efforts to reinstall their colonial dominance. In Indonesia, it took a several-year war for the Dutch to be driven out, passive American support notwithstanding. A parallel process unfolded in Vietnam, but this time the Americans decided actively to put a stop to the spread of self-determination, a story to be recounted in chapter 20 below.

The US at the pinnacle

August 1945 stands as a remarkable moment in the history of the United States. Germany and Japan lay in ruins. The Soviets’ powerful Red Army gave them the capability to impose their will on the neighboring nations that they occupied. However, the war had left tens of millions of Soviets dead and devastated the main cities. Great Britain ended the war tremendously weakened and headed for a major decline. The US stood alone as the world’s one Great Power, an unrivaled economic juggernaut, the only major nation to exit the war in much better shape than when it started. American military might, now confirmed with its use of a weapon whose destructive power reconfigured the very nature of warfare, stretched throughout the world.

At that moment, the US occupied a moral high ground. It had brought the great tyrannies to their knees. American democracy, anticolonialism, free enterprise, and freedom of thought and expression inspired people everywhere. So, the answer to the world’s main question—what kind of peace will follow this terrible war? —lay largely in America’s hands. The world had reason for hope. It did seem that of all the possible outcomes of the war, the US, the world’s pioneering democracy, in the driver’s seat had to be the best one imaginable—and it came to pass.

When we look at our world today, eighty years later, we see extraordinary crises. The US did not use its power well. The next several posts to follow will sketch that failure.

[This is the 18^th of a long series of blog posts, “A Christian pacifist in the American Empire” (this link takes you to the series homepage). The 17^th post in the series, “Empire as a way of life: The colonial era to World War II,” may be found by clicking on this link. The 19^th post, “The quest for a unipolar world” may be found by clicking on this link.]