ABSTRACT
For the second time in a generation the United States had intervened and triumphed in a foreign war only to lose the peace. World War II, like World War I, failed to deliver on the American president’s grand design of a world made safe for freedom and democracy. Having failed to produce either a fully “liberated Europe” or a “democratic China,” the world war instead brought a perpetuation of hostility in the form of the global cold war. In the years immediately following Wo rld War II, the United States adopted a policy of global “containment” of communism, created a national security state, took the lead in escalating the nuclear arms race, and fought a “hot” shooting war on the Korean Peninsula.
