The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror by Joseph Masco (review)

To what extent are citizens of the United States affected by and entangled in the issue of national security? In more ways than one could ever imagine is Joseph Masco’s answer to this question in his new book, which examines the creation and promotion of a national security state in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. He uses a comparative lens to examine the War on Terror of the contemporary moment in relation to the Cold War. Instead of a list of similarities and differences, Masco’s robust and historically rigorous comparison yields a deep understanding of the evolution of U.S. hegemony in the long postwar era and into the twenty-first century. He not only traces the origins of the counterterrorist security apparatus to the nuclear revolution of the Cold War era, but also elucidates the character of the counterterrorist state as a repetition with variation from the countercommunist state. And in Masco’s study, the variations are just as significant as the repetitions, as he persistently and persuasively draws readers’ attention to the remarkable expansion of state influence in pushing the idea of preemptive war on its citizens and the changed temporality of war in the perennial military readiness of the War on Terror.

While each chapter reveals fascinating information and analyses on various dimensions of national security—some more obvious, like the public campaigns on the nuclear threat or the state codification and guarding of sensitive information (in this case, “sensitive but unclassified” information) in chapters one and three, and some less obvious like climate change in chapter two—the most instructive element of the book is its consistent illustration of what Masco calls “national security affect” (9) and its various forms. His attention to how national security in the second half of the twentieth century turns on the state’s ability to educate its citizen-subjects on the appropriate feelings of terror, shock, and pain and to mobilize such feelings in accordance with the state objectives of security illuminates the cultural work of affect in a democratic society that is given to, as Masco calls it, governance through terror (21). His formalist awareness results in coherent and perceptive discussions about a wide range of rhetorics of national security, including what he calls “biosecurity noir,” his term for the scripts of official efforts to predict and preempt biosecurity threats. In its emphasis on affect, Masco’s discussion of feelings as “a new national project” (17) in the post–1945 national security state calls to mind Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. If the latter can be read as the affective interpellation of the bourgeois subject, Masco’s discussion of national security affect queries “the techniques of emotional management” (26) for a new kind of militarized liberal democratic subject in the continuum of the national security state from the Cold War to the War on Terror. His project is, as he claims, “ultimately a consideration of American self-fashioning through terror” (42) in this period.

In the field of Cold War studies, Masco’s book can be read alongside works that compare contemporary U.S. military interventions in the Middle East to Cold War-era interventions in Asia, such as Lloyd Gardner and Marilyn Young’s edited volume, Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam, or studies on the culture of contemporary U.S. militarism, such as Andrew Bacevich’s The New American Militarism. These works prompt readers to reexamine the very definition of “post-Cold War” and to view the Cold War era and the post-Cold War era not as discrete historical periods, but as intermeshed systems that continuously call for a critical scrutiny of U.S. military hegemony. Additionally, Masco’s study connects the discourse of policies with the experiences of the people these policies influence. Micro-effects of macro-level decisions can be seen throughout...