International Relations Center | Special Report | The “Present Danger” War Parties by Tom Barry

On three occasions since the end of World War II—in 1950, 1976, and 2004—elite citizen committees have organized to warn the nation of what they viewed as looming threats to U.S. national security.

These three Committees on the Present Danger (CPD) aimed to ratchet up the level of fear among the U.S. public and policy community. In each case, the committees leveraged fear in attempts to increase military budgets, to mobilize the country for war, and to beat back isolationist, anti-interventionist, and realist forces in American politics.

In the early 1950s and in the late 1970s, the Committees on the Present Danger succeeded in shifting the country to a war footing—first to launch the Cold War, and two decades later to end the move in the policy community toward détente and arms control agreements with the Soviet Union.

The success of the first two present danger committees has inspired the country’s hawks and neoconservatives to imitate the CPD model. Both the Center for Security Policy, founded by Frank Gaffney in 1988, and the Project for the New American Century, founded in 1997 by William Kristol and Robert Kagan, cite the CPD model.

It was not, however, until the backlash against the war in Iraq started spreading that the Committee on the Present Danger name was resurrected. This time the Committee on the Present Danger points to Islamic terrorism as the present danger we face abroad and anti-war sentiment as the clear and present danger we face at home.

This IRC special report traces the history and the impact of the three CPDs. [keep reading…]