On January 12, 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson delivered a speech in Washington, the reverberations of which were felt on the other side of the world. Describing U.S. foreign policy objectives in Asia, a region where both China and the Soviet Union were seeking to spread Marxist-Leninist revolution, Acheson declared that America had established, by force of arms, a “defensive perimeter" that ran "along the Aleutians to Japan and then goes to the Ryukyus." More significant than the territories Acheson included, however, was the one he left out: the Korean peninsula. There, in the northern half, the Soviet- and Chinese-backed Communist regime of Kim Il-sung was preparing to invade its southern neighbor.

A historian can be wise after the fact, but a political analyst must be wise before it. Most commentators failed to detect the signs of Donald Trump’s presidential victory, despite their received wisdom and psephological sensitivity. (The exception seems to have been those relying on that most sensitive of all predictors, the gut.) Since the election, some of the commentariat, straining to get ahead of the next inconvenient fact, have settled upon a new narrative. A concept sufficient to explain all unforeseen, objectionable, and confusing phenomena; an insurance policy so extensive as to forestall any accident of reality: the Trump Effect.

The Trump Effect, the wise now agree, is a kind of sickness in the democratic

“.  .  . vast bureaucracies of civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil." (Winston Churchill)

In 1961 President Dwight Eisenhower warned of the danger of a military-industrial complex. This powerful public-private collaboration, he said, had the potential to exert "unwarranted influence" over America's democratic processes. A half-century later, there are still those on the left who cling to this fear. But it seems that Eisenhower's warning had its intended effect—and perhaps then some. In 1961 defense spending constituted 9.1 percent of the gross domestic product, and there were 2,483,000 uniformed military personnel. Today, defense spending is 3.2 percent of GDP and