On October 10, 2024, the Reimagining World Order (RWO) research community hosted Professor David Ekbladh (Tufts University) for this year’s first meeting of its World Order Colloquium. Professor Ekbladh’s talk was entitled “Looking at the World: Forging the ‘Heavy Industry’ Imagining U.S. Globalism in the World Crisis of the 1930s”.
On the cusp of World War II, a leading American scholar, Charles Beard, perceptively decried the rise of a “heavy industry” supporting U.S. intervention abroad. An interlocking network across media, academia, civil society and government clamoring for global U.S. engagement had indeed arisen during the prolonged crisis of the 1930s. However, that “heavy industry” - the basis of today’s foreign policy community - itself reflected the profound historical shifts of the era. Following key figures in this “industry” exposes how liberal internationalist shibboleths like “interdependence” and interconnection” were retooled to respond to an unstable world, forming a basis for enduring U.S. commitments to global stability.