I’ve written this book in ways that are different than those of some other books. One difference is that I generally don’t adopt conventional names for wars. The names of wars are political and usually reflect one’s national perspective or the perspective of the “winner.” Commonly used names also tend to trigger commonly held understandings about wars, which tend to shut off curiosity, critical thinking, and the ability to build new understandings about wars’ causes, dynamics, and effects.
For example, commonly used names for wars greatly oversimplify the nature of conflicts. The “Spanish-American War” of 1898 is more accurately named the “Spanish-Cuban–Puerto Rican–Philippine-American War,” as historian Daniel Immerwahr has noted.1 Beyond oversimplifying, the conventional name erases the lives of the colonized from history. This happens all too often already. To avoid some of these pitfalls, I generally identify wars by naming major combatants and years of combat (while noting commonly used names to prevent ambiguity when necessary).
Naming all the combatant countries and territories involved in what’s generally known as the “Cold War” would make for an impossibly long name. But how can we call a war cold that killed an estimated ten million people in Korea, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and Afghanistan alone? Calling the war cold contributes to ignoring the victims of the war and to ensuring that, as historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin writes, “its constituent conflicts are little more than footnotes in the story of post-1945 international relations.”2 I generally avoid the name and, when necessary, render it as “Cold War” with quotation marks to encourage rethinking its widespread acceptance.
Rethinking naming practices and the myths and assumptions built into them is one of many ways to change how we write, talk, and think about history and the present. With rare exceptions I refer to the government agency responsible for the U.S. armed forces as the “Pentagon” rather than the “Department of Defense.” The name of the agency’s headquarters is a frequently used and less ideologically loaded shorthand. The degree to which the department actually provides defense services is a major subject of this book and should not be assumed. The name of one of the Pentagon’s predecessor agencies, the “Department of War,” provides a more accurate description of that agency’s activities.
For similar reasons, except in quotations, I don’t use the language of national defense or national security or the terms national security state or national security bureaucracy. The language of national defense and national security has often obscured and implicitly justified U.S. military, CIA, and other government actions that have frequently been offensive in nature and had little to do with defending or securing the nation. I likewise avoid describing countries as having national interests. Doing so suggests that an entire nation could share and agree on common interests. Such language often obscures the specific interests of specific actors and specific groups, making it more difficult to understand how and why things happen in the world. In a similar way, I try to avoid making claims about what the United States writ large has done. Instead, I attempt to be as precise as possible by writing about what specific individuals or groups have done—U.S. government officials or U.S. corporate elites or specific multinational corporations, for example.
Finally, with the exception of the book’s subtitle, I do not refer to Christopher Columbus—an Anglicized name the sailor never used—and instead employ the only documented name he appears to have used, Cristóbal Colón. I do this to question some of the colonialist assumptions built into language and our daily lives. In the United States these assumptions include, as historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz points out, an “unconscious belief in manifest destiny,” which is equally visible in my city’s name: Washington, District of Columbia, celebrates and claims Cristóbal Colón despite his never having set foot in continental North America.3 For similar reasons, outside of the subtitle and quotations, I avoid using “America” when I mean “United States of America.” As Latin American friends rightly remind us U.S. Americans, “America” means the continents of South and North America, not the United States alone.