Deep state

The CIA, the FBI and the myth of America’s Deep State

The conviction that pointy-headed intellectuals in the US national security establishment are covertly imposing their worldview on American foreign policy hardly originated with the Trump White House. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade in the 1950s was largely premised on the same paranoia about some establishment “deep state”. Similar views were voiced — with lesser degrees of conspiratorial conviction — by the Reagan and Nixon administrations. And as national security correspondent David Rohde notes in his new book on presidential battles with the US security services, such fears are not the exclusive province of the political right. The idea of a military-industrial complex secretly running US foreign policy outside the prying eyes of right-thinking Americans was a standard trope of the left for much of the Vietnam war era, one that hasn’t altogether disappeared from parts of the Democratic party.