‘A New Geography of Defense’

Abstract

This chapter details the efforts of the American and British intelligence officers who popularised the concept of ‘psychological warfare’ between 1940-42. In the context of fierce political battles between American interventionists and isolationists, this chapter outlines the construction of a geographical imagination of psychological warfare as a new and scientifically calibrated method of attack that ‘knew no limits in time and space’ — what Nelson Rockefeller called ‘a new geography of defense’ in which the civilian’s thoughts, feelings and opinions became a new terrain of international contest. It concludes with a consideration of the origins of the United States’ so-called ‘strategy of truth’ that would define the rhetoric of its international communications in the early Cold War period.