Toward the end of the Clinton administration, in a series of widely noticed articles later expanded into a book, Washington Post correspondent Dana Priest called attention to what she claimed to be a novel feature of the post–Cold War era: the growth in the prestige, power, scope of activity, and relative independence of the United States’ regional military “commanders in chief” (CINCs). Since that time, the notion that the regional CINCs are in effect the “proconsuls” of a new American “empire” has become a standard trope in the contemporary literature on American foreign policy. They have become Exhibit A in the larger argument – which has proponents on many points of the political compass – that American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War has taken a turn toward unilateral and military solutions to international problems and, in particular, the forceful imposition of democratic governments on unfriendly autocracies around the world. What is one to make of all this?

The origins of the current system of regional CINCs – or as they are now called, combatant commanders – go back to the immediate aftermath of World War II. In effect, the first CINC was General Dwight Eisenhower, who in June 1945 was given command of a new organization, U.S. Forces in the European Theater (USFET), headquartered in Stuttgart and later encompassing General Lucius Clay's military government command in Germany as well as regular army and air units throughout Western Europe. This would eventually become U.S. European Command (USEUCOM or simply EUCOM). Its commander (styled USCINCEUR or simply CINCEUR) would later be “dual-hatted” as the senior North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military officer, or Supreme Allied Commander in Europe (SACEUR), a position that ever since has been occupied by an American four-star general officer. But the impetus behind the creation of a comprehensive worldwide system of CINCs actually came from the Navy, which remained deeply unhappy over FDR's decision to create a separate theater command for General Douglas MacArthur in the Southwest Pacific during World War II.