This dissertation examines how war shapes postwar support for a state's grand strategy. How do the public’s wartime experiences influence support for the aims the war was fought to achieve? How do those experiences inform elite behavior, and how are memories of war passed down and made politically salient? I develop a theory of local war legacies, arguing that coercive and geographically concentrated mobilization generates backlash, alienating citizens from the state and its strategic goals. These effects are especially pronounced in rural communities, where war is experienced more acutely due to strong place-based identity, communal narratives of sacrifice and neglect, and distinctive social dynamics. Over time, these legacies are reinforced through commemorative practices that reflect and reproduce localized understandings of war. My framework integrates international relations, American political development, persistence studies, and memory politics to link the microfoundations of wartime experience to national debates over a state’s global role. I apply my theory to the U.S. experience in World War II, widely remembered as the “good war” that ended “isolationism” and solidified broad public backing for international engagement. While a “watershed thesis” treats WWII as a decisive turning point, revisionist accounts emphasize its uneven and contingent effects. To adjudicate these interpretations and test my theory, I use a mixed-methods design that includes: (1) historical county-level war fatality data; (2) a novel measure of county-level support for postwar global engagement generated using multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) on historical public opinion surveys; (3) an index of congressional roll call votes on key foreign policy legislation; and (4) eighteen months of fieldwork with veteran organizations in predominantly rural, high war exposure communities, including four Honor Flight trips with veterans to Washington, D.C. My findings affirm my theory and qualify the view of WWII as a uniform, transformative national experience. Counties with more coercive mobilization—measured by the share of draftees among war dead—were less supportive of postwar global engagement, particularly in rural areas, and this pattern persisted into the early Cold War. Congressional behavior mirrored these trends: legislators representing more exposed districts were more supportive of the postwar consensus, while prewar noninterventionists were not systematically punished. These findings challenge the narrative that WWII decisively transformed mass public attitudes toward postwar internationalism. My fieldwork reveals how local war legacies remain embedded in rural civic life. Drawing on over 75 interviews and extensive participant observation, I argue that American commemorative practices operate through a logic of atonement, focused on redressing perceived past mistreatment of veterans, especially from the Vietnam era. This culture privileges recognition over reckoning and is sustained through “patriotic scripts,” norms and language that shape how Americans engage with veterans and interpret war’s meaning. While often deferential and hawkish, these scripts also contain rhetorical resources for a more restrained strategic posture, a position I characterize as commemorative vigilance. This dissertation advances a bottom-up account of how war reverberates through domestic political life, shaping attitudes and memory well beyond the war’s end. It contributes to scholarship on grand strategy, collective memory, American political development, local politics, and democratic representation. This dissertation makes the case for a simple but powerful insight: all war is local.
