How 'National Security' Came Unmoored From Americans' Actual Security
The turning point was the New Deal.
Total Defense: The New Deal and the Invention of National Security, by Andrew Preston, Belknap Press, 336 pages, $29.95
The idea of "national security" is so ubiquitous that it is hard to imagine an American political culture without it. But as the Cambridge historian Andrew Preston shows in Total Defense: The New Deal and the Invention of National Security, the concept and its universal usage have not always been with us. They have a history firmly rooted in New Deal liberalism, its anxieties about economic insecurity at home, and its fears of illiberal forces abroad.
Despite the framing suggested by the subtitle, this well-argued and often provocative book stretches from the 19th century through the early Cold War. Preston's purpose, he writes, is "to find the source of the idea, now axiomatic, that the security of the United States often had little to do with the immediate safety of the continental United States itself." He argues that the modern ideology of national security, one where security is unmoored from strict dictates of Americans' physical safety from immediate danger, was primarily an elite project. That elite pushed, cajoled, and scared a nation that once prided itself on having the luxury of distance into seeing its interests as global. America, the new thinking held, belongs at the center of a "horizonless world."
Early in the life of the republic, the American foreign policy consciousness had an ever-moving but nevertheless discernible westward horizon. After the War of 1812, Preston argues, the young nation enjoyed what was retroactively known as "free security"—an unrivaled combination of fortunate geography and fortunate geopolitics. He acknowledges that the U.S. had its share of security concerns that emanated from abroad, such as war scares with Peru in 1852 or Chile in 1891, but those fears never rose to the level of the existential competitions of Europe. Free from major outside threats, Americans came to envision self-defense as nothing more than fending off attacks against the country itself. And that could be accomplished with a comparatively small military establishment and a minor tax base.
America's first blush with extrahemispheric ambition and its entry into the Great War tested the idea of free security, but they did not extinguish it. When President Woodrow Wilson was roused to intervene in Europe's war, he privately conceded that "if Germany won, she would not be in a condition to menace our country for many years to come." Instead, Wilson sold American involvement as an idealistic crusade to make the world safe for democracy.
Despite the deviation of the Wilson years, the war to end all wars did not eliminate the notion of free security or create a new national security paradigm. Indeed, our sense of free security emerged from the war stronger than ever, as the Allies' victory removed an ambitious imperial Germany from the global stage. And Wilson's high-minded ideals failed to take hold. Instead, the end of World War I gave Republican Warren Harding a smooth path to the White House on a promise to "safeguard America first."
But under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a new national security ethos buried free security for good. Preston argues that the Roosevelt administration used World War I as a "model of efficient, centralized planning in a crisis environment"; the country's leaders adopted an atmosphere of wartime rhetoric that cast the Depression as a threat worthy of aggressive action. Preston argues that the New Dealers' domestic logic—the idea of using planning to mitigate risk—provided the ideological lattice upon which the idea of national security was grafted. With the coming of total war in Europe, a crisis exacerbated by technological change, Roosevelt and his advisers asserted that the era of free security, like the supposed era of unconstrained capitalism, was now history.
This combination of apprehension and uncertainty led to a national security posture predicated on possible threats rather than immediate dangers, thereby "turning anarchic uncertainty into manageable risk." Before entering World War II, Roosevelt—like Wilson—pitched Americans on the fighting in idealistic terms. Since "geopolitical logic came down on the side of [the] anti-interventionists," Preston argues, interventionists argued that in an "interdependent world, American values were just as much a part of national defense as US territory."
Of course, it took an actual attack on U.S. territory to bring the country into the war. But even after that, Preston argues, the White House saw a need to educate Americans on the rationale for fighting and knowingly infused its wartime messaging with New Deal politics. Preston cites Frank Capra's Why We Fight documentaries, which presented World War II not merely as a defensive enterprise but as a Manichaean struggle that strengthened Americans at home through progressive policies. Preston argues that even after Pearl Harbor, the nation's distance from the heart of horror demanded messaging like Why We Fight—for "while Hawai'i had been attacked, Iowa remained safe."
In the book's final chapters, Preston argues that America's prosecution of the Cold War grew out of World War II and the Great Depression. The conflict with the Soviets, he writes bluntly, "didn't result from departing from Roosevelt's principles but from applying them." Preston cites the career of George Marshall—a New Dealer and military leader under President Roosevelt, a secretary of state and secretary of defense under President Harry Truman—as essential to this continuity. Marshall and those who supported his eponymously named plan to rebuild Europe sold it as a way to insure against potential Soviet aggression, a carryover from the logic of social insurance.
Marshall also echoed an emerging liberal shibboleth: that because Washington had withdrawn from the world in the interwar period, World War II was on some level America's fault. If the U.S. again failed to "fulfill her responsibility" of global leadership, Marshall argued, America courted "disaster for herself and the world."
On the domestic front, Cold War liberals like Marshall and Truman saw the showdown with the Soviets, much as they saw America's previous war with fascism, as a chance to remake the nation's economy and society—again in the name of national security. Both men favored universal military training, a labor regime that Marshall promised would instill "the ideals of responsible American citizenship" into every American male. The Cold War was an opportunity to reorder the economy, too. Truman argued in his 1947 State of the Union address that national security did not consist only of a military: It depended "on continued industrial harmony and production," which to Truman meant wage and price controls as well as sweeping interventions in housing, agriculture, and health care.
Preston's book joins a growing body of scholarship that shifts the genesis of the national security state and its related foreign policy from the early Cold War to the FDR administration. Such scholarship has often argued that the formation of the national security state was not merely reactive but lay within the New Deal, its assumptions about modernity, and its implications for liberalism. While earlier works such as James T. Sparrow's Warfare State focus on the domestic economy and Ira Katznelson's Fear Itself on domestic politics, Preston centers his book on how an elite progressive idea of national security became a bipartisan and ubiquitous social norm that spanned the challenges of fascism, communism, and beyond.
This wasn't the only source of the national security state, of course—it also grew out of interparty politics, the material push of the military-industrial complex, and the pull of overseas crises. But Preston makes a compelling case that New Deal liberalism was a big part of the picture. If his account is in some ways disheartening for civil libertarians, it also shows that the present paradigm was not natural and inevitable: It is a product of history, and it could be changed.
This article originally appeared online and was published in print under the headline "How 'National Security' Came Unmoored From Americans' Actual Security." The web version has been updated to reflect the print edition.