How 'National Security' Came Unmoored From Americans' Actual Security

THE IDEA OF “national security” is so ubiquitous that it is hard to imagine an American political culture without it.

- BRANDAN P. BUCK

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.