Perspective: National SecurityThe Strange Career of “National Security”
National security—it’s an unusual phrase. Americans use it to frame war, terror, and everything else. Refugees fleeing violence and destitution are considered a “national-security threat.” So too are imported automobiles, as the Trump administration declared last year. Chinese ownership of the dating app Grindr “constitutes a national-security risk.” And Greenland, Senator Tom Cotton asserts, is “vital to our national security.” One might think the country has always been obsessed with national security. This is not the case, Dexter Fergie writes: “Americans didn’t begin using the phrase with any frequency until the 1940s. In fact, the Cambridge historian Andrew Preston has counted a mere four mentions of national security by U.S. presidents from 1918 to 1931. That is an average of one utterance for each of the presidents who served during that period. It’s also fewer than the number of times I wrote national security in the opening paragraph of this essay.”
National security—it’s an unusual phrase. Americans use it to frame war, terror, and everything else. Refugees fleeing violence and destitution are considered a “national-security threat.” So too are imported automobiles, as the Trump administration declared last year. Chinese ownership of the dating app Grindr “constitutes a national-security risk.” And Greenland, Senator Tom Cotton asserts, is “vital to our national security,” a sentiment that recently motivated the U.S. government to offer to buy the Arctic territory from Denmark. Trump vaguely summed up the national-security rationale: “Strategically, for the United States, it would be nice.”
Dexter Fergie writes in The Atlantic that the phrase’s ability to get stuff done is also unusual. Policy makers who intone those magic words can turn unpopular policies into law or, more miraculously, suspend the law itself. One act of legal levitation was President George W. Bush’s suspension of habeas corpus for foreign detainees, a move that enabled the Defense Department to lock up so-called enemy combatants in Guantánamo Bay without trial, indefinitely.
“Uttering the phrase can make plenty of things disappear,” Fergie writes. “Shelf upon shelf of government documents vanish from public sight after being wrapped in security classifications. According to the Harvard science historian Peter Galison, the total number of pages in the “classified universe” grows at a rate five times faster than does the page total of the Library of Congress, the self-described largest library in the world. Poof!”
One might think the country has always been obsessed with national security. This is not the case, Fergie writes:
Americans didn’t begin using the phrase with any frequency until the 1940s. In fact, the Cambridge historian Andrew Preston has counted a mere four mentions of national security by U.S. presidents from 1918 to 1931. That is an average of one utterance for each of the presidents who served during that period. It’s also fewer than the number of times I wrote national security in the opening paragraph of this essay.
He adds:
But “national security” doesn’t have to be vertigo-inducing in scope. Given how recent the shift away from “national defense” was, “national security” doesn’t have to be anything. This is not to deny the dangers of the modern world. Rather, it is to ask whether imported car parts or peace advocacy should be considered national-security threats.
