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The Strange Career of ‘National Security’

When the phrase became a national obsession, it turned everything from trade rules to dating apps into a potential threat.

One might think that states have always been obsessed with national security. But Americans didn’t begin using the phrase with any frequency until the 1940s, when Edward Mead Earle, a historian based at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey*, from the 1930s to the ‘50s, helped popularize the concept among policy elites and ordinary Americans alike.

Before then, many military planners and civilian leaders spoke of “national defense.” But that phrase referred to matters of war only. Unlike us, they had no concept that linked together so many disparate policy domains, from information and infrastructure to terrorism and trade. The rise of “national security” has since helped expand the power of government, defy the very idea of peacetime, and reorganize much of modern life.

Cambridge historian Andrew Preston has counted sitting U.S. presidents publicly mentioning “national security” a mere four times between 1918 and 1931—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 article.

Earle didn’t coin the phrase. Nor was he alone during the so-called “world crisis” of the 1930s and ’40s in advocating for a more aggressive military and foreign policy. But he was one of the first to develop a full-fledged theory of national security, which he then sold to the country. Speaking in 1940 before a New York auditorium crowded with academics, military men, and journalists, Earle claimed the term “defense” to be “misleading.” The term implied a passive and reactive position—one of “waiting until the enemy is at one’s gates.” But this amounted to suicide in an age of totalitarianism and air power, which gave the advantage to the aggressor. “Perhaps,” Earle said to the audience, “a better word is security.”

The Great Depression and world wars proved that the modern international system was precarious, capable of collapse. But, in Earle’s eyes, while interwar Americans had blithely placed their faith in stability, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan made no such mistake. They prepared for war, engaging in a vast mobilization effort that subsumed under military preparedness everything, Earle once wrote, “from the birth-rate to the most delicate mechanism of the national economy.” And in their conduct with other nations, military concerns now dominated diplomacy, instead of vice versa. While Earle didn’t call for copying and pasting totalitarianism into America, he did look to Germany’s focus on security with admiration, as well as with fear. In making this case, Earle had introduced something new: a “national security imagination,” as I described it in a recent paper in Diplomatic History. This new, militarized way of looking at the world transformed the economy into a geopolitical machine, distant conflicts into immediate dangers, and military preparedness into a permanent condition. It shattered the boundary between civilian and soldier, domestic and foreign, and even war and peace.