As the United States began to assert itself as a major world power in the first half of the twentieth century, the foreign policy discourse alternated between a belief that the country had to send troops overseas to protect expanding U.S. interests and a conviction that an America First posture of isolationism would best preserve the peace. But it was only with the onset of the Cold War that the term “national security” became embedded in American political discourse. The National Security Act of 1947, which among other things created the Central Intelligence Agency and established the National Security Council, brought about the security architecture that exists today. Recognition of the overarching Soviet threat spurred the creation of a panoply of research centers, think tanks, and university programs dedicated to studying national security.
Wolfers presciently observed that when terms such as “national security” are popularized, “they may not mean the same thing to different people.” Indeed, he wrote, “they may not have any precise meaning at all.” During the 1950s and early 1960s, consensus on the Soviet threat allayed some of those concerns. But by the Vietnam War, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was already warning the public that U.S. officials “have been lost in a semantic jungle” on national security questions, conflating national security with strictly military issues such as weapons procurement.
With the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it might have been expected that the national security basket would shrink along with the size of the military budget. Yet the opposite occurred. Consider the history of the National Security Strategy, the report on current threats that the president is supposed to deliver to Congress annually, although in practice it is usually released less often. A review of post-1990 reports reveals a steady expansion of qualifying concerns: energy security, nuclear proliferation, drug trafficking, and terrorism, among many others.
After 9/11, the trend only accelerated, with politicians and policymakers giving ever-greater emphasis to national security and the number of things that putatively affect it. Pandemic prevention emerged in the first decade of this century and has stayed there ever since. Over the past decade, the rise of China combined with the revanchist ambitions of Russia caused the first Trump administration and the Biden administration to refer to “great-power competition” in their National Security Strategy documents. The reasons for including these threats were sound. But when they were added, the documents never de-emphasized earlier concerns. The 2017 version includes a pledge to “devote greater resources to dismantle transnational criminal organizations.” The 2022 document argues that “global food security demands constant vigilance and action by all governments” and asserts that the United States will be “working across entire food systems to consider every step from cultivation to consumption.” And on and on.