How Everything Became National Security and National Security Became Everything

My latest for Foreign Affairs

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

Posting will be light this week, as the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World currently has Covid case #3 and is very much looking forward to no longer having it. To that end I will be taking it easy and resting up.

As luck would have it, I can steer you towards some longer-form writing of mine that was just pre-released by Foreign Affairs for their forthcoming September/October 2024 issue: “How Everything Became National Security And National Security Became Everything.”

Here are the key paragraphs:

It is true that economic globalization and rapid technological change have increased the number of unconventional threats to the United States. Yet there appears also to be a ratchet effect at work, with the foreign policy establishment adding new things to the realm of national security without getting rid of old ones. Problems in world politics rarely die; at best, they tend to ebb very slowly. Newer crises command urgent attention. Issues on the back burner, if not addressed, inevitably migrate to the top of the queue. Policy entrepreneurs across the political spectrum want the administration, members of Congress, and other shapers of U.S. foreign policy to label their issue a national security priority, in the hope of gaining more attention and resources. American populists and nationalists tend to see everything as a national security threat and are not shy about saying so. For example, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which has been regarded as a blueprint for a second Trump administration if Donald Trump wins this year’s election, calls for regulating both domestic big tech and foreign firms such as TikTok as potential national security threats. Given the continual presence of such political interests and structural incentives, it is easy for the foreign policy establishment’s list of national security issues to expand and rare for it to contract.

But if everything is defined as national security, nothing is a national security priority. Without a more considered discussion among policymakers about what is and what is not a matter of national security, Washington risks spreading its resources too thin across too broad an array of issues. This increases the likelihood of missing a genuine threat to the safety and security of the United States. Whoever is sworn in as president next January will need to think about first principles in order to rightsize the definition of national security. Otherwise, policymakers risk falling into a pattern of trying to do everything, ensuring that they will do nothing well.

And here is the conclusion:

National election campaigns take all the pathologies of the national security bureaucracy and make them worse. Presidential candidates routinely declare that the election is about the soul of the nation and that if the other side wins, Americans will no longer have a country to defend. Given how polarized the United States is now, this tendency seems only likely to grow in the run-up to the 2024 election. Still, both parties’ candidates should clarify which national security issues they believe are more pressing and which ones belong on the back burner, which demand proactive responses and which necessitate better preparation.

Americans may never completely agree about what is and is not a national security issue. But a process that lets policymakers agree on how to disagree would allow for an improved national security discourse—and, ideally, improved national security.

You can read the whole thing to see how the United States found itself in its current national security predicament. Also, in case you were wondering, I was thinking about two things when I wrote the sentence, “if everything is defined as national security, nothing is a national security priority.” The first is Rosa Brooks’ excellent book How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon. The second is this scene from The Incredibles:

Further thoughts on this essay might be forthcoming in the latter half of the week if I feel better. Until then, enjoy!