Andrew Preston, Total Defense: The New Deal and the Invention of National Security, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge Ma, 2025; and Peter Roady, The Contest over National Security: FDR, Conservatives and the struggle to claim the most powerful phrase in American politics, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Ma, 2024.
We are fortunate to have two books, published almost at the same time, illuminating the history of national security in the United States. The political utility of national security as a galvanizing idea and means of framing issues shapes so much policy-making in countries today, yet the meanings attaching to it remain slippery. Writing about the history of key concepts or ideas is not new. Scholars such as Quentin Skinnner, Raymond Williams and more recently David Armitage and Vanessa Ogle have offered excellent examples. Before all of these writers, the conceptual historians at Bielefeld in Germany plotted transformative change through the study of big ideas that were seized upon by several layers of society and worked into structures of power. Tackling national security brings challenges on account of how much baggage it has accumulated since its early articulations in the 1930s and how often it is invoked. In recent times, it seems to saturate political language such that one might be forgiven for thinking that national security has entered the pantheon of what Don Watson has called ‘weasel words’, vague and ambiguous terms that shroud the speaker/writer in importance while relieving them of accountability.
All the more reason then, to historicise national security, to examine its changing import according to different circumstances over time. The two books by Preston and Roady are both anchored in the pivotal decade of the 1930s, but they also tackle the meaning of national security from different, complementary perspectives. For Preston, national security opens the door to a fresh take on the history of US security in the world; and for Roady, it invites more detailed consideration of how the forces of private capital and conservative politics won back the ground ceded to the state, after national security had paved the way for comprehensive welfare provisions and controls. So successful was the conservative counter action according to Roady that, from the mid-1940s, national security was redefined as applying to foreign policy only.
Together, these books enrich our understanding of one of the most pervasive yet elusive concepts in public policy since the middle decades of the twentieth century. They demonstrate how it took robust shape first in the 1930s. In the hands of US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, national security bridged locally-felt and more remotely-sensed fears for the future in a world that suddenly looked less easy to read. But under FDR’s successors, it morphed into something more exclusively focused on ideological and military challenges. The Cold War struggle against communism helped the skew, as did the vigorous campaigning of conservative forces which fought back after being sidelined during the height of FDR’s social welfare measures of his New Deal. From the late 1940s, national security was much less a holistic approach to ensuring people felt secure, and much more an ideological-political-military mission of the United States in the world.
The extraordinary mobilizing work of FDR sits at the heart of both books. He was, as Roady details, surrounded by imaginative and skilled public opinion advisers, but it took FDR to land the message, through speech, broadcast and campaign text, that national security was a cradle to grave commitment by the state to ensure that US citizens would lead decent lives. In Roosevelt’s hands, it was national security rather than welfare or social security that proved most capable of mobilizing voters.
For Preston, national security is also a means of re-examining US political history, especially for the connections between domestic and foreign policies. The Cold War enabled the term to subsume most of the concerns bundled in the term ‘national interest’ and acquire a status that was less subjective. At the same time, it smoothed the tensions of the great paradox for the US in world affairs: its lack of immediate, neighbourhood-based threats up to the mid-twentieth century, and its determination to marshal all forms of resources against apparent threats far and wide thereafter.
With a keen eye for signal moments that reverberate, Preston reminds us of a well-known speech FDR made in October 1937 when opening a new bridge in Chicago. The speech featured Roosevelt’s claim that it was now impossible for nations to isolate themselves from upheavals in the rest of the world. His use of the term ‘quarantine’ in his comments about defending from Japanese aggression attracted much commentary. Preston notes that accompanying Roosevelt’s focus on a physical bridge was a metaphorical bridge between old and new: ‘from old concepts of limited state intervention in national economics and international relations to new concepts of an activist, often unrestrained role for the state in managing the domestic economy and world order. In national security terms, the New Deal was the forerunner to the Cold War consensus, while quarantine was the forerunner to containment.’ (107) Of the two books, Preston roams more broadly. He leans more explicitly in the direction of borrowing from later terminology and practice to illuminate the past. When German saboteurs active in New York are caught in 1916, Preston writes; ‘Even though the term wouldn’t be coined for another 85 years, the federal government’s “homeland security” response, combined with US entry into the war, brought German sabotage to an end’ (60).
Herein lies also an example of an inherent tension in the historical analyses of both books. While sensitive to the particular Rooseveltian creation of national security, they are also on board a teleological train that arrives at more recent renderings of it. In Roady’s account, the balanced, interconnected domestic and foreign sources of security in FDR’s articulation give way to something much less admirable. Roady is no fan of what conservatives have achieved in their capture of national security. Preston too, concludes with a reflection on contemporary times, suggesting that, such are the extraordinary characteristics of the climate crisis we face, the meaning of national security needs either to be reinvented from the ground up, or the term should be cast aside altogether. A sobering note, but a timely one, given the apparent inadequacy of policy framings today to address some of the most existential challenges we face.
