> In American politics, labeling something a matter of “national security” automatically elevates its importance. In the language of foreign policy observers, national security questions, such as regulating weapons of mass destruction, are matters of “high politics,” whereas other issues, such as human rights, are “low politics.”
> Of course, not everyone agrees on which issues fall into the national security bucket. And the American definition of national security has fluctuated wildly over time. The term was used by both George Washington and Alexander Hamilton during the Revolutionary era without being precisely defined. At the start of the Cold War, the federal government greatly expanded the size of the bucket after the passage of the 1947 National Security Act, but that law never defined the term itself. As tensions with Moscow eased at the end of the 1960s, the scope of national security began to shrink a bit, but that ended when the 1973 oil embargo triggered new fears about energy security. In the 1980s, the definition widened until the Cold War ended.
> In the years between the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and the 9/11 attacks of 2001—an era in which the United States seemed to have few immediate rivals—even security scholars had difficulty defining the meaning of national security. Unsurprisingly, they could not reach a consensus. Since the subsequent “war on terror,” however, the national security bucket has grown into a trough. From climate change to ransomware to personal protective equipment to critical minerals to artificial intelligence, everything is national security now.
> 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.
> In theory, national security should be easy to define. For the United States, any malevolent transnational threat or rising power that directly challenges the sovereignty or survival of the United States constitutes a valid national security concern. Powerful foreign militaries obviously impinge on national security, but other threats do, as well. Ports, energy plants, and other vulnerable economic infrastructure can pose national security concerns; so can climate change, by, for example, threatening the economies of major coastal cities such as Miami and New York. Yet there are also important issues of public policy that fall outside these parameters. No matter how loudly some Americans yell about them, neither the promotion of transgender rights nor the banning of critical race theory is a matter of national security.
> In practice, Americans have always had difficulty limiting their conception of national security. George Washington’s first State of the Union message to Congress offered a promising start. He barely mentioned the external threats to the fledgling republic. Instead, he outlined his theory of how the United States could deter any and all threats. He stressed the need to pay soldiers, officers, and diplomats a decent wage and supply them the materiel necessary to do their jobs. “To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace,” he explained.
> The sentiments Washington conveyed in that speech are familiar to many foreign policy experts; less well known is what he said in his second State of the Union address. In that message, Washington ticked off an expansive list of “aggravated provocations,” citing Native American tribes that had “renewed their violences with fresh alacrity and greater effect” and “the disturbed situation of Europe, and particularly the critical posture of the great maritime powers.” Nonetheless, once the United States spanned the continent and was separated from other major powers by two oceans, its geographic remoteness limited the threats it faced. The scholar Arnold Wolfers described this era, from 1820 to 1900, as “a time when the United States policy could afford to be concerned mainly with the protection of the foreign investments or markets of its nationals.”
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> 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.
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> In American politics, labeling something a matter of “national security” automatically elevates its importance. In the language of foreign policy observers, national security questions, such as regulating weapons of mass destruction, are matters of “high politics,” whereas other issues, such as human rights, are “low politics.”
> Of course, not everyone agrees on which issues fall into the national security bucket. And the American definition of national security has fluctuated wildly over time. The term was used by both George Washington and Alexander Hamilton during the Revolutionary era without being precisely defined. At the start of the Cold War, the federal government greatly expanded the size of the bucket after the passage of the 1947 National Security Act, but that law never defined the term itself. As tensions with Moscow eased at the end of the 1960s, the scope of national security began to shrink a bit, but that ended when the 1973 oil embargo triggered new fears about energy security. In the 1980s, the definition widened until the Cold War ended.
> In the years between the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and the 9/11 attacks of 2001—an era in which the United States seemed to have few immediate rivals—even security scholars had difficulty defining the meaning of national security. Unsurprisingly, they could not reach a consensus. Since the subsequent “war on terror,” however, the national security bucket has grown into a trough. From climate change to ransomware to personal protective equipment to critical minerals to artificial intelligence, everything is national security now.
> 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.
> In theory, national security should be easy to define. For the United States, any malevolent transnational threat or rising power that directly challenges the sovereignty or survival of the United States constitutes a valid national security concern. Powerful foreign militaries obviously impinge on national security, but other threats do, as well. Ports, energy plants, and other vulnerable economic infrastructure can pose national security concerns; so can climate change, by, for example, threatening the economies of major coastal cities such as Miami and New York. Yet there are also important issues of public policy that fall outside these parameters. No matter how loudly some Americans yell about them, neither the promotion of transgender rights nor the banning of critical race theory is a matter of national security.
> In practice, Americans have always had difficulty limiting their conception of national security. George Washington’s first State of the Union message to Congress offered a promising start. He barely mentioned the external threats to the fledgling republic. Instead, he outlined his theory of how the United States could deter any and all threats. He stressed the need to pay soldiers, officers, and diplomats a decent wage and supply them the materiel necessary to do their jobs. “To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace,” he explained.
> The sentiments Washington conveyed in that speech are familiar to many foreign policy experts; less well known is what he said in his second State of the Union address. In that message, Washington ticked off an expansive list of “aggravated provocations,” citing Native American tribes that had “renewed their violences with fresh alacrity and greater effect” and “the disturbed situation of Europe, and particularly the critical posture of the great maritime powers.” Nonetheless, once the United States spanned the continent and was separated from other major powers by two oceans, its geographic remoteness limited the threats it faced. The scholar Arnold Wolfers described this era, from 1820 to 1900, as “a time when the United States policy could afford to be concerned mainly with the protection of the foreign investments or markets of its nationals.”
.
> 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.