Redefining National Security: Navigating an Overloaded Agenda

How Everything Became National Security

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.

A SEMANTIC JUNGLE

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.”

Problems in world politics rarely die; at best, they tend to ebb very slowly.

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.

A similar pattern appears in U.S. presidents’ State of the Union addresses. Since the end of the Cold War, presidents have routinely used the annual speech to identify new threats facing the United States or at least to expand their scope. Initially, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and rogue states were the central issues; eventually, other national security concerns, such as climate change and cybersecurity, crept in. Even when presidents acknowledged that U.S. national security was strong, they sought to convey a sense of urgency to the American people. “We face no imminent threat, but we do have an enemy,” President Bill Clinton argued in 1997. “The enemy of our time is inaction.” After 9/11, presidents and their security strategists described a nation surrounded by threats. “The frontiers of national security can be everywhere,” Philip Zelikow, one of the architects of President George W. Bush’s 2002 strategy, has explained, adding, “The division of security policy into domestic and foreign compartments is breaking down.”

Over the past decade, the definition of national security has expanded even more. What the former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan referred to as “problems without passports”—that is, problems not delimited by borders, such as cybersecurity and climate change—have mushroomed. New technologies caused foreign policy thinkers to look in new places. Militaries used to focus only on the threats from land, sea, and air, but in this century, cyberspace and space have become complex terrains of conflict. Artificial intelligence and quantum computing are now critical technologies and therefore a national security priority. The list of “critical minerals” also keeps expanding, as climate change and the transition from fossil fuels generate insatiable global demand for the rare-earth metals needed for batteries and other clean energy applications.

Successive U.S. administrations have also added threats emanating from or playing out inside the country. Domestic extremism made its first appearance in the National Security Strategy in 2010. The Trump administration declared a national emergency at the United States’ southern border, citing the growing inflow of narcotics, criminal gangs, and migrants. The Biden administration declared national emergencies related to critical supply chains, such as that for cobalt, with the aim of “near-shoring” key production technologies.

Viewed in isolation, each of these concerns could plausibly be identified as a national security priority. The problem is that by ceaselessly accumulating such paramount concerns, the executive branch has made the concept increasingly meaningless.

PROLIFERATING PRIORITIES

Once a national security threat has been established, an administration seldom deprioritizes it, but the collapse of the Soviet Union is an instructive exception. After the end of the Cold War, American policymakers no longer saw Moscow as an overriding concern, and Russia disappeared from national security strategy documents. Congress began excluding Russia from Cold War–era laws like the so-called Jackson-Vanik amendment, which restricted trade with nonmarket economies that failed to respect human rights.

Then Russia, under President Vladimir Putin, became a threat all over again. Washington’s short-lived downgrading of Moscow as a national security priority is unusual in that the U.S. bureaucracy actually adapted to this shift. As rare as it is for a threat to be removed from the National Security Strategy, it is even rarer for foreign policy officials to agree on that removal. Most transnational threats wax and wane over time but rarely fade away. The 1987 strategy treated terrorism as a major national security concern. That threat persisted into the 1990s and leaped to the top of the queue after the 9/11 attacks. After two decades of a “global war on terror,” however, it seemed as though U.S. officials had successfully downgraded the threat in documents and public discourse. Then Hamas’s horrific attacks on October 7, 2023, in Israel made it a priority again.

Technological innovation, such as the advent of new kinds of weapons, poses another challenge to strategists’ efforts to manage national security priorities. The proliferation of nuclear and ballistic missile technologies, for example, required a wholesale recalculation of which countries or groups posed major risks. As the barriers to acquiring technology for mass destruction have declined, the roster has come to include not only major powers (China, Russia) but also smaller states (Iran, North Korea) and even nonstate actors (the Islamic State, the Houthis).

But the challenge runs much deeper. With new technologies, new resources become critical and previously vital resources often lose their significance. A century ago, the location of coal and petroleum factored into how states prosecuted wars; today, it is cobalt and lithium that are labeled “critical minerals,” and some analysts are concerned that the race for them could start wars. Yet during such shifts, it can be hard to determine whether to prioritize new resources over the more established ones. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine put severe stress on energy supply chains, forcing countries in Europe and Africa to scramble for access to oil, coal, and natural gas. At the same time, the pressures of climate change and the transition from carbon drive countries to race after the necessary components for green technologies. As a result, many Americans are calling on the federal government to prioritize the security of traditional energy sources such as oil and gas even as many others clamor for weaning the country from those sources.

Both parties must clarify which national security issues are most urgent.

New technologies also multiply the number of pathways that rivals and revisionists can use to threaten national security. Information and communication technologies can help empower a military and serve as powerful tools for propaganda and disinformation. Similarly, breakthroughs in biosciences can save lives on the battlefield but also heighten the risk of biological warfare. Mysteries surrounding unidentified aerial phenomena hint at advanced technologies that top U.S. officials cannot explain away easily. As Senator Marco Rubio of Florida put it recently, “Anything that enters an airspace that’s not supposed to be there is a threat.”

Entrenched political dynamics in Washington also push more and more issues onto the national security platter. The Pentagon is much better funded than the State Department; it is easier to sell security than diplomacy to Congress and the American people. In a world of constrained budgets, policy entrepreneurs are willing to frame their pet issues as national security concerns to unlock resources from the Department of Defense. International relations scholars call this phenomenon “securitization.” At the turn of this century, U.S. officials began to describe HIV/AIDS as a national security issue, arguing that the disease sapped economies and threatened to topple governments in African countries. This argument may have been exaggerated, but it was a way to marshal resources to combat the global epidemic, including the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, credited with saving millions of lives in Africa since it was launched by the George W. Bush administration.

Economic and technological concerns tend to have bipartisan appeal in national security debates. Since the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik space program in 1957, many U.S. policymakers have been in a panic about the United States’ losing its technological edge to another great power. In the early decades of the Cold War, Moscow was the principal concern. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was Japan. In this century, it has been China. This has inevitably led policymakers to focus on technologies perceived as critical to ensuring the country’s economic supremacy. In recent decades, their concern has been semiconductors. For the rest of this decade at least, they will obsess about artificial intelligence. All of these dynamics ensure an ever-increasing list of national security priorities.

MORE IS NOT BETTER

The more issues that are placed on the national security docket, the harder it may be for policymakers to focus on those that matter most. The Cold War led U.S. officials to view the world through a reductive lens, but it also enabled them to sort out what was truly important in foreign policy. The tendency of recent administrations to declare issue after issue a matter of national security, however, makes it easy for a multitude of potential threats to obscure the most imminent danger.

One way that national security doctrine can be narrowed and clarified is through the ebb and flow of power between the two major political parties. During the Cold War, presidential candidates often spoke of “missile gaps” or “windows of vulnerability” that became national security priorities. Republicans have tended to display more hawkish instincts, prioritizing threats from malevolent actors; Democrats are more likely to take diffuse threats such as climate change or pandemics seriously. These differences can lead to conflict on key national security questions. On energy security, for example, conservatives minimize the threat posed by climate change, whereas progressives highlight it; House Republicans warn that winding down U.S. production of coal, oil, and natural gas undermines national security, whereas progressives caution that it is the failure to do so that poses the real threat.

It might be expected that whenever power shifts from one party to the other, Washington’s national security focus would shift accordingly. But in practice, even when a presidential administration comes to power that is radically different from its predecessor, the list of national security priorities tends to expand rather than merely shift. For example, when the 2002 National Security Strategy was released, Zelikow stated that the George W. Bush administration was “surpassing the Clinton administration” because it had “consistently identified poverty, pandemic disease, biologic and genetic dangers, and environmental degradation as significant national security threats.” Although the Bush administration’s 2002 strategy infamously focused on the nexus between terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, it also gave significant emphasis to the Clinton administration’s national security priorities.

More recently, the Trump administration’s emphasis on great-power competition, which took center stage in the 2017 National Security Strategy, could have been viewed as an aberration. The Biden administration’s 2022 strategy, however, did not shy away from identifying competition with China and Russia as a central challenge. Indeed, it stated explicitly that “the People’s Republic of China harbors the intention and, increasingly, the capacity to reshape the international order in favor of one that tilts the global playing field to its benefit.”

One reason administrations are reluctant to deemphasize their predecessors’ national security concerns is simple political prudence. Most Americans do not seem to care when an administration hypes a national security threat that turns out to be overblown. Policymakers can always explain that they were just being cautious or that their very warnings helped neutralize the threat. On the other hand, people tend to remember when an administration downplays a national security concern that metastasizes into a full-blown crisis. There are many reasons why the Trump administration bungled its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but one of them was that it had disbanded the National Security Council’s Directorate for Global Health, Security, and Biodefense in 2018. According to the Associated Press, the decision suggested that Trump “did not see the threat of pandemics in the same way that many experts in the field did.” Presidents and policy principals often look at national security concerns the way that Michael Corleone of The Godfather films looked at organized crime: every time he thought he was out, they pulled him back in.

Another reason that older national security priorities are rarely discarded is bureaucratic politics. As long as an issue continues to be categorized in strategy documents as a matter of national security, a government agency can count on continued funding. For many Foreign Service and foreign area officers, it takes years to learn enough about a particular country or issue to be considered an expert. As a result, bureaucracies resist any attempt to downgrade an existing priority if such a move would affect their core missions or devalue their training.

Whether policymaking elites are optimistic or pessimistic about the future can also play into the willingness of an administration to de-emphasize a lesser threat. When elites believe that geopolitical developments are moving in a favorable direction for the United States, it is easier to depoliticize possible threats by suggesting long-term solutions. During the 1990s, for example, U.S. officials were confident that the liberal international order would entice Russia and China into becoming more like the United States, thereby eliminating the national security threats they had posed. This assumption allowed for strategic patience toward both countries for decades.

When policymakers believe the future will be less favorable to the United States, however, they may be tempted to amplify any potential national security threats. Suddenly, every issue is viewed as a possible tipping point that could hasten further decline in national power. Security becomes a totalizing issue as officials perceive anything and everything as an existential threat. At present, both public opinion polling and the discourse of elites suggest a deep pessimism about the strength of the United States in the future. The benefits of the rules-based international order have cratered in recent years. The world is experiencing the greatest number of conflicts since 1945. Countries are racing to erect barriers to trade and migration while restricting civil liberties. Many states are in a deep democratic recession, with populist and authoritarian leaders arguing that their mode of governance is superior. None of these trends benefit U.S. national security, and domestic divisions exacerbate the public’s fears about these threats. Given the current geopolitical situation, it would be foolhardy to expect policymakers to winnow their list of national security priorities.

RIGHTSIZING THREATS

Several factors have pushed a host of new issues into the national security bucket. Adding threat after threat dilutes the concept of national security, as recent iterations of the National Security Strategy make clear. The document is often little more than a box-checking exercise for executive branch agencies and is therefore of limited use in thinking about foreign policy. This has been obvious in recent years, as successive administrations have neglected issues that were mentioned in their own National Security Strategies. For example, Trump administration officials minimized the risk of pandemics, and Biden administration officials insisted that the Middle East was calm.

In fairness, most of the national security issues identified by these annual reports are real. Russia and China are rival great powers whose values diverge from those of the United States. The past decade has made abundantly clear just how drastically pandemics and climate change can threaten the American way of life. New technologies such as artificial intelligence may very well pose critical threats to national security in the years to come.

But if national security challenges cannot easily be downgraded or eliminated, at least they should be better categorized. Even foreign policy neophytes are aware that one can classify national security concerns by country (Iran, North Korea) and by theme (nonproliferation, cybersecurity). In thinking about how to allocate scarce time and resources, however, there are at least two ways to better organize this ever-growing list.

One improvement would be for U.S. officials to sort national security issues by timescale and degree of urgency. Some concerns, such as terrorism and Russian revanchism, pose immediate and pressing risks. Others, such as artificial intelligence and China’s rising power, are medium-term concerns. Still others, such as climate change, create challenges in the here and now but will have their greatest effect over the long term. The more explicit policymakers are about the anticipated timing of specific threats, the easier it will be for the government to properly allocate resources. This does not mean that the urgent should crowd out the important. Rather, it means formulating a reasoned basis for diverting some resources away from important but longer-term threats. Prioritizing urgency would also allow successive administrations to make clear which initiatives they intend to enact while in office.

Another way of clarifying the relative importance of a national security threat is to specify whether the issue demands proactive measures, defensive responses, or a mix of both. New viruses that risk causing pandemics cannot be addressed before they emerge and are difficult to contain once they do, so a preventive posture is called for. Public health officials need to be ready for contact tracing and testing; scientists need to be prepared for researching and synthesizing tests and vaccines. Attempting to completely eradicate diseases that have already moved from animals to humans, however, is a waste of time and resources. Thwarting terrorist cells, on the other hand, may require offensive measures such as covert action or the use of special forces. Coping with China’s rising economic and military power requires an array of offensive and defensive responses to better protect the United States without needlessly exacerbating tensions to the point of armed conflict.

If everything is defined as national security, nothing is a national security priority.

The government could also produce an annual scorecard to rank national security concerns by order of current importance. Such an approach would both enable policymakers to highlight which arenas of national security they believe warrant the greatest attention now and show the public how different threats have been rated over time. Equally important, scorecards would allow administrations to de-emphasize some threats without dismissing them entirely—that is, it would force U.S. officials to state which issues are less vital than others. Even if the specific ranking proved controversial, such an exercise would bring more focus to national security debates and help identify underrated threats.

Calibrating national security priorities has always been a challenge for U.S. officials. In January 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously delivered a National Press Club speech in which he specified which parts of the globe were within the U.S. “defense perimeter.” He did not include the Korean Peninsula. Nonetheless, when North Korea invaded South Korea less than six months later, the Truman administration deployed 300,000 troops. Korea was not a U.S. national security priority—until it was.

In the 70 years since, the definition of national security has been stretched almost beyond recognition. New technologies have multiplied the vectors through which external forces can threaten the United States. Furthermore, because security issues command greater staffs and budgets, policy entrepreneurs have strong incentives to frame their interests as matters of national security. The forces that push issues into the national security queue are far more powerful than the forces that lead policymakers to exclude them. Nevertheless, even with this expansion, the United States has been blindsided by events: 9/11, the COVID-19 pandemic, the October 7 attacks. Simply having a longer list of threats hasn’t really helped prepare for the unexpected.

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.

By Daniel W. Drezner