Commentary: The Cold War and the Discourse of National Security

Asserting that historians have “struggled long and hard to forge a synthesis” on the Cold War era, Howard Jones and Randall B. Woods propose a “dominant approach based on the national security imperative.” They define national security to include social, economic, political, military, and cultural elements, both rational and irrational, that affect a country's safety. A synthesis based on the national security imperative, they believe, transcends the “visceral controversy” of past battles between traditionalist and revisionist scholars. Instead of the “value-laden judgments” and “simplicity” of previous frameworks, they assert, the national security approach promotes “understanding” of the Cold War. As a kind of annotated bibliography to histories of the Cold War in Europe and the Near East, the Jones and Woods essay is highly useful. I will surely turn to its citations and commentary again and again for bibliographical guidance on specific issues, geographical areas, people, and events. The value of forcing all of the disparate studies discussed in the essay into one overarching framework called “national security,” however, seems questionable. Before World War II the term “national security” scarcely existed; only in the late 1940s did it begin to become a centerpiece of foreign policy discussions. The meanings (symbolic systems set within historical contexts) of “national security” emerged only within the context of the Cold War and need to be “unpacked,” as literary theorists might say. In what contexts did the term arise? Does it provide a helpful approach for understanding the Cold War? This commentary will offer some tentative suggestions about the origins, the meanings, and the interpretive usefulness of the term. My analysis is necessarily sketchy, however, and I invite speculation from others. Traditions linked to the term “national interest” accompanied the rise of nation-states. Felix Gilbert's classic study of Washington's farewell address traced the oceanic transplantation of “interests of the states” doctrines to the new republic.1 Over a century later, the phrase “national interest” remained a dominant construct in discussions of foreign policymaking. Charles Beard, in his influential study of The Idea of National Interest, examined how the concept's usage and practice had evolved through the second decade of the twentieth century.2 The term “national interest,” however, developed powerfully negative overtones. Beard argued that special interests had captured the national interest for their own profit, and his writings helped the term develop a negative connotation as being the vehicle by which self-serving subnational groups pursued special advantages. Meanwhile, many critics of the “interests of the states” tradition, often those touting postwar internationalist organizations, equated national interest with the amoral pursuit of power for power's sake. Hans Morgenthau's postwar In Defense of the National Interest attempted to defend and revitalize the concept of national interest as an appropriate framework for the realist, balance-of-power policies he advocated for the Cold War.3 Morgenthau denounced the traditions of moralism and sentimentalized internationalism that he, and other realists, believed undermined execution of wise policy, and he refuted the by-now-familiar charges of amorality leveled against the national interest approach. But Morgenthau's postwar writings reveal the defensive tone that discourses about national interest had acquired in the postwar world. Consequently, policymakers and scholars who identified with the realist tradition increasingly embraced a new formulation: “national security.” Free from negative symbolic baggage, the term provided a potentially more successful articulation of specific realist policy goals. The word “security” had historic associations with protection. During World War II, “security” appeared frequently in foreign policy discourses, especially in connection with military affairs. When Henry Stimson testified in favor of universal military training before the House of Representatives in 1945, for example, he argued that such a program was the “necessary foundation on which to build the security of the United States.”4 Navy Secretary James Forrestal, in the same hearings, explained that he deliberately used the word “security” rather than “defense.”5 In the same era, “social security” had become the centerpiece of New Deal welfare programs. And “collective security,” an important concept in Wilsonian internationalist thought, provided the discursive tradition out of which emerged the “Security Council” of the new United Nations. Blending the several traditions associated with the word “security,” the phrase “national security” suggested a level of security that was midway between an individual's “social security” and the world's “collective security.” Dovetailing with the emergence of the United States as a superpower, the term placed responsibility for security on the military preparedness of the nation-state. Edward Mead Earle of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, for example, used the term largely as a synonym for national preparedness in a 1938 article advocating a proactive national policy that would prevent trouble rather than simply respond to it.6 By 1945, as planners began trying to formulate postwar foreign policies, the term “national security” suddenly appeared everywhere. In February 1945, Secretaries Stimson and Forrestal announced creation of a “Research Board for National Security,” which, they proposed, would continue research on new military weapons into peacetime.7 The Reader's Guide first used the term in 1945, cross-referencing it (as it remains today) to “U.S., Defense.” One of the earliest attempts to adapt the term to postwar policy came in September 1945 in an article by Paul Russell Anderson in the Annals of the American Academy called “National Security in the Postwar World.” President of the Pennsylvania College for Women and a consultant with the American Council on Education in Washington, Anderson explicitly advocated “national security” as an alternative to “collective security.” “There is a growing number of people who feel we must work for collective security wherever possible, but also develop our own plan for defense.… We shall not again be caught unaware and unprepared. We shall preserve the peace in co-operation with others if we can, but we shall be prepared to defend ourselves alone if need be.” As a program for postwar “national security,” Anderson advocated maintaining an “adequate” intelligence service, continued scientific research and development, continuous diagnosis of industrial, natural resource, and “manpower” capacities, a permanent and professionally trained military establishment, and morale forged by “common belief in certain basic moral concepts.”8 In short, as the terms “national interest” and “collective security” faded from public discourse, “national security” came into prominence. “National interest” seemed selfish and corruptible; “collective security” connoted weakness or raised the possibility of misguided foreign involvements. The newer term, by contrast, offered positive symbolic associations that neither of the previous terms could provide.9 “National security” can be seen as an aggregate of the well-worn, older terms; the negative words (“interest” and “collective”) were dropped, while the more positive words (“national” and “security”) were combined together. “National security” provided common discursive terrain upon which internationalists of both the national interest, realist school and the collective security school could unite in order to press for the one basic goal upon which they both agreed: the necessity of vigorous American global involvement in the postwar world. Usage of the new term snowballed after 1945, along with the attempt to marshal popular support for globalist and then strong anti-Communist policies. “National security,” scarcely used as a phrase before the war, became by the end of 1945 what Michael Mandelbaum and Daniel Yergin have called the “commanding idea” of the postwar period. “At certain moments,” wrote Yergin, “unfamiliar phrases suddenly become common articles of political discourse … [and] seem always to have been with us.”10 As the term emerged by the end of the war, it seems to have held relatively specific meanings related to military, industrial, and scientific power. Melvyn P. Leffler's A Preponderance of Power gives some attention to the late-World War II origins of “national security.” Leffler takes pains at the outset of his study to build a highly specific historical context of meaning for the term, around which he then builds his analysis of Truman's foreign policy. He suggests that the term initially had a close relationship to the school of geopolitics that dominated strategic thought during and after the war. To geopolitical analysts, industrial capacity (including resources), technological prowess, and military capabilities were the paramount “correlations of power” that shaped geopolitical configurations and thus provided the fundamentals of both foreign policy and strategic planning.11 The most important institutional embodiment of the term, of course, was the National Security Act of 1947, which revolutionized the structure of foreign policymaking. Leffler points out that the National Security Council (NSC), which became the central institution for coordinating Cold War foreign policy, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), both created by the act, used the basic correlations of geopolitics to shape their operational definitions of national security. The National Security Resources Board (NSRB), also created by the act and most clearly reflecting the geopolitical heritage of the term, was to be in charge of planning future mobilizations.12 To grasp the discursive importance of the new term “national security” in shaping how the “reality” of the Cold War came to be inscribed in both language and institutions, one need only imagine the fate of a “National Interest Act” or, even worse, a “Collective Security Agency.” Much of the power of the term came, linguistically, from the fact that it had a clear (and clearly negative) antonym: national insecurity. Terms with clearly implied opposites claim especially strong emotive and symbolic power, as in “male” (female), “strong” (weak); in fact, such sets of linguistic binaries often link together in chains of significations to form distinctive discourses. (For example, “insecurity,” “female,” “weak” often shared common significations in Cold War-era discourses.13) Because of its implied antonym, national security carried its own justification: Even advancing the need for national security implied its potential lack. Fears about insecurity (personal and social, as well as international) were already rampant in postwar American life. Amid postwar uncertainties, who could argue for insecurity? “National security,” a term without historically negative connotations, was a consensus-builder; it became the key word in an enormous peacetime expansion of state power. After 1947 the term became ubiquitous, and its meaning broadened. In a new age of symbolic politics, advocates of almost everything and anything scrambled to affix the popular label of national security to particular postwar agendas. The term stimulated the new Cold War think tanks and spawned weighty shelves of new books. In 1959 the name of the annual National Defense Resources Conference, sponsored by the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, was changed to the National Security Seminar. In 1963 the Center for Strategic Studies, established the year before, sponsored as one of its first acts a conference and book on National Security: The Demands of Strategy and Economics in the Decade Ahead. Alarmed over the growth of nondefense spending, participants generally called for giving new primacy to national security—that is, to appropriations for defense.14 Throughout the 1960s a new academic subfield within international relations, called “national securities studies,” spread throughout U.S. universities, producing growing numbers of courses, conferences, and publications.15 “National security” became the discursive vehicle that accompanied (both shaped and was shaped by) the Cold War's restructuring of the nation's political economy and governance.16 In the late 1970s, use of the term, like the Cold War itself, accelerated. Daniel Yergin's influential Shattered Peace (1977) aptly described the Cold War governing structures that emerged in the late 1940s as a “national security state.” In the wake of Shattered Peace, this influential construct became increasingly prevalent in histories, but was often used with less historically grounded specificity than Yergin's analysis employed.17 The Cold War revival during the late Carter and Reagan years produced new interest in national security studies within academia and think tanks. Any book list on foreign policy topics of the 1980s will confirm “national security” as a preeminent catchphrase; in fact, of the nearly two thousand entries for books containing “national security” as a keyword at a major university's library, well over 90 percent were published after the late 1970s.18 As use of the term “national security” proliferated in the 1980s, its meanings became even more diffuse. Scholars and politicians pushed the boundaries of traditional national security concepts, which had emphasized geopolitical considerations and the role of nation-states, in all directions. New formulations of national security stressed a broad concept that extended, as one scholar put it, “both above the nation-state, to something called international security, and below it, to individual security.”19 It also spread far beyond geopolitical discourses, becoming more prevalent within a wide variety of military, foreign policy, and domestic discussions and linked to a remarkable array of policy prescriptions.20 Sprinkled liberally in text and pronouncement, the term seemed to bolster the authority of the policymakers and academics who invoked it, but whatever specificity of meaning the term may have possessed in the late 1940s was entirely lost. The broadening of the term that occurred especially during the 1980s seems reflected in the latitudinous definition that Jones and Woods provide: “National security is defined broadly enough to show the relation between domestic and foreign elements affecting a country's safety and to include the social, economic, political, and military considerations that influence strategy, as well as the important and often subtle cross-cultural exchanges and the interworkings of the public and private sectors of society.” As historians, they have made the same discursive turn that Cold War policymakers themselves made: conflating a wide variety of contexts and complexities into a symbolically powerful but increasingly diffuse phrase—national security. Jones and Woods have mistakenly identified national security as a promising approach toward synthesis precisely because of the term's high symbolic valence—its ability to combine with just about any policy and be invoked by almost anyone. Arnold Wolfers's cautionary remarks, made in 1962, could be reissued with even more relevance to historians pushing a national security synthesis today: Wolfers wrote that when formulas such as national security “gain popularity they need to be scrutinized with particular care. They may not mean the same thing to different people. They may not have any precise meaning at all. Thus, while appearing to offer guidance and a basis for broad consensus, they may be permitting everyone to label whatever policy he favors with an attractive and possibly deceptive name.”21 Or, as Robert C. Post argued in 1976, “Although political rhetoric often invokes national security as if it were a 'fact' beyond the control of policymakers, national security is dictated by policy rather than the reverse.”22 In much the same way that postwar policymakers and analysts used the increasingly diffuse term “national security” to help unite diverse constituencies behind particular foreign policies, so Jones and Woods have similarly broadly employed it to gather scholars behind a single synthesis of Cold War interpretations. A national security synthesis is, therefore, in danger of simply replicating the Cold War policymakers' rationales by adopting uncritically their language and discursive traditions.23 “National security,” I have suggested, was a term that helped construct the Cold War and thus needs to be used carefully and contextually if used as an interpretive device.24 It incorporated parts of, while replacing, two earlier foreign policy discourses—national interest and collective security—both of which had developed significant negative connotations and oppositional constituencies. Drawing from both of these earlier internationalist traditions and carrying a powerfully emotive linguistic structure, the term “national security” could garner wide support for global involvements and bestow an aura of authority on those who invoked it. Gradually, it became so popular and all encompassing as to lose all definition. Debates over national security have become simply debates over foreign policy in general; national security experts are no more specific a category than foreign policymakers and analysts. In the field of national securities studies, and echoed in Jones and Woods's definition, the term has become a semiotic black hole, sucking in all meanings. The concept of national security thus may provide a useful focus for analyzing contested and changing policy formulations in specific cases and for examining the chains of signification that have made up policy discourses. But because its meanings have broadened out to become virtually synonymous with foreign policy itself, it seems of questionable value as a universalized interpretive paradigm. Jones and Woods have presented a helpful annotated list of books on a variety of foreign policy issues but not an interpretive essay on the origins of the Cold War.