How to Tell a National Security Story

A review of Peter Roady, “The Contest Over National Security: FDR, Conservatives, and the Struggle to Claim the Most Powerful Phrase in American Politics” (Harvard University Press, 2024), and Andrew Preston, “Total Defense: The New Deal and the Invention of National Security” (Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2025). 

The 15th annual Aspen Security Forum made headlines in an unexpected way: Shortly before the conference’s start on July 15, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth barred the department’s civilian and military officials from participating in the widely respected gathering of foreign affairs experts. Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell explained the withdrawal in these terms: “The department will remain strong in its focus to increase the lethality of our war fighters, revitalize the warrior ethos and project peace through strength on the world stage. It is clear the A.S.F. is not in alignment with these goals.” The Aspen Strategy Group, the forum’s organizer, responded by highlighting how, for “more than a decade, the Aspen Security Forum has welcomed senior officials—Republican and Democrat, civilian and military—as well as senior foreign officials and experts, who bring experience and diverse perspectives on matters of national security,” and it lamented the Pentagon’s lack of participation in this year’s forum on apparently partisan or ideological grounds. The forum reiterated its commitment to “informed, non-partisan debate about the most important security challenges facing the world.” This controversy over how debates about U.S. national security will be conducted in the future rests in part on fights over a more fundamental question: How should U.S. national security be defined in the first place?

Historians Peter Roady and Andrew Preston bring crucial contributions to our understanding of how the concept and rhetorical tool of "national security" has changed over time. Roady and Preston both find fault with our current understanding of national security, and both trace the source of those faults to political debates during the New Deal. But they tell quite different tales and thus focus on different sets of key actors. For Roady, the central thread is a conservative counterrevolution that succeeded in defeating the New Deal’s promise of including economic security for all Americans as an essential component of national security. For Preston, the fault lies instead with the New Deal’s liberalism and its attachment to securing the United States from fear itself. While Roady provides a policy prescription to return to the push for nationwide economic security, Preston offers the broader and deeper proposal on how to redefine national security to meet the challenges of climate change. 

In his probing examination of the political struggle to define national security during the 1930s, Roady argues that Franklin Roosevelt initially deployed the language of security to address the Great Depression’s economic effects, but conservatives usurped the idea and molded it according to their perceptions of threats to the U.S. homeland. An assistant professor of history at the University of Utah, Roady previously served as an official in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. These dual facets of his career give him the perspective of an insider-outsider. Roady sought out government service after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but, once he arrived at the Pentagon, he witnessed how, to his surprise, national security was prioritized above all other federal policies and responsibilities. Roady subsequently discovered that what he characterized as a “narrowing” of the notion of national security to focus exclusively on militarized responses to world affairs stemmed from the drama of U.S. domestic politics in the 1930s and 1940s.

He begins “The Contest Over National Security” with Roosevelt’s speech at the 1932 Democratic Convention introducing central tenets of the New Deal, and he ends with the administration of Harry Truman and its ineffectiveness in implementing the Fair Deal as domestic policy. Roady is concerned primarily with the “language of national security” and how it helped define the bounds of the U.S. national security state. He traces how the rhetoric of national security evolved by focusing on both presidential and special interest messaging efforts.

Roady argues that national security, as originally envisioned by Roosevelt, had a far more encompassing and transformative meaning than it came to have by the end of Truman’s time in office. In Roosevelt’s view, according to Roady, security necessarily included economic and social security, not just security from foreign threats. Roady laments the shrinking of national security’s meaning and places the blame for it on conservative persuasion campaigns supported by corporate interests. Roady’s take situates his book within a broader literature emphasizing struggles between public and private interests in U.S. political history. His specific project is to reclaim the early New Deal’s broader notion of national security, one tied to its liberal policies over the course of Roosevelt’s many years in office. Roosevelt’s speech at the 1932 Democratic Convention outlined his vision of protecting the personal liberty of the individual and the collective liberty of the community, introducing, for the first time, his new liberalism to combat the Great Depression. Roady traces this Rooseveltian fascination with safeguarding the liberty of individuals to the administration’s early adoption of economic liberty as official domestic policy. Recognition of Roosevelt’s advocacy for economic rights is, of course, not new in and of itself. Roady’s contribution reveals how Roosevelt’s deliberate association of security with the economy and thus his use of security expanded the powers of the federal government. Roady traces Roosevelt’s continued use of security as a leading theme for economic governance through his iconic fireside chats during the 1930s. 

Roady’s titular “contest over national security” developed, according to his analysis, because of Roosevelt’s reliance on the language of security to mobilize liberal voters. In Roady’s narrative, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) became the primary antagonist to FDR’s broad conception of security and his contention that economic security was essential to individual liberty. The NAM brought together conservative executives from leading manufacturing companies. According to Roady’s analysis of its leaders’ personal papers, they resented the liberal mobilization of security in support of an expanded federal government when they had long conceived of limited government as necessary to protect individual liberty. Roady shows how the NAM relied on recent innovations in media technology to promote a coordinated messaging campaign, paying particular attention to their use of booklets, such as “A Day in the Life of an Average American,” and radio broadcasts. His concentration on the NAM displays a different approach to it than that adopted by Kim Phillips-Fein in her earlier investigation of the ideas influencing these conservative business leaders. Roady uncovers how the NAM ran a sophisticated public polling system, which he argues operated as a business. The robust polling conducted by the NAM led the coalition to believe in the success of its influence campaign. Roady’s depiction of the NAM, however, leaves unclear how much impact the coalition had on members of Congress and thus on federal policy. Documenting the activities of special interest blocs, while important, may lead to impressions of faceless and shadowy interests undermining progressive agendas in U.S. politics.

Roady’s account becomes particularly compelling when he highlights how Brain Truster and former Roosevelt speechwriter Raymond Moley, who played an influential role in the adoption of the language of security, became a prominent critic of the New Deal. Moley’s trajectory is particularly illuminating because it shows concretely how the language of security shifted meaning during the 1930s. Focusing on more particular historical actors such as Moley would have illustrated more effectively how national security shifted from a liberal priority within the Roosevelt administration to a conservative critique from outside of the federal government, and it would have had the added benefit of bringing Roady’s “insider-outsider” perspective to the fore. Roady concludes by urging a return to the liberal principles of economic security and social freedom as the “true” components of national security within the United States.

Andrew Preston’s “Total Defense: The New Deal and the Invention of National Security” also addresses national security as a liberal concept. Consistent with the centuries-spanning approach in his 2012 “Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy,” a pioneering study of the role of religion in U.S. foreign policy, Preston investigates the “invention of national security” over a much longer period than does Roady. Preston starts at the foundation of the United States and then follows the notion’s transformations over time, culminating in the Roosevelt administration’s hardening of the definition of national security. Preston identifies “necessity” as the crucial consideration that has shaped conceptions of U.S. national security over many eras. 

Preston begins with the notion of free security, a concept defined by historian C. Vann Woodward in the early 1970s. Woodward observed that, unlike European countries, the United States needed to devote few resources to a military establishment throughout much of its history because the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans served as natural guarantors of its territorial security. Preston acknowledges other historians of the 20th century have highlighted how the concept of “free security” influenced national security, but he claims historians of the 19th century largely ignored the “myth of free security” when it came to the military campaigns against Native American populations known as the “Indian Wars” and territorial conquest from Mexico. Preston discusses traditional figures such as presidents, diplomats, and academics as thinkers, but he also introduces a wider array of cultural figures as worthy of equal consideration because of their influence on the popular imagination. These individuals include early 20th-century writers Ernest Hugh Fitzpatrick and Homer Lea, who were obsessed with an invasion of the continental United States by Japan; social insurance theorists Isaac Rubinow and Abraham Epstein; and the movie director Frank Capra, whose government-sponsored films presented World War II as the “good war.” Preston uses these cultural figures to illustrate how the 19th-century logic of free security gave way in popular thinking to heightened anxieties over U.S. national power, status, and survival in the increasingly interconnected world of the 20th century.

“Total Defense” describes how worries over U.S. national borders in the early 20th century led to increasing calls for military preparedness. Preston situates those calls within a broader policy turn toward, of all things, insurance. He examines Woodrow Wilson’s adoption of “moral insurance” to combat the “spread of the conflagration [of world war]” as Wilson’s approach to military preparedness in 1914, and he links that metaphor to prevailing popular concerns with fire risk and the rise in insurance to compensate for fire damage. Preston contends that insurance formed a policy bedrock for national security, going so far as to claim insurance and “military efficiency sprouted from the same conceptual ground as progressivism: a desire for improvement by modernizing and rationalizing society in ways that preserved what were thought to be the core elements of American identity, democracy, and sovereignty.” According to Preston, Wilson’s adoption of the language of social insurance led to the Wilson administration’s expansion of federal power to cultivate increased (yet limited) equality and patriotism while “insuring” the flow of free international trade. The trick for progressive thinkers and policymakers, then, was the differentiation of national security as a kind of social insurance from the militarist and racist visions of preparedness advocated in the same period by groups such as the National Security League and the American Defense Society.

Preston then turns to uncover the “social welfare origins of national security” in the years between 1937 and 1942. Preston treads familiar territory with his analysis of FDR’s 1937 “quarantine speech” condemning the Axis powers’ aggressions in nearby territories. Yet, by examining the speech as a sequel to Wilson’s 1914 imagery of insuring the United States against the risk of a kind of fire in international affairs, Preston, like Roady, reveals how Roosevelt interwove “social economic welfare and national self-defense” much more thoroughly than had Wilson. Roosevelt’s rhetorical mixing of economic welfare and national security helped support the New Deal’s expansion of federal power.

Preston builds on the work of historians such as Ira Katznelson, David M. Kennedy, and Jennifer Klein in his critique of the New Deal regime, but he pushes their criticism of liberalism even further by striking at the liberal desire to protect the U.S. from emergencies as part of the core of New Deal policies. While Roady laments the New Deal’s turn from economic security to social and then national security, Preston traces the interweaving of economic and social security into national security. He concentrates on the Roosvelt administration’s employment of “emergency,” both in rhetoric and in legislation, for its signature domestic policies to combat the Great Depression. Preston’s discussion of national security’s early definitions includes standard historical figures such as early defense intellectuals Edward Mead Earle and Arnold Wolfers, but he uses social thinkers Charles Merriam, Rubinow, and Epstein to illustrate the role of social security within the New Deal’s concept of national security. Social reformers and planners had concluded, in Preston’s view, that “economic laissez-faire was akin to geopolitical free security” in that both were outdated 19th-century ideas unsuited to the geopolitical realities of 20th-century global conflicts. While Roady traces an evolution from economic to social to national security, Preston sees social security and national security as policies developing hand in hand.

Preston sees the reasoning behind the U.S. atomic bombings of Japan as an extension of the New Deal’s repurposing of free security. Preston traces Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb as a precursor to the domino theory against global communism first articulated by the Eisenhower administration in the early Cold War. Preston reframes the domino theory as the “most natural way of analogizing national security” because it distills the strategic thought against threats to the U.S. homeland. FDR’s resistance to Nazi and Imperial Japanese expansionism evolved, against the backdrop of nuclear weapons, into Truman and Eisenhower’s resistance to communist expansion within the “free world.” Preston’s inquiry into the reinvention of national security under Roosevelt as security from fear gives greater urgency to Preston’s wish to once again reinvent the “basic terms of national self-defense” for the 21st century.

The Trump administration’s rejection of participation in the Aspen Security Forum, now expanded to include all think tank and research events, raises concerns not only about the administration’s concept of national security but also about who will be in the proverbial room for discussions about how best to define that crucial concept. The late political scientist Joseph S. Nye Jr., who developed the concepts of soft power, smart power, and neoliberalism, co-founded the Aspen Security Forum in 1971 with his then-colleague Paul Doty, a chemist and the founder of Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International and Edwin “Ed” A. Deagle Jr., the director of the international relations program at the Rockefeller Foundation at the time, with the purpose to be “less academic, more bipartisan in composition, and more policy oriented.” Near the end of the first Trump administration, Nye proposed conditions for a moral foreign policy in an essay in the Texas National Security Review. Nye argued for greater discipline in structuring moral reasoning about U.S. foreign policy, and the same holds true for the concept of national security. Nye linked U.S. foreign policy and conceptions of national security through his discussion of Swiss-German political scientist Arnold Wolfers, a pioneer in the study of national power and the psychological influences on state behavior in the international system. Wolfers published a series of articles in the late 1940s and early 1950s grappling with the nascent concept of national security, and both Roady and Preston analyze Wolfers’s much-cited 1952 “‘National Security’ as an Ambiguous Symbol.” But Wolfers’s 1949 “Statesmanship and Moral Choice” deserves equal consideration. Wolfers claimed that “[i]f a statesman decides that the dangers to the security of his country are so great that a course of action which may lead to war is necessary, he has placed an exceedingly high [moral] value on an increment of national security.”

Preston’s account shares some of Wolfers’s outlook in its focus on necessity as an essential element of the idea of national security. But as Laicie Heeley, a nuclear policy expert and editor-in-chief of the foreign policy Inkstick, pointed out on a 2018 episode of the “Things That Go Boom” podcast aptly titled “Home Security,” “When the government says it’s doing something for the sake of national security, does that include protecting you?” Heeley later observed, “Sometimes, as it turns out, what we think keeps us safe, or what some of us think keeps us safe, actually harms the rest.” While it remains uncertain how national security will be defined in the future, it can only be hoped that it will lead to a more democratic interpretation to meet the challenges of the 21st century.