Lansdowne Lecture: Andrew Preston - World Politics, the Liberalism of War, and the invention of US ‘national security’

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David Turpin Building (DTB) A110. National security may seem like a timeless notion, yet it actually has a very particular, very American, history—and a surprising one at that. It originated in the 1930s, when the majority of Americans were staunchly antiwar, as part of a White House campaign in response to the rise of fascism. Before then, national defense simply meant protecting sovereign territory from invasion, and Americans felt secure behind two vast oceans. In response to fascism abroad and complacency at home, New Dealers developed a new doctrine, coined as “national security,” to replace the old idea of self-defense: now even geographically and temporally remote threats were to be understood as clear-and-present dangers. But the invention of national security wasn’t just conditioned by external threat perception; it was part of the new liberalism that emerged in response to the Depression. No less than Social Security, national security was a New Deal promise that the state was obliged to safeguard Americans from the risks of the modern, interdependent world. US foreign policy, and world politics, haven’t been the same since.