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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...