National Security

Donald M. Snow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429765445
• Edition: 7
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

The seventh edition of this highly successful textbook analyzes the history, evolution, and processes of national security policies.

It examines national security from two fundamental fault lines - the end of the Cold War and the evolution of contemporary terrorism dating from the 9/11 terrorist attacks - and traces their path up to ISIS and beyond. The book considers how the resulting era of globalization and geopolitics guides policy. Placing these trends in conceptual and historical context and following them through military, semimilitary, and nonmilitary concerns, National Security treats its subject as a nuanced and subtle phenomenon that encompasses everything from the global to the individual with the nation at its core.

New to the Seventh Edition

• 
  
  

• An assessment of the impact of the Trump presidency on national security and relevant domestic policies, including border security and energy security matters.

• 
  
  

• The continuing impact and evolution of terrorism as a security problem, with notable emphasis on the decline of the Islamic State (IS) and what terrorist threats are likely to succeed it.

• 
  
  

• A description of the cyber security problem with an emphasis on Russian efforts to interfere with the 2016 US presidential election and beyond.

• 
  
  

• A revised delineation of the geographic and substantive challenges facing the United States in the form of a chapter on "lethal landscapes, " emphasizing the rise of China as a global rival and opponent in Asia and an attempt to deal with state aspirants like the Kurds.

This book will continue to be highly beneficial to students and scholars working and studying in security studies, military and strategic studies, defense studies, foreign policy, US politics and international relations.

Part I
The Conceptual Nexus

Debates about national security can seem confusing to the point of being off-putting to the newcomer to the subject. National security policy and its study occur within a framework of concepts and ideas that is not part of everyday political discourse. In addition, national security deals with life-and-death concerns about the safety, well-being, and even potentially the physical existence of the country and its citizens. Together, these factors set it apart from other areas of the policy process. As a result, national security and its study have evolved their own special language and ways of looking at their special policy area. Part I introduces the concepts and ways of thinking around which national security has been built and evolves.

It consists of two chapters that introduce the area and serve as an underpinning for the rest of the book. Chapter 1 addresses the question of how the idea of national security is changing in the contemporary world, with emphases both on the international environment and on the domestic political scene. The operative, and distinctive, idea of national security is the concept of threat, and thus the discussion of the international aspect of the “intermestic” policy area (partly international and partly domestic) looks at how the pattern of threats to the United States is changing, whereas the discussion of domestic concerns concentrates on the current debate about national security. Chapter 2 introduces and elaborates on the series of interrelated concepts around which national security policy matters are organized. It concludes with a discussion of the dominant pattern of thinking that has helped frame those discussions, the realist paradigm.

Chapter 1
National Security for a New and Changing Era

American national security policy continues to evolve. Since the 2016 election, it has entered a new international and domestic political environment in which influences inside and outside the country have accentuated an “intermestic” situation to which the country must adapt. Internationally, the country is adjusting to a changed emphasis in terms of how it interacts both with friends and adversaries. Disagreements within the G-7 and tariff threats are examples of adverse dealings with allies while the country vies with North Korea and Iran globally. Domestically, political dysfunction, hyper-partisanship, and gridlock continue to dominate political and economic agendas and extend to the national security effort. The two environments intersect over both the impact on defense budgets. After reviewing and laying out some of the basic concerns associated with each factor and their intersection, the chapter concludes with an attempt to show how these influences are relevant to the current national security condition.

The United States is at or nearing one of its periodic crossroads in its national security orientation toward the world. Since 1945, the United States has been the leading power in the world, the country whose policies and actions have mattered everywhere. Much of this predominance has had a national security base, premised on and often enforced by the military strength of the United States, which has been the primary measure of national security. During this period, the United States has generally adopted an expansive, sometimes aggressive global role based on an abundance of resources that could be devoted to national security chores.

This period of American dominance, sometimes described in superlatives like “American hegemony,” has eroded. It developed after World War II when the United States was virtually alone in the possession of great economic strength and military potential and thus stood astride the world system. This position was occasionally challenged, but until recently there has not been any systematic suggestion that the United States might have to dilute its role of world predominance. Domestic and international dynamics suggest that traditional American dominance may be becoming less tenable, possibly even untenable. Assessing these assertions produces important questions that form much of the core of what follows.

There are two major sources of contemporary challenge to the traditional American national security role. Neither is unprecedented. The first is weakness at home, a basically domestic concern caused by major difficulties in the operation of the American political system. The strongest manifestation of this weakness has been the slow growth of the American and global economies, which has further served to exacerbate underlying dysfunctions, and the political battle over domestic priorities, including national security posture and actions. One early 2000s outcome of internal developments was a determination to try to reduce federal spending, including the national security budget, to help balance the budget, a goal that has quietly been effectively abandoned. Another has been a reaction against US involvement in national security operations in the past decade that have been controversial and have raised questions about the wisdom of extrapolating future actions from traditional policies and levels of activism. Syria is a prime example.

Neither condition—economic stricture or policy reassessment—is unique to this time. The United States suffered a period of economic downturn in the 1970s and 1980s that some suggested might result in a permanent reduction in American economic prosperity and America’s economic position in the world, and that crisis proved overblown. The popular negative reaction to the outcome of American efforts in Vietnam in the 1970s produced a far more severe demand for reassessing the level of American national security activism.

The period between the end of World War II (1945) and the present witnessed remarkable development and transformation in the idea and shape of national security in the American experience. National security was not a central and enduring concern in most of the previous 150+ years of American history, when American interests were more clearly focused on institutionalizing the independence won in 1783 and in developing the vast reaches of the North American continent.

World War II and the Cold War were watersheds in the American concern with national security as an ongoing, central American problem. World War II permanently ended any American delusions that it could remain politically aloof from the rest of the world. The peacetime politico-military threat posed by the Soviet Union and the growing communist world was also a transformational experience that produced, among other things, the first major sustained peacetime American concern with national security, the first coherent American security orientation toward the world, and the first sustained commitment of substantial American resources to the problem of national security.

The United States is now entering a new phase in its national security evolution. National security policy has always been quintessentially intermestic, a combination of international and domestic influences. This term is more generally associated with national security’s close conceptual cousin, foreign policy (it is, for instance, a central theme of Snow and Haney, American Foreign Policy for a New Era), but it applies equally well to national security policy. The heart of the intermestic dynamic is the belief that national security policies have both an international and a domestic content and impact and that those influences physically interact in making and implementing policy. An internationally based problem like terrorism also has domestic consequences that must be taken into consideration in making an international response and that will be affected by the international outcome of the issue. Similarly, many domestic issues, such as trade policy, have an international impact, and how they are resolved affects the international dimension of economic policy.

American national security policy and politics can be cast in intermestic terms. After World War II, for instance, the major international factor was the rise of a powerful, antagonistic Soviet bloc in political and military opposition to the United States and the rest of the noncommunist world, and it demanded a response in kind. The primarily military dimension of that change became the basis for the American national security policy and strategy of containment, a construct that evolved over time as the Soviet threat inflated and eventually deflated. Domestically, the threat was manifest in a parallel political demonization of communism with sharp domestic political impact and the first large-scale continuous commitment of sizable American resources to national security in times other than a major “hot” war.

This pregnant period of American national security development and physical resource commitment was not linear. The negative outcome of American involvement in Vietnam in 1973 brought with it a strong but temporary negative reaction to, and thus rethinking of, the national security commitments the country had made. At the same time, the late 1970s and early 1980s witnessed the American economy in an apparent crisis of competitiveness that raised questions about the affordability of America’s ongoing global commitments and its willingness to bear those costs. The Vietnam “hangover” (the intense negative attitude toward security resulting from the outcome of the war) was largely over by the early 1980s, and by the end of that decade, the American economy had rebounded on the coattails of American preeminence in high technology, thus restoring the luster to both international and domestic aspects of national security policy. After the Cold War ended, the United States enjoyed a decade-long apparent respite from serious international threats during the 1990s while the American economy flourished in the early stages of economic globalization. The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, punctured the international tranquility in the new millennium and re-created a sense of threat and national security vitality that had receded during the 1990s. The second decade of the twenty-first century has already provided a new permutation that may mark another new era for American national security. The questioning of possible overextension and misapplication of American force in Vietnam has its parallel in similar questioning about the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That national security has been in a process of transition since 2016 is hard to deny, as is its intermestic nature. What may be different this time is that the national security debate of the latter twentieth century was driven primarily by international threats to which the domestic environment provided resources, whereas resource constraints in the current period may instead affect the extent and nature of national security responses to perceptions of international threats. The idea that the United States should pull back from a generous but expensive commitment to enforcing the global order has been a signature characteristic of the Trump administration’s approach to America’s role in the world.

Whether the complex of influences swirling around national security will represent a fundamental or transitory adjustment is uncertain. The motor that drove national security during the second half of the twentieth century was a clear, relatively unambiguous, and compelling challenge and threat driven by the international environment that could not be left unattended. The primary engine of the current reconsideration is more clearly domestic and surrounds the question of how much activism the American political system is willing to bear. A return to a period of national economic growth, the balm that has healed previous economically influenced crises, may provide the salve that reduces the sharp edges of the argument. In the meantime, there is little consensus about what the national security problem is or how much to commit to its amelioration.

While the idea that national security is inherently an interplay of domestic and international (in other words, intermestic) factors may have broad implications, the current sense of concern and priorities may be somewhat more ephemeral. Things change, and the circumstances that are currently of such great import may be among them. As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said over 2,500 years ago, “Nothing endures but change. Nothing stays still.” Change, in other words, is the real constant, and what it means in the current environment forms the national security problem. Abstract philosophy aside, adapting to change is the essence of the policy debate.

The sources, dynamics, and prospects for consequences of intermestic change in the traditional American national security equation provide the major theme of this volume. The discussion moves first to an introduction of the nature and sources of change in the international and domestic environments that underlay the current reexamination of how the United States approaches national security, themes that are elaborated and explained in subsequent chapters. The question is then phrased in terms of possible directions that change may take and the consequences and desirability of those possible changes.

The Nature of Change in a Heraclitean World

The analysis of national security is always conducted in an atmosphere of some controversy, emotion, and uncertainty. The major source of controversy is the subjective nature of the problem. National security’s basis is in threats (promises to do harm in the absence of compliance with some condition demanded by the threatening party) and responses to them. Threats may or may not be overt and overwhelmingly obvious, but they are almost always subject to interpretations that allow reasonable people to disagree about them. Within the current debate about national security, one issue that encapsulates this subjectivity is the contentious matter of Chinese military expansion and its clear pretension to challenge the United States as a world power. By almost any measure, the Chinese are devoting considerable resources to military modernization and expansion. What this expansion means for the United States is not so clear. If one wants to inflate the threatening nature of Chinese expansion, one points to the ominous possibilities of a fleet of Chinese aircraft carriers with designs—and presumably capabilities—far more advanced than the current American carrier fleet. If one wants to downgrade that threat, one questions how or to what extent this capability directly threatens the United States. Alternatively, one can argue that modern missile technology leaves aircraft carriers exceedingly vulnerable and thus an anachronistic target, like capital surface battleships in World War II—a capability from which sensible countries should be divesting themselves. On the other hand, Chinese naval expansion can be seen ominously as a challenge to American naval hegemony in East Asian waters like the South China Sea that carry much of the world’s trade.

National security matters are also highly emotional because of the potentially enormous impact and consequences of policy outcomes. The heart of national security is ultimately ensuring the physical survival of the state and protection against those who would encroach upon it. Prior to the Cold War, these were rarely prescient concerns for Americans, but the ever-present possibility of a civilization-ending nuclear Armageddon created a sense of urgency and emotion that has attached to the subject ever since. This has been revived in the new century by the threat of international terrorism and the danger posed if its actors could obtain these weapons. Threat—such as that posed by terrorism—particularly influences discussions on future policies because the failure to take adequate measures today could possibly jeopardize the ability to ensure security and even survival in an uncertain future. This dynamic gives a conservative bias to national security planning. One cannot afford to underestimate threats because being wrong could be catastrophic. The result is a proclivity for overpreparation and “tried and true” approaches that have succeeded in the past.

Uncertainty fuels both controversy and emotional anxiety. Much of that uncertainty arises from the volatile and largely uncontrollable nature of an international environment to which national security policy must respond. Who, for instance, foresaw in early 1990 that the United States would be at war with Iraq by early fall of that year? The action precipitating that involvement, of course, was Saddam Hussein’s decision to invade and annex Kuwait, a decision US planners neither anti...