Why America Got a Warfare State, Not a Welfare State

When Donald Trump won the presidency the first time, liberal internationalists set out to rethink their doctrines. Hillary Clinton’s aide Jake Sullivan commented that he had “the humility of the defeated,” and a few years later, as Joe Biden’s national security adviser, he developed the slogan of a “foreign policy for the middle class.” Breaking with decades of neoliberalism, the new creed would give up the illusion that the social contract and national security were separate. The main question in foreign policy isn’t just whether the government keeps people safe from enemies. Globalization “had frayed the socioeconomic foundations on which any strong and resilient democracy rests,” Sullivan said. A new national security outlook for the world would incorporate economic security at home as its chief goal.

Sullivan was going back to the future, the historian Andrew Preston’s new book implies. In Total Defense: The New Deal and the Invention of National Security, Preston argues that, between 1937 and 1942, Democrats in power created the idea of national security out of a New Deal liberal commitment to economic fairness for the common man. If so, the discovery of the domestic foundations and purposes of national security today is a rediscovery—the moment at the end of liberal internationalism when we “arrive where we started,” in poet T.S. Eliot’s lines, and “know the place for the first time.” And yet, unlike when New Dealers invented national security at the height of Franklin Roosevelt’s popularity, and saved the country from economic ruin, the concept’s Biden-era revamp has not helped Democrats to win elections. A return to their origins shows that they need to move on to a new beginning.

Preston starts by pushing back at the idea that “national security” is a necessary fixture of American thinking, either because it is an eternal problem of states or because it dates to deep in the mist of the country’s history. As he shows, the words “national security” had barely passed American lips before the 1930s, and the “catchy new term” did not “describe existing policies of national defense.” Rather, it emerged when it did because Americans needed “to describe a totally new way of thinking about national defense.” It was a mutation with enormous consequences for non-Americans on the receiving end of “total defense,” too.

Preston, a historian of U.S. foreign policy who has long taught at the University of Cambridge but is moving to the University of Virginia this fall, knows how to tell a story, and tell it well. Total Defense is so impressive because Preston is the master of his craft; his clarity and sophistication are always buttressed by illuminating evidence and well-chosen quotations, bespeaking both a great expert’s depth and an expert writer’s talent.

For most of their history, Preston says, Americans adopted the ideology of “free security,” not national security. It was born of the providential immunity of the United States from harm from abroad, and especially the great powers of Western Europe. “The Americans have no neighbors” and therefore no “conquests to fear” or “great wars,” French traveler Alexis de Tocqueville reported in 1835. It was, Preston suggests, precisely their “unprecedented” freedom from territorial danger that allowed Americans to be “unusually aggressive and acquisitive.” They could impose fear on others while experiencing little themselves. Constant wars across the North American continent and in their hemisphere prove as much, but none of this disturbed the free security paradigm much for a long time.

Even during World War I, Woodrow Wilson didn’t change the score. He had already made preparations for war, expanding the military like no president in peacetime after inheriting a tiny force—fewer men than the French lost in the first two weeks of the war. Once Wilson decided years later on the need for Americans to join the fray, he felt that he could not take advantage of a truly global sense of the national interest. He therefore argued for World War I as a war of choice rather than necessity, to pursue “abstract principles rather than clear and present dangers,” as Preston puts it. It was a sign of things to come that Wilson pivoted beyond territorial self-defense to portray threats to interests and values as threats in the first place, rather than as a nonmilitary problem. But doing so was no more than a “false start” toward national security.

The essential move Americans made after 1937, Preston claims, was to supplement territorial self-defense—keeping the homeland and the people on it safe—with a more inchoate and vague agenda that effectively declared even hypothetical risks unacceptable. Nipping them in the bud became a nonnegotiable imperative. Americans in the 1940s relabeled their old Department of War the Department of Defense. But what they were really doing was committing to the idea that the only good defense is preemptive offense.

In 1935, Congress passed Franklin Roosevelt’s most consequential legislation, the Social Security Act, to provide help to the aged and unemployed. “It was no coincidence that the invention of national security closely followed the creation of social security,” Preston asserts. Surely that is convincing as a rhetorical matter, since Roosevelt is so associated with both phrases. But what did he believe was the relationship between the two? Were other Americans buying it?

In a pivotal 1937 address in Chicago, known as the “quarantine” speech, Roosevelt argued that, at a minimum, he would strive to keep tyrannies like Germany and Japan from infecting America. After the Russian Revolution, Eastern Europe had been set up by the Western powers at Versailles as a “sanitary cordon” against communism, and now FDR applied same rhetoric to right-wing threats. As Preston puts it, “FDR’s extension of biopolitics to international relations was not just a stylistic flourish.” He means that the modern world had evolved new consciousness of population-level threats like epidemics—influenza having killed over half a million Americans in living memory, and over 50 million globally. States had to shoulder the task of managing the threats, turning “anarchic uncertainty into manageable risk.”

One of the wiliest men to serve as president, Roosevelt began in 1937 to analogize the threat of war to the threat of disease in an interconnected world. For Preston, it was the globalization of commerce and travel that set up the possibility of the shift to a new ideology of national security. He doesn’t lay much emphasis on the fact that the United States already had new territorial holdings and interests, most notably across the Pacific, that made free security a relic, too. Instead, he focuses on the way a new consciousness of how threats matter did the trick.

But Preston’s biopolitical argument—that modernity invites a need to safeguard populations from risks—only goes so far. He highlights breakthrough economic thinking from the era about uncertainty, and recalls how often Roosevelt promised to make existence less scary by providing “security against the hazards and vicissitudes of life.” Economic threats weren’t the only systemic ones to master. Indeed, Roosevelt analogized the need to establish domestic security to a kind of war. Yet many welfare states have been built the world over without an ideology of national security following in their wake. There is no iron law that a campaign for social security prompts a newfound concern for national security. And, as Preston himself argues, Roosevelt’s insistence on the necessity of an actual war in the years that followed was a choice.

This matters because Preston might overstate Roosevelt’s own role—especially since, for years on end, the beloved president had trouble finding takers for a war footing in response to looming foreign dangers. It wasn’t for a lack of trying. Preston follows his honored teacher, the great historian John Thompson, in suggesting that Roosevelt engaged in “the exaggeration of American vulnerability” to make the case for a new threat-sensitive internationalism. Preston is also surely right that the airplane fomented a new sense of interconnection, and that aerial bombardment of colonies across the world—and then, both Japan’s immolation of the Chinese city of Chongqing in 1939 and Germany’s onslaught from the skies of Warsaw later that year—gave many the impression that wars were losing any boundaries. Still, only Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, definitively settled a bitter debate about U.S. intervention, in part because Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States within days.

For all the precedent of social security and the bridge Roosevelt erected to national security, America didn’t cross it because of the new framework. “Not everyone believed the fundamentals of world order had changed so much,” Preston concedes. They changed because of the Japanese attacks on our imperial holdings in the Pacific, in both Hawaii and the Philippines. For that matter, even the ideology of free security would counsel a response to a declaration of war from the most belligerent and best-outfitted state in the world, which—having smashed France the prior year—Nazi Germany was at the time. But Preston is certainly right that national security crystallized at that time, even if it was far less a cause than a consequence of war.

Astonishingly quickly, FDR made the ideology of national security almost inevitable, mainly because the war gave the United States more authentic global interests than ever before. A large permanent military became fundamental overnight to American life, and eventually a world-spanning force. In 1939, when World War II began, the country had barely 300,000 service members; by 1941, when it entered the conflict, that number had expanded to more than a million. By 1945, a whopping 12 million Americans were part of the armed forces. The economic mobilization was also extraordinary, with military spending increasing tenfold during the course of the war—a budgetary item that has never receded to prewar levels since. Meanwhile, European powers were brought low, suffering far more death and destruction, their imperial glory things of the past, leaving the United States further ahead of any rivals than any country has ever boasted.

In other words, the dynamic of fighting the war actually exacerbated the risks that Preston suggests had undergirded the ideology of national security in the first place. Once you have a lot to lose, you have more to fear losing. If the extraordinary mobilization of men and materiel to fight made the United States the most powerful country in world history, it also created a reason to see threats everywhere. “With great power, it seems, comes great fear,” Preston himself observes.

The new liberalism of fear that triumphed through World War II, and which Preston captures so well, was primed for skewed priorities. In his emphasis on anxiety as an emotional source of historical change, Preston’s claims are close to—and inspired by—Ira Katznelson’s classic Fear Itself, a 2013 analysis of New Deal politics. Katznelson championed FDR for keeping America democratic in an environment in which totalitarianism won out across Europe in response to economic insecurity. Preston, however, asserts that fearmongering was a brilliant move but also a faulty basis for political change: Roosevelt, he writes, “embraced a kind of liberalism of fear even if it wasn’t at all well-suited to a politics of progressivism,” given that a “liberalism of fear is reactive, not progressive.” It served national security better than social security.

This is a far harsher verdict on Roosevelt than Katznelson was willing to pass, with his emphasis on how the president stewarded a liberal democracy through crisis when most others failed. Though Roosevelt cared most after the Great Depression about a politics of domestic fairness, Preston responds, the great president laid a more certain foundation for a politics of global militarism. In the end, America got a warfare state but not a welfare state.

As his book concludes, the verdict becomes even harsher. Preston pushes back against attributing too much novelty to the Cold War, locating “the origins of what would come to be called Cold War liberalism in the era of the New Deal.” True, but Preston also argues that the Cold War posture of many liberals in the 1940s and 1950s was a choice. “The Cold War’s embedding of national security within the American worldview wasn’t inevitable,” Preston remarks. But when it happened, the consequences were even graver. Where fear of domestic conflict had driven a revision of the American social contract in the 1930s, fear of global conflict, permanently entrenched by the Cold War, ended up slowly undermining the progressive tilt of liberal policies. Liberals argued for some time for fulfilling the promise of social security, never more than in the 1960s; compellingly, however, Preston argues that there was a problem at the start.

Though always redistributive in fact, social security functions as a trust fund to allow ordinary workers to insure themselves against risks, including living into old age. National security, by contrast, gave the state a far bigger role than mere trustee. Americans came to understand the state itself as least controversial when it was at war, or planning for it on a permanent basis. “If distant countries really did pose a threat to the security of the United States, there was no feasible way private interests could address such challenges,” Preston writes. “Americans’ social security at home was becoming less statist than their national security abroad.” Even today, Elon Musk hasn’t touched military spending.

The fact that Democrats were in power in 1937 when national security was invented as a goal—and were in power to launch the majority of subsequent American wars, from Cold War interventions in Korea and Vietnam to humanitarian interventions in Kosovo and Libya—contrasts starkly with their plight now. Jake Sullivan originally volunteered to reforge the connection of national security with economic populism when out of power, and in response to loss. And the message did not really stick, as 2024 fatefully showed.

It makes considerable sense, therefore, that Preston concludes that Americans need to think beyond the paradigm of national security, not just reboot it by returning to its origins. Democrats’ strategy to craft a new social contract under Joe Biden without abandoning the ideology of national security did not stave off Trump’s return. Their old priorities to meet people’s anxieties and fears are hardly irrelevant now, as Astra Taylor has shown in her survey of our “age of insecurity.” But the ideology of national security, with its permanent war footing, appears obsolete, and the recent attempt to connect it back to its domestic origins proves it.

War itself is anything but over, recent years attest, and neither are other threats, like pandemic waves crisscrossing a warming planet. It’s hard to argue with Preston’s judicious conclusion that Roosevelt’s “success trapped later generations of policy-making” into an American posture that is no good for dealing with any of these dilemmas. What would an American statecraft beyond the ideology of national security look like? Preston doesn’t say, but he clearly thinks the fear of fear itself that drove Americans to embrace a quest for security has outlasted its usefulness. Democrats must talk and think about the good life in more uplifting terms, rather than arming to the teeth for war, as if intolerance of threats will satisfy the people’s desire for hopeful alternatives.