The Strange Career of ‘National Security’

This article was updated at 6:15 p.m. on September 29, 2019.

In the United States, “national security” is the preoccupation that never has to explain itself. In some quarters, refugees fleeing violence and destitution are a “national security threat.” So too are imported automobiles, as President Donald Trump’s administration declared last year. A key government committee has determined, according to Reuters, that Chinese ownership of the dating app Grindr “constitutes a national security risk.” And Greenland, Tom Cotton asserts, is “vital to our national security,” a sentiment that recently motivated the U.S. government to offer to buy the Arctic territory from Denmark. Trump summed up the national-security rationale in these vague terms: “strategically, for the United States, it would be nice.”

Invoke national security, and unpopular policies become law—or the law itself may even be suspended. One act of for foreigners, a move that enabled the Defense Department to lock up so-called “enemy combatants” in Guantanamo Bay without trial, indefinitely. Uttering the magic phrase can make other things disappear. Shelf upon shelf of government documents vanishes from public sight after being shrouded in security classifications.