| Summary/Abstract |
On a wet Wednesday morning in November 1940, an audience of academics, journalists, policymakers, business leaders, and military men crowded a Columbia University auditorium for a discussion on “The Bases for an American Defense Policy” at the Academy of Political Science’s annual meeting.1 The first speaker, imperial and diplomatic historian Edward Mead Earle, opened on a contrarian note and questioned the session’s title. The term “defense” was “misleading,” Earle began. It designated a policy of “sitting back and waiting until the enemy is at one’s gates. Perhaps a better word to use is security.” For only with “security” could “the initiative … be ours, and only by taking the initiative, only by being prepared, if necessary, to wage war offensively, can we … make sure that defense is more than a phrase and is in fact a reality.” Earle’s co-panelists continued to use “defense,” but soon “national security” would be on the tip of all their tongues, as the United States pivoted from a policy of national defense to one of national security.2 This was more than a semantic shift. National security heralded a novel way of imagining the world, one in which a permanently prepared United States would confront seemingly omnipresent threats. It marked the re-thinking and re-making of U.S. power abroad and at home.
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