Total Defense
The New Deal and the Invention of National Security
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- $29.99
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
A New Yorker Best Book of the Year
“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.”
–Samuel Moyn, The New Republic
The story of how FDR and fellow New Dealers created the idea of national security, transforming the meaning of defense and vastly expanding the US government’s responsibilities.
National security may seem like a timeless notion. States have always sought to fortify themselves, and the modern state derives its legitimacy from protecting its population. Yet national security in fact has a very particular, very American, history—and a surprising one at that.
The concept of national security originates in the 1930s, as part of a White House campaign in response to the rise of fascism. Before then, national self-defense was defined in terms of protecting sovereign territory from invasion. But President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his circle worried that the US public, comforted by two vast oceans, did not take seriously the long-term risks posed by hypermilitarization abroad. New Dealers developed the doctrine of national security, Andrew Preston argues, to supplant the old idea of self-defense: now even geographically and temporally remote threats were to be understood as harms to be combated, while ideological competitors were perilous to the “American way of life.”
Total Defense shows it was no coincidence that a liberal like Roosevelt promoted this vision. National security, no less than social security, was a New Deal promise: the state was obliged to safeguard Americans as much from the guns and warships of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan as from unemployment and poverty in old age. The resulting shift in threat perception—among policymakers and ordinary citizens alike—transformed the United States, spearheading massive government expansion and placing the country on a permanent war footing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
American military interventionism has its roots in the New Deal, according to this insightful study. Historian Preston (Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith) follows a shift in U.S. strategic thinking from the 19th century, when Americans believed themselves protected by the oceans from overseas enemies, to WWII and the postwar era, when the U.S. government felt that foreign countries posed existential threats to America that justified far-reaching armed interventions. He spotlights President Franklin Roosevelt as the key figure in this shift. Just as Roosevelt's domestic agenda insured citizens against the fearful uncertainties of old age, illness, and unemployment, Preston contends, his administration promulgated an expansive, fear-based concept of national security, which held that America's safety could only be ensured by a powerful military that fought enemies abroad before they could attack the homeland. The result was a state of permanent peacetime military mobilization and unlimited geostrategic commitments that led to wars from Korea and Vietnam to Iraq. Preston traces these ideological developments through many eclectic sources, from the writings of international relations scholars to the movie It's a Wonderful Life. (The film presents George Bailey's wartime civil defense activities as comically pointless, he notes, indicating that fears of invasion were perceived by some as farcical.) It's an incisive reconsideration of a landmark legislative program.
