The Dangerous Doctrine

National Security And U.s. Foreign Policy

Saul Landau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000315769
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Ever since President Truman invoked the words "national security" to launch the U.S. side of the cold war, government officials have used the phrase to explain, justify, or excuse executive actions that were dubious, illegal, or, as Senator Sam Ervin said during the Watergate hearings, "on the windy side of the law." National security does not simp

Chapter 1
From Anticolonial to National Security State: Continuity and Change

The national security of all the Americas is at stake. . . . Who among us would wish to bear responsibility for failing to meet our shared obligation?

—Ronald Reagan, Address before a joint session of Congress on Central America, April 27, 1983

On February 24, 1984, General Paul Gorman, commander in chief of the U.S. Southern Command, brought a distracted audience of senators and public to attention. "Mexico," he said, could become "the number one security problem for the United States in the next decade." Not Moscow or Havana, Gorman declared to the Senate Armed Services Committee, "but the capital of Mexico is the hub of subversion for all of Central America."

U.S. officials offered immediate denials while the Mexican Foreign Office sounded appropriately indignant, but the assembled senators recognized that the general had meant what he said. Nor was he the first important official to say it in recent years. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director William Colby, in his 1976 retirement speech from the Agency, also had pointed to Mexico as the most serious national security threat to the United States. Both men were talking about the danger of the spread of revolution in the Western Hemisphere.

Neither Gorman nor Colby told their audiences exactly what "national security" meant, nor how the spread of revolution from Mexico could affect U.S. interests. The meaning of these two words and the reality of the threat to the United States were taken for granted by these officials and their audiences. Yet the government's refusal to define national security and the loose and elusive way in which it is used should make us look twice at this powerful phrase.

How can something so vaguely defined be achieved in practice? How can the lay public, or even U.S. senators, grapple with a topic that is discussed in generalities such as "credibility," symbols such as "dominoes," vague menaces such as "threats to vital shipping lanes" and "missile gaps,"¹ and lurid nightmares such as being overrun by "floods of refugees" or invaded by the Russians?²

The United States has legitimate security concerns. Indeed, in order to make their case for a new constitution, the authors of The Federalist Papers—Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison (the man who also drafted the U.S. Constitution)—attacked the vagueness of the Articles of Confederation in the areas of defense and foreign policy.³ In the debate about the Constitution, the Founding Fathers grappled with the question of how to build a strong and enduring state without depriving the citizens of their inalienable rights. Among the answers that emerged from this debate was the idea of a democratic empire, one that would recognize societal and individual rights. According to this view, the new state had to be accessible to society and had to guarantee citizen participation in the governing process.

It was, after all, the colonists' experience with the English Crown and their reading of history that led them to mistrust centralized states. This suspicion found its way into the Constitution, which gave limited powers to the government and divided those powers among different branches. In addition, citizens were protected, in principle, from the state by the Bill of Rights.

Suspicion of unchecked centralized government remains an axiom of U.S. politics, and indeed most civil liberties cases revolve around the state-citizen conflict. But through the creation of an outside and centralized enemy state, the Soviet Union, with its "atheistic" and "communistic" ideology, the brunt of historic suspicion in effect was transferred from the U.S. central government to the Soviet state. Security as protection from the evil central government came to mean protection from the expansionist impulses of the Soviet bear.

The Emergence of the National Security State

Until the 1950s, the U.S. public generally understood security to mean the preservation of the country's territorial integrity, the well-being of its citizens, and the strength of its democratic institutions. Although territorial expansion played a large part in achieving this security up through the 1890s, few U.S. citizens ever equated security with the nineteenth century imperialism of England, France, Russia, or Japan. It was widely assumed that contiguous territory rightfully belonged to the United States and that expansion did not interfere with the society's access to the state. Indeed, new lands were seen as beneficial. The process of acquiring them involved a minimum of hocus-pocus and did not require a draft or other accoutrements of military governments.

How is it that national security has become a widely accepted explanation for questionable, and often highly illegal, government activities at home and abroad? As will be shown, eighteenth and nineteenth century expansionism spilled over into imperialism in the early decades of this century, as the United States extended its power to Latin America and Asia, areas for which Europe could not compete militarily. Moreover, the oceans protected the United States from the powerful nations of Europe and their destructive wars. Until President Woodrow Wilson involved the United States in "world" (European) affairs as a war partner, "isolationism" (noninvolvement in European affairs) had prevailed.⁴

From World War I on, the government began to change as the United States became a global power. Before then, the majority of the U.S. public generally had accepted wars as just or, at least, as cruelly necessary. But after World War I, in which 125,000 U.S. troops died for what seemed a remote cause, there was a reaction. The U.S. population suspected that it had not been told the real reasons for U.S. entry into World War I, and through Congress, public opinion forced the state to pull back and confine its intervention to Latin America and Asia. Even there, when body counts grew (for example in Nicaragua in the late 1920s and early 1930s), popular pressure induced Congress to bring the troops home.⁵

After the United States emerged from World War II as the strongest economic and military power in the world, key government and industrial leaders saw the opportunity for a world empire. Urged on by the business elite, which sought to maintain and expand its advantaged status, U.S. leaders constructed, from the expansionist past and the World War II organization, a national security state to deal with global affairs.⁶ The concept of national security, which was never defined clearly or explained, became the overriding concern of the state, at the expense of other long-held traditions and practices. The concept also became dominant in domestic affairs; it governed political debate and rationalized restrictions on the individual's constitutional freedoms. The National Security Act of 1947 (which was secret at the time) and subsequent amendments and decrees placed the governance of critical foreign and defense policies in the hands of new institutions: a national security apparatus run by national security managers.⁷

The national security myth required changes in political language because, given the implications of the undefined notion "national security," the president simply could announce that a crisis existed and that U.S. national security required him to commit armed forces to, for example, Iran, Greece, or Korea. The president did not explain "why" because clear explanations might violate another national security requirement: secrecy.

Secrecy became an obsession. It was not just the "enemy," however, that could endanger national security through knowledge of national security operations. No one outside the newly formed national security elite could be trusted. Thus, national security became a justification for withholding information of the kind that previously had been available to the public.⁸ By keeping the citizenry in the dark, the national security elite forestalled debate and participation.

In the course of less than five postwar years, U.S. leaders made George Washington's "no permanent alliances" dictum obsolete and engaged in military pacts with scores of nations around the world. At the same time, the federal government began interfering in previously sacrosanct domestic areas.⁹ Once established, the national security bureaucracy not only perpetuated itself, but also spread its hegemonic authority to the point of warping the basic idiom of political debate.

In less than forty years, the national security state elite has obfuscated traditional values by claiming even higher values—the security of the nation. This elite has not offered basic security or enhanced the national well-being. Instead, the elite's members have defined a dominant worldview under which we must live, in constant and precarious tension, uncertainty, and social unrest, and under the threat of nuclear obliteration. The national security managers have prevented public and congressional debate about major policy decisions, which violates the spirit of the Constitution and indeed limits each citizen's democratic rights.

A demonic view of the world that requires hundreds of billions of dollars to be spent every year for "defense" unrelated to the nation's established territorial boundaries must be questioned. The worldview that sees all anticolonial and anti-imperial revolutions as a communist threat to U.S. security also must be challenged because the United States won its own independence in a bloody revolutionary war that provided an example for many that followed.¹⁰

Central America and National Security

The current conflict in Central America provides an ideal opportunity for challenging the taboo on discussing national security. The United States does have real concerns about Central America, but the prevailing definition (or lack thereof) of national security does not address the issue of real security. In fact, the current definition produces ongoing anxiety.¹¹

Former speaker of the House Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill has predicted that this escalation of military activities and supplies will culminate in the use of U.S. troops in Central America. This is not idle speculation. O'Neill has observed that for more than sixty years presidents have sent U.S. armed forces to intervene in Third World nations after they were declared vital to U.S. national security.¹²

The former House speaker also was aware of the sizable domestic and international opposition to U.S. policy on Central America, one that is becoming more active and militant as Washington's actions in the region become more aggressive and less lawful. Since the early 1980s, there has been much organized opposition from churches, labor unions, and community groups, and Washington, D.C., has hosted numerous protests against the administration's national security policies in Central America.

From 1981 to 1985, Congress responded to this opposition by refusing to grant carte blanche to President Ronald Reagan's alarmist Central America policies.¹³ Yet despite polls indicating overwhelming public opposition, Congress approved $100 million aid in the summer of 1986 for an effort to overthrow the revolutionary government of Nicaragua, after the administration virtually charged that opponents of the policy were soft on communism.¹⁴ One member of the House described the effects of forty years of national security policy on the debate about contra aid:

After [Nicaraguan president Daniel] Ortega went to Moscow, no one in the House would be caught dead saying anything good about Nicaragua no matter what good things they did down there. And they are doing some. The only issues we could stand up on was aid to the contras and even there the goddamned national security language gets shoved down our throats. Every time one of these rinkydink nations starts a revolution or independence movement, the Congress gets bludgeoned over the head by national security crap. It means we have to sit by and watch the taxpayers' money get spent on a bunch of thugs who kill, torture, rape and steal from poor people, whether it's Nicaragua or Angola.¹⁵

Once invoked, the national security rhetoric becomes difficult for publicly elected officials to oppose. The result is that at decisive moments, debate is cut off. In the name of national security, the administration and a majority in Congress have declared support for counterrevolutionary wars in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.¹⁶ But little discussion has taken place in Congress or in the press on the likely consequences of such action.

Whether or not Tip O'Neill's dire prediction of U.S. troop intervention in Central America before Reagan leaves office is correct, real national security itself requires a debate on the meaning of the concept. The guidelines for such discussion should emerge from the experience of the past, from the Declaration of Independence—which declared the right to revolt when there was no "just consent" of the governed—and from the lessons learned and forgotten or still unlearned from the war in Vietnam. The history of the United States and that of other peoples and nations must become the context for such discussion—not a history that is stored in the White House attic, to be rewritten by the president's speechwriters.

Notes

1. For a critique of the "missile gap," a phrase invoked by John F. Kennedy in the I960 presidential campaign, see Desmond Ball, Politics and Force Levels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), and Edgar M. Bottome, The Balance of Terror (Boston: Beacon Press, 1980). On the "window of vulnerability," a term used by critics of the SALT II treaty and picked up by Ronald Reagan in his 1980 campaign, see Strobe Talbott, Deadly Gambits (New York: Random House, 1986).

2. According to Senator Jesse Helms, republican of North Carolina, "There are ten million people between our borders and the Panama Canal. If we sit back and allow communism to take over, how many of those ten million do you expect to flood across the border into the United States? Look back at what happened in Cambodia. Those people had only leaky boats. . . . The Soviet strategy is, and always has been, to encircle the United States with socialist nations. I wonder if I'm allowed to say this anymore. It's a strategy that was made possible, my friends, by the giveaway of the Panama Canal." (From the film Quest for Power: Sketches of the New Right, produced and directed by Saul Landau and Frank Diamond, 1983, pp. 36-37, of the transcript.)

3. The Federalist Papers was a series of essays written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay to convince the public to adopt the Constitution of the United States. See Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• About the Book and Author
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 FROM ANTICOLONIAL TO NATIONAL SECURITY STATE: CONTINUITY AND CHANGE
• 2 THE ORIGINS OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY DOCTRINE
• 3 ONTO THE WORLD STAGE
• 4 THE COLD WAR
• 5 THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE
• 6 THE CIA AND THE NEW INTERVENTIONISM
• 7 CUBA: NATIONAL SECURITY FIASCO
• 8 KENNEDY, JOHNSON, AND COUNTERINSURGENCY: THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF DISTORTION
• 9 THE NIXON DOCTRINE
• 10 FORD, TRILATERALISM, AND THE EXPORT OF NATIONAL SECURITY
• 11 INTERVENTION AND HUMAN RIGHTS
• 12 THE REAGAN DOCTRINE
• 13 CENTRAL AMERICA AND THE FRUITS OF REAGANISM
• 14 BEHIND THE NATIONAL SECURITY MYTHS
• 15 THE ALTERNATIVE
• 16 THE LAST NATIONAL SECURITY SCANDAL?
• Selected Bibliography
• Index