UC Santa Cruz

As a guiding thread for U.S. domestic and foreign policies, the protection of U.S. national security has long shaped the world. During the post-war era, the U.S. conceptualized the country's protection in terms of securing and leading the so-called "free world." This framing has led to the global expansion of a particular version of civilization based on western liberal values and the construction and reproduction of who and what needs security and against whom. Decades of continuous military growth, the erosion of civil liberties, numerous interventions in foreign countries, and the militarization of domestic law-enforcement agencies have been some of the direct consequences of U.S. national security doctrine. Why has U.S. national security policy remained consistent even in right-leaning republican and left-leaning democratic administrations since the Cold War? How does the U.S. understand, rationalize, and legitimize the protection of its national security both domestically and internationally?

This project analyzes the development, bipartisan articulations, and expansion of U.S. national security doctrine through its discursive, knowledge, and policy production from the Cold War through the so-called “end of history” period (i.e., the 1990s). Through a genealogical-historical and institutional approach, this study delves into hundreds of national security documents—declassified and leaked—to examine the national security establishment's own processes of meaning-making, problematization, and rationalization. It argues that American national security doctrine catalyzes bipartisan consensus to promote profit-driven geopolitical interests and normalize non-democratic practices domestically and internationally. By tracing U.S. national security's ideological roots and bipartisan articulations, this study shows how existential threat narratives and the pursuit of civilizing missions (e.g., the exportation of freedom and democracy and trade liberalization) have legitimized the global expansion of U.S. capitalism as a matter of national survival. In the midst of a global pandemic, climate change crisis, and growing socioeconomic inequalities, this project offers an innovative analysis of U.S. national security for more thoroughly understanding the lasting consequences of past practices and engaging with the challenges that this doctrine has posed for world peace and global democracy.