Summer Essay 10 -- National Security

Winding down the summer with daily reviews of essays from the current edition of Foreign Affairs as the United States barrels towards the most consequential election in decades, with US global leadership very much on the line.  Looking forward to the conversations this may spark.

The editors at Foreign Affairs are real pros. They know how to follow a train of thought and anticipate the questions readers might have.  So if you read the AI War essay yesterday and came to the troubling conclusion that AI tech could easily become a threat to national security if it is not programmed well or if it is in nefarious hands, the next logical question is: where does national security begin and end?

Tufts Professor Daniel Drezner answers this question in his essay (How Everything Became National Security And National Security Became Everything). The short answer: national security has ALWAYS loomed large in the national debate from the Revolutionary War to the present.  The article provides an excellent tour through 200 years of American foreign policy history.  Prof. Drezner points out that while periodically some have fretted over the blurring boundary between domestic and foreign policy, in reality the boundary has been fuzzy.

Political ideology cannot exactly be blamed for the lack of clarity.  The essay notes that “…in practice, even when a presidential administration comes to power that is radically different from its predecessor, the list of national security priorities tends to expand rather than merely shift.”     It makes the case for more precise thinking and prioritization across identified threats, but logic suggests strongly that such tools already exist inside the U.S. government. Publicly sharing perceived priorities and threat identification at the level of specificity suggested in the essay could easily create more national security threats than it resolves.

The essay focuses predominantly on diagnosing “the pathologies of the national security bureaucracy” over time, as accentuated by various very real political leadership and geopolitical backdrops.  The essay makes excellent points.

However, the essay does manage to miss one significant incentive for declaring national security to be the foundation for a policy decision. The national security rationale often constitutes a major exception to treaty obligations.  Consider the trade policy context.  As discussed in this recently published research, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade Article XXI (which has served as the operating system for global trade since the end of World War II) expressly exempts all national policies aimed at protecting “essential security interests” from the trade obligations under the Agreement.  Similar exemptions apply to bilateral, plurilateral, and multilateral agreements. 

Prof. Drezner may already know, and he certainly will not be surprised to see, that some climate advocates are positioning to place climate change on the ever-expanding list of national security threats.  In addition, on September 9, the Atlantic Council will host a public discussion on how climate change creates “threat multipliers.”  The event will feature the Pentagon’s first and former Chief Environmental Officer (Sherri Goodman) and her book, Threat Multiplier: Climate, Military Leadership, and the Fight for Global Security.

From AI to climate change to the energy transition, the new issues on the policy docket jostle with traditional geopolitics for attention.  Prof. Drezner’s essay helps place these current conversations into an historical context. The reality is that security threats always have, and always will exist. How we manage them determines whether and how those threats evolve.

Barbara C. Matthews is a globally recognized public policy and quantitative finance leader.  Her track record of successful innovation and leadership spans five continents in both the private and public sectors, including service as the first US Treasury Attache to the EU with the Senate-confirmed diplomatic rank of Minister-Counselor.  She has consistently been the first executive to forge new paths that add lasting value with durable, high-performing teams.  She is currently the Founder and CEO of BCMstrategy, Inc., a company that delivers ML/AI training data and predictive analytics that provide ground-breaking transparency and metrics about government policy globally.  The company uses award-winning, patented technology to measure public policy risks and anticipate related reaction functions. Ms. Matthews is the author of the patent.