An Idea Whose Time Is Fading

By Wade Greene Wade Greene is a writer and a philanthropic adviser on peace and environment issues.

The etymology can be traced, with rare nicety, to the last Big Bang in world affairs before the current one -- the pivotal autumn of 1945, just after the end of World War II and before the beginning of the cold war. "Our national security can only be assured on a very broad and comprehensive front," said Navy Secretary James Forrestal at a Senate hearing that fall. He added, "I am using the word security here consistently and continuously, rather than defense." Senator Edwin Johnson replied, "I like your words national security."

So did a lot of other Americans. By 1947 the National Security Council was in business, and the term national security was in wide currency. Historically, the U.S. had felt immune to menaces afflicting lands less blessed by God and geography. But menaces there now were: missile technologies left in the ashes of the Third Reich and the aggressive ideology of an ally turned archrival. Also, as the supreme world power to emerge from the war, we nourished what Walter Lippmann called "the totally vain notion that if we do not set the world in order, no matter what the price, we cannot live in the world safely." All these factors awakened worries about security and a striving for protective measures, mainly military ones.

Over the decades, national security became a uniquely compelling article of civic liturgy: legislators, bureaucrats and judges regularly bowed before its incantation, its aura of danger and patriotic self-interest. In its pursuit, public coffers coughed forth trillions of dollars and military budgets were gorged like French geese. It is hard to remember that national security has not always been with us as a national preoccupation. But it hasn't. Of late, it has become a hollow shell of an idea. It may be time to retire the term gracefully from service.

Even before the fading of the cold war, the focus of national security was beginning to blur. In the past few years, advocates of softer-sounding causes have been intoning the sacred syllables as piously as the Pentagon. It is firmly implanted in conventional wisdom that our economic competitiveness is a matter of national security. Fighting drug traffic is proclaimed a matter of national security. So is repairing our witless educational system, our unhealthy health system, our crumbling infrastructure.

So is, not least of all, our care of the realm currently specified by Senator Al Gore. "The environment has become a question of national security," says Gore. Indeed, environmental threats are the most analogous to military ones, and it's easy enough to stretch national security's original intent in this direction. "Environmental refugees" fleeing from homelands ! made barren by shattered ecosystems are poignantly reminiscent of fugitives from the plains of war. Social instability, breeder of violence, is a spreading by-product of desertification and deforestation in lands as far apart as the Philippines and Egypt.

Even given its ocean barriers and the ecological safety margins provided by its vast interior spaces and abundant resources, America is vulnerable to transnational environmental threats such as global warming and stratospheric ozone depletion. "A new kind of international security threat is advancing on us," warns Gus Speth, president of the World Resources Institute in Washington, a leading environmental think tank. "The world's geopolitical systems may be faring better, but its ecological systems are in trouble."

The recognition of nonmilitary aspects of security comes none too soon. If it ever did, national self-interest no longer calls for more arms, and it may currently depend on fewer. Now that some veils are being lifted on national- security obscurity, indications are that military facilities are major sources of toxic pollution. Military activity, it appears, has been undermining security of a physical kind, in the name of protecting the metaphysical kind contemplated by geopolitical threat assessors.

As part of a post-cold war reordering of national priorities, a broadening of the definition of national security is apt. But so is at least a passing doubt about extending a frame of mind that in the past has not always aroused the nation's noblest instincts -- as the derivative term security risk can chillingly remind those who were around in the late '40s and the '50s. Do we really want cold war-type anxieties and constitutional indelicacies to be applied in nonmilitary realms -- in the environmental area, for instance, where restraints might be far more intrusive than military protectiveness, perhaps involving close public scrutiny of industrial practices, even household behavior? Instead it may be time to relax a bit and give room to other, more positive and less anxious goals: health, liberty, equity, cultural enrichment, environmental enhancement -- for their own sake rather than security's.

Happily, one of the more fertile lines of thinking about security, paralleling its demilitarization, is its denationalization, which may at least restrain xenophobic excesses. Terms like common security, mutual security, global security, international security are proliferating in think tanks and Gorbachev's speeches, if not yet in the National Security Council. These terms have at their core the wise notion that in an increasingly interdependent world, security, however defined, cannot be achieved or protected along national lines; that our security depends on others'.

If we demilitarize and denationalize national security, it's no longer quite clear what is left, other than vague notions of peaceableness or stability or well-being. But such imprecision may not be a bad transitional state. After nearly a half-century's concern about national security, a certain etymological inertia may be inevitable. This ingrained way of ordering and worrying may yield not so much to outright retirement as to a kick upstairs -- to a grander role with little real significance.