Daniel W. Drezner
In American politics, labeling something a matter of “national security” automatically elevates its importance. In the language of foreign policy observers, national security questions, such as regulating weapons of mass destruction, are matters of “high politics,” whereas other issues, such as human rights, are “low politics.”
Of course, not everyone agrees on which issues fall into the national security bucket. And the American definition of national security has fluctuated wildly over time. The term was used by both George Washington and Alexander Hamilton during the Revolutionary era without being precisely defined. At the start of the Cold War, the federal government greatly expanded the size of the bucket after the passage of the 1947 National Security Act, but that law never defined the term itself. As tensions with Moscow eased at the end of the 1960s, the scope of national security began to shrink a bit, but that ended when the 1973 oil embargo triggered new fears about energy security. In the 1980s, the definition widened until the Cold War ended.
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