National Security

Principle 3:

Protecting National Security and National Autonomy

If the United States is to survive for long in the often predatory international world of nation-states, the United States must give primary concern for the factors that insure its national survival. America must be able to defend and secure its borders, maintain its territorial integrity, maintain access to key raw materials and commercial trading partners, defend geographic positions of defensive and offensive strategic importance, be secure in its national secrets, hide its weaknesses from its enemies, defend its citizens and protect its young. America must be able to define national goals and have some degree of assurance those national goals can be achieved, must be able to define itself as a nation-state different from and apart from other nation-states, and must be able to develop and maintain its military and industrial strength.

National security and national autonomy are issues related to the organic state itself-- to the state as an entity distinct from the people that populate the state.

"In a very vague and general way 'national interest' does suggest a direction of policy which can be distinguished from several others which may present themselves as alternatives. It indicates that the policy is designed to promote demands which are ascribed to the nation rather than to individuals, sub-national groups or mankind as a whole." (Wolfers, 481)

According to structural-functional theory, all organizations, including all nation-states, must maintain access to resources, must maintain their boundaries, must be able to self-perpetuate themselves, and must have the ability to achieve goals the organization believes to be important if the organization is to survive. The drive to survive is paramount in all perpetual organizations, including nation-states. Organizational and national security are, therefore, high priority concerns for the national organization.

"Any foreign policy which operates under the standard of the national interest must obviously have some reference to the physical, political, and cultural entity which we call a nation. In a world where a number of sovereign nations compete with and oppose each other for power, the foreign policies of all nations must necessarily refer to their survival as their minimum requirements. Thus all nations do what they cannot help but do: protect their physical, political, and cultural identity against encroachments by other nations....

The concept of the national interest... assumes continuous conflict and threat of war, to be minimized through the continuous adjustment of conflicting interests by diplomatic action. No such assumption would be warranted if all nations at all times conceived of their national interest only in terms of their survival and, in turn, defined their interest in survival in restrictive and rational terms. As it is, their conception of the national interest is subject to all the hazards of misrepresentation, usurpation, and misjudgment ... To minimize these hazards is the first task of a foreign policy which seeks the defense of the national interest by peaceful means. Its second task is the defense of the national interest, restrictively and rationally defined, against the national interests of other nations...." (Morgenthau, 1952, 961-976)

A "nation" is a group of people with shared history, shared identity and shared goals and aspirations. A 'state" is the organized organization of power within a geographic territory. In the modern world of "representative government," nations and states have been combined. Nations assert their identities and aspirations through the state, which they have come to dominate through election to positions of power in the state. But, national interest is more than the representation of these sub-national interests.

"The legitimacy of the national interest must be determined in the face of possible usurpation by subnational, other-national, and supranational interests. On the subnational level we find group interests, represented particularly by ethnic and economic groups, who tend to identify themselves with the national interest....Yet, the concept of the national interest which emerges from this contest of conflicting sectional interests is also more than any particular sectional interest or their sum total." (Morgenthau, 1952, 965-970)

The defense of national values, the achievement of national objectives and the assurance of national integrity and national autonomy in the face of other nation-states, is at the very heart of the definition of "nation-state." Each nation has "core values" which establish its identify, determine its objectives, and constitute the defining essence of its being. These core values satisfy national pride, heighten national self-esteem, reduce national fears, define the essence of the nation. A nation is secure to the extent that its national values are secure and are not threatened with sacrifice to the values of another state, or threatened with sacrifice to the needs of national security itself.

"Traditionally, the protection and preservation of national core values have been considered ends in themselves.... When one sets out to define in terms of expedience the level of security to which a nation should aspire, one might be tempted to assume that the sky is the limit.... Yet, there are obvious reasons why this is not so.

In the first place, every increment of security must be paid by additional sacrifices of other values.... At a certain point, then, by something like the economic law of diminishing returns, the gain in security no longer compensates for the added costs of attaining it....

In the second place, national security policies when based on the accumulation of power have a way of defeating themselves... This is due to the fact that 'power of resistance' cannot be unmistakably distinguished from 'power of aggression.' What a country does to bolster its own security through power can be interpreted by others, therefore, as a threat to their security... The vicious circle of... 'security dilemma' sets in: the efforts of one side provoke countermeasures by the other which in turn tend to wipe out the gains of the first." (Wolfers, 490- 495)

One of America's core values is "toleration." But in the face of subversive activities from, for example, Moslem clerics entering America from abroad, how much toleration will be extended, to these Moslem clerics when it becomes known they are using American toleration to threaten American national security? And, how much toleration is America willing to sacrifice to silence the Moslem clerics before America sacrifices the entire core value of toleration? Of course, if America is successfully subverted by the Moslem clerics, America is lost and the core value of toleration is also lost.

The term "national security" implies the nation's ability to defend its territory and its interests and the nation's ability to maintain geographic separation between itself and other nation-states. The term "national autonomy" implies a higher-level ability of the nation-state to define itself as separate from and distinct from all other nation-states, to select and defend its national values, and to achieve its national objectives. It is possible a nation may have national security but not national autonomy. Examples include most Warsaw Bloc nations during the period of Soviet hegemony. Each Warsaw Bloc nation is reasonably able to maintain its territorial integrity but its national definition and national values come from Moscow. When individual Warsaw Bloc nations seek self-definition, as is the case in the "Hungarian Revolt" of the mid-1950s, the nations quickly find their national security violated by Soviet tanks.

America struggles with self-definition in the decades before the revolution which brought political independence from England. England seeks to define America as a colonial dependency and mercantilist resource base and market; the Americans seek to define themselves as a self-sufficient entity roughly equal to England. The American Revolution can be seen as a contest to decide which definition will hold. The United States of America jealously defends its right to self-definition after political independence, including in the years leading up to the War of 1812. Any attempt by any nation to impose a definition of America on America is vigorously rejected and is still rejected today. For example, America refuses to accept Japan's definition of America as an economic dependency of Japan and counters the flood of 1970s and 1980s Japanese imports with tariffs, protests and a national commercial and industrial revival.

For a nation to maintain national autonomy, the nation must be able to maintain national security. Like national autonomy, national security must be defined by the nation itself. No amount of assurances from parents and friends makes a fearful child feel secure; only the child can make himself feel secure. The child defines, for himself, the parameters which will result in a sense of personal security. It is the same with nation-states. No amount of assurances from the United Nations or the world's superpowers can make a nation feel secure; the nation must have the resources and ability to insure its own security. These autonomy and security drives are at the heart of America's need for military superiority, need for visible military, commercial and diplomatic presence around the world, and need to insure that all nations in control of strategic geography and strategic resources are "friendly" to the United States. These drives are at the heart of America's refusal to relinquish its veto power in the United States Security Council and its caution in negotiating and approving arms reduction agreements.

The concern for national autonomy and national security is seen in a wide range of American foreign policy actions. The Monroe Doctrine, for example, is both a statement of support for the national autonomy and national security of the other nations of the Western Hemisphere and a statement for the autonomy and security of the United States itself. This national autonomy-national security intention is seen in the words of the 1856 Democratic Party platform. After discussing the value of the Monroe Doctrine, the platform continues:

"Resolved... that every proper effort be made to insure our ascendancy in the Gulf of Mexico, and to maintain a permanent protection of the great outlets through which are emptied into its waters the products created by the industry of the people of our Western valleys and the Union at large." (1856 Democratic Party Platform)

Even in the midst of the Civil War, the national security implications of the Monroe Doctrine find their way into the Republican Party platform of 1864 when the Republicans signal their opposition to French efforts to conquer Mexico and place a European archduke on a throne in Mexico.

"The people of the United States can never regard with indifference the attempt of any European Power to overthrow by force or supplant by fraud the institutions of any Republican Government on the Western Continent and that they will view with extreme jealousy, as menacing to the peace and independence of their own country, the efforts of any such power to obtain new footholds of Monarchical Government, sustained by foreign military force, in near proximity to the United States." (1864 Republican Party Platform)

Those same words could be used to describe American attitudes toward European attempts to seize Haiti and some Central American countries for failure to repay international debts in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries and the Soviet Union's attempts to establish a European military presence in Cuba and Nicaragua in the Twentieth Century.

A claim to national autonomy-national security is made when President Woodrow Wilson authorizes the use of American troops to intervene in a Mexican civil war in the months leading up to World War I. The Democrat administration claims military action is necessary to suppress "Mexican bandits and self-styled revolutionaries" who are creating a crisis in the border area between the United States and Mexico. The nationwide Mexican revolution has support and strongholds in northern Mexico; these loosely organized revolutionaries often venture into American territory to obtain guns, military supplies, and subsistence supplies, often taking the supplies by force. In their 1916 party platform, Democrats attempt to justify their incursion into Mexico in national security terms while attempting to also reassure the other nations of Latin America.

"The Monroe Doctrine... guarantees the independent republics of the two Americas against aggression from another continent. It implies, as well, the most scrupulous regard upon our part for the sovereignty of each of them.... We seek not to despoil them. The want of a stable, responsible government in Mexico, capable of repressing and punishing marauders and bandit bands, who have... invaded our soil, made war upon and murdered our people... has rendered it necessary temporarily to occupy, by our armed forces, a portion of the territory of that friendly state." (1916 Democratic Party Platform)

Republicans, however, do not concur that national security issues are involved in this case. In their 1916 platform Republicans acknowledge the outrages committed by the bandits but "denounce the indefensible methods of interference employed by this administration in the internal affairs of Mexico." In the late Twentieth Century, Republican President George Bush borrows President Wilson's justification in Mexico and argues that the Panamanian government's inability to suppress illegal drug traffic into the United States, and the threat of that drug traffic to national autonomy and national security, is justification for a United States invasion of Panama and the incarceration of the Panamanian president.

Principle 3:

Protecting National Security and National Autonomy

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