Notes

5 W Main: The Contest Over National Security. In April 2023, U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan gave a speech outlining Washington’s new economic strategy. To have the National Security Advisor, not the Treasury Secretary, hold forth on economic policy might seem strange—but it’s a sign of how economic issues have become part of the American national-security brief. Sullivan said that the White House wants a “foreign policy for the middle class.” Domestic economic policy, in other words, isn’t separate from the United States’ “security competition” with rival powers—especially China.

Last week, Sullivan made the point to the Financial Times that the U.S. isn’t the only country linking economic policy with national security. “The role of national security in trade and investment policy and strategy is rising everywhere,” he said.

Meanwhile, the American administration is preparing to impose 25 percent tariffs on Chinese cargo cranes, citing the risk of the Chinese government using them to spy on American harbor operations. President Joe Biden has also promised to put some $20 billion into bringing crane manufacturing back to the States. And the 2022 Chips and Science Act is subsidizing American and allied countries’ semiconductor-chip industries to the tune of $39 billion.

But these moves haven’t angered only Beijing. As the Financial Times reports, Tokyo is unhappy with Biden’s opposition to Nippon Steel’s proposed $14.9 billion takeover of U.S. Steel—opposition Biden has motivated on national-security grounds.

From one perspective, the question may be why national security now increasingly includes economic security—but from another, it might be why it wouldn’t have before?

The answer to which, according to Peter Roady in his new book, The Contest Over National Security: FDR, Conservatives, and the Struggle to Claim the Most Powerful Phrase in American Politics, is: It did—for Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In the 1930s, Roady writes, President Roosevelt made the case that national security encompassed protection not only from foreign threats but from economic want, as well. Roosevelt’s understanding of national security never won out; his successors developed a much more limited national-security state, putting military strength above all else. But while Biden hasn’t entirely revived Roosevelt’s vision, he’s speaking Roosevelt’s language.

—Gustav Jönsson