"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 77

In this episode: What is “National Security” Anyway?

November 19, 2024

"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 77

Episode 77: What is “National Security” Anyway?

Declaring something a matter of “national security” is a great way to get people to take it seriously — and Congress to fund it. After all, what matters more than keeping the United States and its citizens safe from foreign attack? But what about the economic security of the citizenry? Or their health? President Franklin Delano Roosevelt thought those should be included too — and that if the government didn’t prioritize them as national security issues, Americans might begin to look to autocrats to provide for their well-being. Was FDR right?

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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What do you think of when you hear the term “national security”? Defending the country’s airspace against enemy missiles? Protecting people from terrorist attacks? Collecting intelligence about emerging threats from overseas? Probably all the stuff that the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, and the CIA do to keep Americans secure. National security.

But was the country really secure when the COVID pandemic killed around the same number of people as the combined death toll from every U.S. war since the American Revolution? Is it secure when about 75,000 Americans die of fentanyl poisoning each year? Or 40,000 die from guns?

These also seem — at least to me — like matters of national security. When my team and I first launched this show a couple of years ago, I came up with a little catch phrase to sum up our focus. The catch phrase was: “national security, broadly defined.” Emphasis on that last part — “broadly defined.” And I thought this was kind of an edgy new idea. But then I recently met someone who convinced me that my new idea, this broader definition of national security, is actually pretty old.

Peter Roady: Franklin Roosevelt understood national security depends first and foremost on the well-being of our citizens.

Peter Roady is an historian who studies the national security state. But he started his career writing national security policy at the Pentagon, where he began to ponder an essential question:

Peter Roady: Who decides what counts as a national security matter?

A lot is riding on the answer to that question. Fundamentally, the primary responsibility of a government is the safety and security of its citizens. So how you define “national security” determines what leaders prioritize, who benefits from the policies, and how much money is spent on them.

Peter Roady: If you work in national security, there is a large amount of power that comes with that.

And Roady says it wasn’t always the case that “national security” was as narrowly defined as it is generally today.

ARCHIVAL Franklin D. Roosevelt: The one supreme objective for the future can be summed up in one word: security.

That’s President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in 1944…

ARCHIVAL Franklin D. Roosevelt: And that means not only physical security, which provides safety from attacks by aggressors. It means also economic security, social security, moral security.

Think of that: Roosevelt is speaking at the height of World War II, when you might think a very narrow definition of national security — protecting the nation from foreign enemies — would dominate. But it was only about a decade since the depths of the Great Depression.

Peter Roady: If you and I were to ask, you know, people who work in national security today, at what point in history did Americans feel the most insecure? I suspect the answer we would hear would be something like in the wake of Pearl Harbor, perhaps, in the wake of 9/11, perhaps. But if you think about how severe the economic crisis was during the Great Depression, the answer is obvious. It's during the Great Depression.

That’s how Roosevelt saw national security: that national security certainly meant defending against aggressors from abroad, but it began by taking care of people at home. And Roosevelt had big plans for how to accomplish this:

ARCHIVAL Franklin D. Roosevelt: I pledge myself to a New Deal for the American people.

[THEME MUSIC PICKS UP]

But not everyone was on board with the big-spending, big government, New Deal programs FDR pushed as a solution. In a few minutes, you’ll hear how Roosevelt's opponents hijacked and whittled down his definition of national security with the help of a nationwide propaganda blitz:

Peter Roady: You literally could not go through your normal workday without encountering the conservative persuasion campaign at least a half a dozen times. It literally was inescapable.

And you'll learn why prioritizing defense at the expense of broader well-being might explain our very divided politics today.

Peter Roady: If what you really care about is preserving your own system — in our case, American republican democracy — you better make sure that enough people feel like they're having their basic needs met.

I'm Peter Bergen. Welcome back to In the Room.

[THEME MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES]

Peter Bergen: You write that national security ranks among the most powerful phrases in American politics. Why is it so powerful?

Peter Roady: If you go to Capitol Hill and you say, “We need, you know, X billions of dollars for some national security program,” there's a tendency to open the national checkbook. If you go and you say “We need X billions of dollars for a welfare program,” you get a big political fight that lasts many years and an ambiguous outcome. There's this concept within psychology called loss framing. If you frame something in terms of a loss, people are much more persuaded by your argument than if you frame it in terms of what they have to gain. And the language of security has a loss frame baked into it because everybody fears insecurity.

This fear of insecurity was extremely top-of-mind when President Roosevelt took office in 1933, in the depths of the worst economic crisis the country had ever seen.

ARCHIVAL Franklin D. Roosevelt: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror…

President Roosevelt was not the first leader to put the phrase “national security” together in a sentence. But Roady credits Roosevelt with moving security to the very center of the government's promise to the public. And from the beginning, Roosevelt’s version of national security combined two promises. Building a defensive wall, so to speak, to protect the nation from outside threats. And then guaranteeing the basic welfare of everyone inside the wall... And, when Roosevelt first took office, welfare was the most urgent of the two.

ARCHIVAL Old-timey Newscaster 1: The years of the Great Depression in the United States found able-bodied men and women unable to find work to support themselves and their families.

ARCHIVAL Old-timey Newscaster 2: As frustration turned to fear and anger, people took to the streets. Communists led hunger marches in many big cities and attracted thousands.

Peter Roady: In terms of what actually motivated Roosevelt most in 1932, he genuinely believed that American republican democracy hung in the balance. The Great Depression, I think, so much time has passed and such an incredible wave of prosperity followed World War II that some people have sort of forgotten how dire the Great Depression was. Something like one in four Americans lacked work, during the Great Depression, and even those who had work didn't really have enough work to consistently feed themselves and their families. And Roosevelt himself felt that very keenly.

This is Roosevelt speaking at the Democratic National Convention in 1932, where he introduced the phrase “New Deal” to the American people. And he framed the whole thing in the language of security.

ARCHIVAL Franklin D. Roosevelt: What do the people of America want more than anything else? In my mind, two things. Work. And with work, a reasonable measure of security.

Peter Bergen: FDR took a relatively new medium — radio — and was able to speak directly to the American public about his ideas. So the fireside chats, tell us about them.

Peter Roady: This was such a revolution in American politics, you know, and Roosevelt really, really felt like if he could just communicate directly with the American people…

ARCHIVAL Franklin D. Roosevelt: My friends, I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States.

Peter Roady: …that, of course, it would just seem to them like common sense what he was proposing to do.

ARCHIVAL Franklin D. Roosevelt: I want to tell you what has been done in the last few days and why it was done and what the next steps are going to be.

Peter Roady: He was the great beneficiary of broadcasting, which was a new thing in the 1920s, and he seized on in the 1930s. He was very careful with his fireside chats to address them to the average American. And he was very careful not to give too many of them.

ARCHIVAL Franklin D. Roosevelt: Tonight, eight weeks later, I come for the second time to give you my report…

Peter Roady: I think some people think that he just did this like once a week or something like that throughout his presidency, but he only gave a few dozen of these, over the entire time he was in office because he wanted it to be a special…

Peter Bergen: It's not like he was tweeting on a regular basis.

Peter Roady: [ROADY LAUGHS] Yes, exactly. Quite the contrary. He wanted every time he spoke to be an event.

We tracked down recordings of a bunch of Roosevelt's fireside chats. And listening to them, I was struck by Roosevelt's talent as an Explainer-in-Chief.

ARCHIVAL Franklin D. Roosevelt: Industry has picked up. Railroads are carrying more freight. Farm prices are better. But we cannot ballyhoo ourselves back to prosperity. And I am going to be honest at all times with the people of the country…

These national addresses can seem almost conversational. But each one is a well-crafted tool for mass persuasion. And in many of them, Roosevelt was selling the American people on the idea that economic security and national security were one and the same.

ARCHIVAL Franklin D. Roosevelt: A prompt program, applied as quickly as possible, seemed to me not only justified, but imperative to our national security…

ARCHIVAL Franklin D. Roosevelt: …You and I agree that security is our greatest need…

ARCHIVAL Franklin D. Roosevelt: …We are moving forward to greater freedom, to greater security for the average man than he has ever known before in the history of America.

Peter Bergen: Who informed Roosevelt's thinking on his idea of national security?

Peter Roady: He and his advisors realized that security was sort of the key to everything. It was the key to the problem. It was the key to the solution, and it was the key to selling the solution. Frances Perkins, of course, as secretary of labor, had been an advisor of Roosevelt's when he was the governor of New York and some of the programs that she advocated for: unemployment insurance, old age pensions.

Peter Bergen: You've just said an important word — she — about Frances Perkins.

Peter Roady: Yes, yes.

Peter Bergen: Because, until I read your book, I must confess, I wasn't clear that Frances Perkins was a woman.

Peter Roady: Yes.

Peter Bergen: It shows my ignorance, but she was a woman in very much a man's world, but she obviously had a large impact on Roosevelt's thinking.

Peter Roady: A huge impact on Roosevelt's thinking. Frances Perkins was one of the most influential members of Roosevelt's cabinet, especially in his first two terms as president. She was the architect. She led the committee on economic security out of which the social security act was drafted. And she was the leading champion for continuing to build that domestic economic security. What Roosevelt called cornerstone of the national security state. In many ways, Frances Perkins was really our country's first national security professional, and she was seen as such at the time.

Peter Bergen: I didn’t understand, or had forgotten that social security was really FDR's invention. And, of course, that he, that he framed national security around the idea of a much bigger definition of national security than we typically think about today.

Peter Roady: Absolutely, I mean for Franklin Roosevelt, the naming of social security was deliberate. You know, he had said, we're going to talk about this in terms of security.

Alongside Social Security, Roosevelt’s New Deal established dozens of agencies and programs to create jobs, help unions organize, offer subsidized loans for homes and farms, and generally promote Americans’ material well-being. In 1939, Roosevelt's Administration established a big new department called the Federal Security Agency, which had nothing to do with defense.

Peter Roady: The federal security agency is the predecessor to the modern day Department of Health and Human Services. Franklin Roosevelt, when he was trying to build on the cornerstone of the social security system, his advisors said, let's create a department of welfare and it will deal with all aspects of human flourishing, you know, health, education, those sorts of things. And Roosevelt said, yeah, we should do that, but we're going to call it a federal security agency. And he was very deliberate about that because he understood that by calling something a security agency, it had that extra power attached to it.

Peter Bergen: Well related to that, Roosevelt thought of security as resting on two pillars, defense and welfare. And this seems like seeing national security sort of like a walled garden. Defense being the wall that protects you from outside attack, and social security and other types of benefits being the need to cultivate the garden. So how did we end up with today's definition of national security where it seems like we've got all wall and very
little garden.

Peter Roady: Historians always spin these complex contingent stories. I'll try and keep it as brief as I can.

[BERGEN LAUGHS]

Roady does have a pretty complex answer. But the main thrust of it is that Roosevelt’s opponents sabotaged the wall-and-garden vision of national security he was trying to establish. Some of these opponents were leaders of big businesses who’d been angry since Roosevelt first proposed the New Deal, and all the unions, higher corporate taxes, and government regulation that came with it.

Peter Roady: There was this incredible series of meetings in New York in the six weeks after Roosevelt announced his ideas for social security, where you had leading executives from General Motors, General Foods, you know, the biggest corporations in the country getting together to figure out how on earth are we going to stop this guy and his agenda.

Ultimately, these business leaders, trade groups and conservative media outlets launched a nationwide persuasion campaign — print and radio ads, speaker tours, lesson plans handed out to schools, and stories planted in friendly publications. The goal was to convince Americans that they shouldn’t trust big government programs — and that actually, the government’s incompetent. The campaign’s message was, essentially, the government has no business cultivating the national garden. It needs to just get out of the way, and let private industry do its thing. And Roady says the scale of this campaign was pretty staggering.

Peter Roady: If you were an American living in the late 1930s, you literally could not go through your normal workday without encountering the conservative persuasion campaign at least a half a dozen times. You turn on your radio in the morning and there's a little spot, sponsored by the National Association of Manufacturers 10 second talking point, right? Making fun of the government, for example. You go down, you read your morning newspaper. And you read an article in the newspaper which was planted by another trade group, again, implying that the government is incompetent.

Peter Roady: You go to work, and in your workplace, there are posters up. They're trumpeting the superiority of the private sector over the government. Perhaps after work, you go to a movie and at the beginning of the movie, there would be a short clip played dramatizing all the private sectors contributions to winning the war, not mentioning that
the government paid for the factory paid for all the munitions, and then at night you turn the radio on and again, and it's the same thing. It literally was inescapable. The conservative persuasion campaign, that reduced public support for Roosevelt's efforts to cultivate the garden, if you will.

And while that advertising campaign pushed to get the government out of the garden, another powerful group undertook its own campaign. And what this group wanted was more resources for the wall.

Peter Roady: There was also a campaign, if you will, waged by the growing class of foreign policy professionals that emerged during World War II.

Roady says people in the newly-enlarged national defense agencies, and in the intelligence and foreign policy establishment, wanted to hold onto the authority and prestige that winning World War II had given them.

Peter Roady: These guys did not really want to go back to what they had been doing before World War II. They immensely enjoyed the power and influence and resources that came with their positions in government. And they were not particularly eager to share those with people like, say, Frances Perkins, who was the Secretary of Labor and the architect of social security.

And so Roady says these people took an ax to Roosevelt's definition of national security. They wanted to use the prestige and power of the term to boost spending on defense, but not social programs. This group tended to be conservative politically, and there was an anti-government streak in their rhetoric. But only when it came to the garden, because they were creatures of the wall. Roady calls this “selective anti-statism.”

Peter Roady: So, imagine you have on your dinner plate, a piece of pizza and a pile of broccoli. And the dinner plate as a whole represents everything that the U.S. government does — domestic policy and foreign policy. The pizza is foreign policy. The broccoli is domestic policy. From the 1940s down to the 2000s, Republicans were consistently delighted to pay for and eat the pizza… and had very little interest in the broccoli, so that's an example of selective anti-statism, It is an inelegant term, selective anti-statism, but I think it accurately captures the way that most Americans feel about the government.

And Roady says this selective attitude about when big government is an essential thing and when it’s not, got codified when the U.S. Congress passed a hugely transformative law after the end of World War II: The 1947 National Security Act. This law created the definition of national security that’s kind of common understanding
today.

Peter Roady: And if you go back and read the National Security Act of 1947, it doesn't define national security anywhere. But that definitional work is done by what is included in there and by what is not.

Peter Bergen: Oh, so tell us what was included and what wasn't included.

Peter Roady: So the national security act created the Central Intelligence Agency, a department of national defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it codified that. What was not in there was anything related to domestic economic security and the wellbeing of individual Americans.

Peter Bergen: So FDR sort of lost the debate then in a sense. I mean, obviously he died before the debate could be fully joined, but that, that, that broader conception of national security more or less died with the 1947 National Security Act. Is that what you were saying?

Peter Roady: I think it's fair to say, yes.

Out of the 7,500 or so words that made up that 1947 law, the word domestic appeared exactly one time. Roosevelt's sweeping definition of national security died, just two years after the president had died himself.

Peter Roady: And it didn't help that Harry Truman tended to, even though he advocated for domestic economic security programs, he himself had this bad habit of distinguishing between national security and welfare. He would draw a distinction. He would say they're both equally important, but then he would treat them differently.

And every president after Truman continued treating defense as a matter of national security and welfare as something else. Under President Eisenhower in 1953, Roosevelt’s Federal Security Agency was abolished. And most of its functions were shifted over to a newly formed Department of Health, Education and, you guessed it,
Welfare.

Peter Roady: If you go up to Capitol Hill and you invoke national security to ask for money for something, I think the data would show that you're much more likely to get it, than if you frame it as welfare or social policy or something like that. And then I think it generates huge deference from the public. It also generates deference to the executive branch from the other branches of the government. I started my career in the Pentagon, and I'll tell you, you know, my biggest takeaway from that experience, is that if you work in national security, there is a large amount of power that comes with that. Um, the second thing is a large amount of resources. You know, when someone asks you, what do you do for a living, you say, well, I work in national security and there's sort of some, you know, you know, this Peter, right? There's some deference that comes from that. [BERGEN DEMURS, LAUGHS] Oh yeah, well, you know, you know, well, but you know, it's, it seemed to me though, that therefore it really mattered what counted as a national security issue.

Peter Bergen: When you were in the Pentagon, you were working OSD policy, policy shop of the secretary of defense.

Peter Roady: Yeah.

Peter Bergen: The Pentagon, I mean, it's not like a, it's not Meals on Wheels, or Save the Children, or the Red Cross. [ROADY LAUGHS] The organization, I mean, I actually like the fact that it used to be called the Department of War, because it was a little bit more clear.

Peter Roady: Clear, yeah.

Peter Bergen: And the United States, at the end of the day, the United States is engaged in a lot of wars, and continues to be engaged in a lot of wars. So when you were there, were you thinking about these issues, was there a point where you kind of changed your mind about them, did you have any friction with colleagues about talking about the bigger picture?

Peter Roady: It wasn't really until I stepped back from that world and began with this, what seemed like a really innocuous question, which is, you know, where did this term national security come from?

Peter Bergen: Mmm.

Peter Roady: Because things that were considered in the national security bucket would get that power, deference, and resources. So I would say my experience on the inside helped plant one of the seeds for this book, which was to really think about, well, who decides what counts as a national security matter? How did we come to understand national security in the way that we understand it today?

Peter Bergen: I worked on a project, uh, my current boss at my think tank, Anne Marie Slaughter, did a project on national security with a bunch of people, subject matter experts. It actually was surprisingly diﬃcult to get an agreement on what national security was. We ended up with something by George Kennan, which I'll paraphrase, which he said, you know, national security is the ability for Americans to continue their daily lives without threat or the real possibility of an interference by a foreign power.

Peter Roady: Mmm.

Peter Bergen: You know, so, the idea that foreign powers shouldn't be able to sort of either interfere or threaten to interfere with just the daily course of our lives, it was what I think what he was saying. And you could update that for today, which is look when 1.2 million plus Americans have died of COVID, which is more than every, all the numbers of Americans that have died in every war since the American Revolution, or when 100,000 Americans are dying of overdoses, many of them of fentanyl.

Peter Roady: Mmhmm.

Peter Bergen: You know, what's wrong with that more narrow definition of national security or what's sort of lacking?

Peter Roady: Yeah. Those are big questions, Peter. And I think, you get at something very interesting and it's something that president Obama reflected on quite a bit, actually, especially after the bin Laden raid. And you might remember this, cause I remember you interviewed him, you know, in the years after the bin Laden raid. And after Abbottabad, he couldn't help but wonder what the government could accomplish if Americans saw domestic policy priorities as just as urgent as getting the architect of September 11th. I think, you know, unwritten in his memoir and unsaid in his interview comments on this is that therefore, it matters what counts as a national security priority, right? And one of the things that I'm always excited to talk about about this book, you know, with people who are still serving in government is that, hey, you know, there is this broader conception of what national security has meant in the past and therefore could mean again in the present and in the future.

Peter Bergen: At the end of your book you write that, quote, “It is no longer clear that the United States can afford a foreign policy-focused approach to national security, or that such an approach can actually deliver national security.”

Peter Roady: Mhmm.

Peter Bergen: What do you mean by that?

Peter Roady: I think that from sort of 1947 really down to the present day, you know, we have tried to achieve national security primarily through foreign policy and military policy. And I'll give you the example of energy policy, you know, in the 1970s, when we had the successive oil crises, first President Ford and then President Carter tried to have a domestic policy solution, if you will, to that problem, because everybody recognized that energy shortages were becoming a national security problem. Um, what did Congress do? They said, you know, we're not going to do anything on that. And so we ended up relying on the military in the 1980s and down to the present day, to keep shipping lanes open, from the Middle East, back to the United States to ensure the relatively free flow of energy supplies. So that's an example of a foreign policy focused way of executing or trying to achieve national security.

And Roady says a broader view of national security could have unlocked resources to help solve the problem at home. Maybe that meant expanding domestic oil production or developing more renewable energy sources. The point is, there’s plenty of national security work to be done at home, inside the wall.

Roady made me think a lot about how we approach this show. I thought about all the times I've gotten into rooms with people who are grappling with serious national threats. And I've listened to these people make FDR-style sales pitches, on their own, seemingly from first principles, about why some given problem should count as a national security matter even if conventional wisdom holds otherwise. For example, here's a clip from an interview I did with Josh Geltzer, who’ s one of the top lawyers in the Biden administration. He serves on the National Security Council.

Josh Geltzer: When you think about horrific terrorist attacks and think about a certain number of lethalities, or you think about horrific acts of extreme weather, you think about some number of lethalities. And then if you think about the fentanyl crisis, you need to add a bunch of zeros to that.

This was for a show we did on how fentanyl poisoning is killing some 75,000 Americans a year.

Josh Geltzer: We think about fentanyl as a national security problem, a homeland security problem, a public health problem. A diplomacy problem, all of those.

I also thought about my conversation last year with Philip Zelikow. He's the historian who directed the 9/11 commission before overseeing the most thorough investigation of American policy failures during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Philip Zelikow: The whole point of national security is to get beyond the narrowest definitions of military.

Peter Bergen: We have a situation right now where 1.-, more than 1.1 million Americans have died. So, if that isn't a national security problem, what is?

Philip Zelikow: Right. If the security of your people is threatened, the security of their jobs, of their daily existence, and of their health and well being is threatened, well, then that's a national security issue.

This broader conception of American national security seems especially apt for another inside-the-wall problem that seems to be getting worse every year.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: The death toll from Hurricane Helene keeps rising. At least 225 people are dead now across six states.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Tonight, monster Hurricane Milton unleashing a tornado outbreak across Florida.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: There is strong evidence human driven climate change strengthened Helene's destructive power.

The impact from two catastrophic hurricanes in two weeks earlier this year suggests that treating climate change as a national security problem is not a liberal position but a hardheaded, realist one.

Peter Roady: If large swaths of our country are rendered uninhabitable by virtue of rising sea levels, is that a national security problem? And I would say if those people are not able to be relocated and flourish elsewhere, then the answer is yes, of course, it's a national security problem. Because it's going to contribute to instability inside the United States. And that's another thing to understand about the way Roosevelt understood national security. A lot of it had to do with domestic stability. Anything that contributed to undermining domestic stability — and in his time, that was mainly economic insecurity — was potentially going to be a serious national security problem. In a country as large and diverse as the United States social cohesion, it turns out is really important. And if people don't feel invested in the idea and actuality of the United States, then your biggest national security problem is probably inside the wall, not outside the wall.

From the beginning, Roosevelt recognized that people would stop feeling invested in a political system that failed to look after their wellbeing. And they’d be much more willing to throw that system out.

Peter Roady: Roosevelt, especially as the 1930s wore on, he would reference what was happening in Germany in particular, in very visceral terms. He said, all you have to do is look at what's happening overseas. If people do not feel like their government is meeting their needs, they will seek alternative forms of government. Full stop. They'll seek autocrats. They'll seek fascism, communism, whatever.

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF NAZI CHANTS]

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. And I heard some Roosevelt-inflected rhymes this summer when I spoke with Ben Rhodes. He was a top national security advisor to president Barack Obama. Since leaving government, Rhodes has chronicled the erosion of democracy in countries around the world. An erosion rooted in the fact that financial crises and decades of shipping jobs to China left country after country unable to deliver prosperity to their people at home, inside the wall.

Ben Rhodes: You have a sense that the whole system is essentially rigged, that a bunch of rich people at the top are doing very well, and the rest of us are getting screwed. And I think that opened the door for populists, particularly on the right, who could kind of appeal to the oldest form of politics, which is nationalist politics, tribal politics. And so I think in country after country, what you've seen is strongman leaders standing up and saying, I'm offering you the traditional identity: make America great again, make India great again, make Hungary great again.

Roosevelt seemed to understand this back in 1941.

ARCHIVAL Franklin D. Roosevelt: This is no time for any of us to stop thinking about the social and economic problems which are the root cause of the social revolution which is today a supreme factor in the world. There is nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy. They are equality of opportunity. Jobs for those who can work. Security for those who need it. The ending of special privilege for the few.

Peter Bergen: What would Roosevelt make of today? I mean, we've got a defense budget that is pushing up against a trillion dollars. Um, we’ve got at home, the COVID pandemic hasn't really gone away. It may be an endemic rather than pandemic. But, you know, we're not prepared for the next one, unbelievably. We have the fentanyl crisis. If FDR was looking at where we are today, what, what do you think he would say? And what do you think he would do?

Peter Roady: I think he would be saddened by the lack of progress on a lot of these issues. If you go back and listen to his 1937 second inaugural address as president, he said in that, “I still see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them day by day.” Well, here we are more than 80 years later, and economic insecurity remains a serious problem. I think the latest count has something like 40 million Americans living in poverty. You know, 12% of the population. And then you've got something like 80 million Americans that have less than a thousand dollars in savings. You know, it's hard to say that we are flourishing, as we would hope that we would be flourishing as a society.

Peter Bergen: Well, then pushing back a little bit, if things are overly broadly defined, they ultimately are meaningless.

Peter Roady: Correct, yes.

Peter Bergen: So if national security suddenly becomes like everything, then, we might as well just say, we're talking about everything.

Peter Roady: Exactly.

Peter Bergen: So, how broad should the definition be and, what should we include and what should we exclude?

Peter Roady: To me, I think that thinking about national security less in terms of potential physical harm and more in terms of the flourishing of the society: if the society behind the wall is flourishing, I think you have a lot less to worry about. You could build a really big wall, but if everybody's starving to death behind the wall, the wall is not doing you any good.

[MUSIC FADES]

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If you’re interested in the issues and stories we discussed in this episode, we recommend The Contest over National Security by Peter Roady. We also recommend Fear Itself by Ira Katznelson, which is available on Audible.

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