National security

The National Security State of the Future

It’s all well and good to perseverate about the national security dangers the Trump presidency poses to the United States, and some at least are real enough. But it’s a mistake to allow our time horizons to be constricted by the presumably fleeting periodicity of those dangers. When we analyze the future security environment, as the U.S. intelligence community is obliged to do from time to time, we look out beyond three, five, or eight years. When we do that, what post-Trumpian challenges can we detect? 

In my view, the most serious of these challenges is not strictly an exogenous threat, whether from a state or clot of non-state actors, but rather the combination of a key challenge with how the very act of managing it could change American governance frameworks in ways we might come to regret. More specifically, my fear is that a protracted geo-economic competition with China could usher in the American national security state of the future. I will come in a moment to my meaning and reasons, but we need a little history as prelude.