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This chapter explores the globalization school's predictions for the pursuit of security. First, it examines the various strands of the demise of the state argument, including those of hard globalization proponents, soft globalization proponents, and commercial liberals, as well as two other groups with claims that are compatible with our definition of globalization, democratic peace theory, and constructivist arguments about the spread of globalized political norms. It then culls out of these positions a set of common propositions about the effect globalization is likely to have on the way states pursue security. It identifies macro-level propositions about the level of interstate war, aggregate defense spending, the prominence of transnational terrorism, and the role of multilateral institutions at the international system level. It then identifies state- and region-specific propositions about the national security strategies and architectures of individual states.

This chapter brings the survey of custom to the beginning of this century. That survey shows how U.S. foreign policy has continued to pressure the judiciary to go in the direction of Curtiss-Wright, an invitation it has still generally refused in light of the recommitment to the original constitutional framework set out in Youngstown. That the courts, and the Supreme Court in particular, maintained their position as well as they did stands as a testament to the original constitutional design and nearly a century and a half of constitutional custom. Starting roughly midcentury, the nation was placed on a type of near-permanent war footing. These developments accelerated the trend toward greater claims of executive power in particular. In this setting, arguments that the judiciary was ill suited to second-guess executive foreign policy, and to intervene in foreign affairs more generally, were sounded with greater frequency. At times the Court bowed, much to its later regret. Yet, for the most part, it has shown itself capable of maintaining its role. In the end, the survey of constitutional custom falls short of showing constitutional demotion of the judiciary's role in foreign affairs as originally envisioned and long practiced.

This chapter is motivated by the following question: What explains the determinants of illiberal democracies in Latin America and the prevalence of regime transitions from liberal to illiberal governance? The chapter argues that counternarcotic aid is the financial and diplomatic mechanism through which the corporatist drug enforcement regime has replicated essential features of the U.S. national security state in aid-recipient countries in Latin America for the purpose of fighting the drug war. The replication of the national security state and thereby the creation of a drug war national security state undermines the process of democratization and, in the process, produces illiberal regimes in the region. The drug-war-induced national security state explains not only the emergence of illiberal democracy in the region but also regressive regime transitions from liberal to illiberal governance. Probabilistic econometric models are used to analyze data for 19 Latin American countries covering the period 1978 to 2011. The findings show that U.S. counternarcotic aid increases, by 56 percent, the probability that a recipient government will be an illiberal democracy. And the risk of a liberal democratic government receiving aid and reverting to illiberal democracy increases by 44 percent.

Export controls do not only regulate international trade. They also regulate the transfer of information, knowledge, and know-how (intangible technology) to foreign nationals, both abroad and in the US (a so-called deemed export). They have become increasingly wide in scope, invasive, and nationalistic in the global space of knowledge production and circulation. The reach of the regulatory National Security State has expanded to embrace the education and training of scientists, engineers, and project managers in face-to-face interactions at both academic and corporate sites. Heavy fines and imprisonment have been imposed on US entities and individuals who violate the law, which is subject to constant (re)negotiation between diverse stakeholders who strive to balance academic freedom and access to markets with threats to American national economic and military security. This paper traces the historical arc of these developments from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. It highlights key moments when the sharing of sensitive but unclassified knowledge and know-how with foreign nationals was a major preoccupation of the National Security State. An increasingly restrictive export control regime was put in place to deal with threats from first the Soviet Union and then the People's Republic of China.

The success of the project of survival governance, which requires states to focus on the repair of ecosystems, depends on the success of China’s experimental cities and whether China can manage to develop core technologies in the face of opposition from the US national security state. The technologies that are central to the construction of the bio-digital energy paradigm are also the ones that matter to US military power. The United States is using regulatory mechanisms such as intellectual property and export controls to block or slow China’s acquisition of core technologies. The United States has already created a technological fork in global technology markets, making it more or less impossible for companies like Google to deal with Chinese companies like Huawei. Less clear is whether multinational capital will support this fork. It may choose to support the new circuits of accumulation that emerge as states embrace survival governance.

This chapter examines the Rosenberg trial's place in postmodern historiographic fiction. Relying on simulated evidence and staged testimony revealing covert activity, the trial possessed a fictional quality. The chapter then analyzes Robert Coover's satire of the Rosenberg case, The Public Burning (1977). Among the most important examples of postmodern U.S. fiction, this novel repeatedly associates its own narrative experimentation with the confusion of the Rosenberg trial and the ideological system that supports the National Security State. By doing so, it illustrates a common inconsistency of much Cold War avant-garde writing—because writers cannot know state secrets, they must limit themselves to representing the radical unknowing produced by the security state.

This chapter explains that Margaret Mead's tools and techniques in national character studies were meant to be useful in times of peace, despite being made during the Second World War. Mead made sure of this by keeping her work safe from the hands of what she called “bastards,” so it would remain applicable in making a peaceful world rather than making a world of hate and hostilities. But the subsequent generations were sceptical of her claims. They argued that social science had become entangled with the so-called “National Security State” during the war and that it would become impossible for them to disengage, if they actually tried to disengage. They even pressed that neither side actually tried to disengage.

This chapter examines how sovereign violence defines the meanings and effects attached to race by bringing W. E. B. DuBois into conversation with Michael Omi and Howard Winant. It deploys racial formation theory alongside DuBois to conceptualize race as less “precipitated out of social relations” than “remade as social relation,” in order to expose race as reconstituted in the practices of permanent war and as deeply embedded in “the uniquely violent foundations of Western modernity.” It also deconstructs racist depictions of Barack Obama and highlights the complex and troubling contradictions that his presidency engenders, not only for a white hegemony founded on “post-racial” politics but also for sovereign violence legitimized under the global umbrella of the expanded U.S. national security state.

The end of the Cold War left the USA as uncontested hegemon and shaper of the globalization and international order. Yet the international order has been unintentionally but repeatedly shaken by American interventionism and affronts to both allies and rivals. This is particularly the case in the Middle East as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the nuclear negotiations with Iran show. Therefore, the once unquestioned authority and power of the USA have been challenged at home as well as abroad. By bringing disorder rather than order to the world, US behavior in these conflicts has also caused domestic exhaustion and division. This, in turn, has led to a more restrained and as of late isolationist foreign policy from the USA, leaving the role as shaper of the international order increasingly to others.

This concluding chapter discusses Tracking Transience, a performance both of the law and for the law. It stages the surveillance techniques of the national security state as they concentrate on the artist's racialized body. In addition, the play demonstrates the links between law and performance in the process of racialization. To do so, it draws on the tradition of body artists, such as Hanna Wilke, Yoko Ono, Chris Burden, and Karen Finley, who use the body in performance to stage, a “dislocation of normative subjectivity, reconfiguring identity politics (the way in which the subject comes to meaning in the social) and the very parameters of subjectivity itself.”

During World War II, the choices made by liberals had immediate consequences for liberalism and the country. Social defense was ultimately subordinated to the needs of national security. As home defense evolved, what “defense” and “security” even meant narrowed in wartime society to connote military preparedness rather than “human security.” Eleanor Roosevelt became a principal architect of liberalism as “a fighting faith.” She insisted that social and economic problems had to remain at the center of the debate about democracy in wartime. She helped forge the liberal tradition of projecting America’s values to the world while also pushing Americans to live up to their founding principles. Fiorello La Guardia’s vision for home defense found arguably even more resonance in the culture of 1950s America than ER’s. His idea to prioritize militarism ahead of other national concerns gained traction among some liberals during the Cold War.

The epilogue tracks the evolution of naval science and its relationship to the broader scientific world into the Twentieth and Twenty-First centuries with attention to the growing strategic role of cartography, oceanography, and marine science within the Cold War national security state, the emergence of submarine warfare, and the militarization of science in weaponizing nature itself. The epilogue argues that while science became even more central to strategic discourse and naval warfare more generally, it continued to have a fraught place within the Navy’s ranks and its significance was not continuously appreciated among naval leaders even as the U.S. Marine Corps in the interwar period placed strategic knowledge of the natural world at the foundation of its emerging amphibious assault doctrine. Finally, the epilogue makes some general claims about the significance of the marine environment to naval affairs in the present day by linking the Navy’s strategic visions to a marine environment made more violent and dynamic by the influence of climate change as well as the renewed importance of hydrographers historic methods and data as baselines from which to understand the degree of change in the world’s oceans.

Basic features of the Korean War were not revealed to the public, particularly how voluntary repatriation froze peace talks. Washington did not believe the nation would continue supporting a war to attain asylum for former communist prisoners. Officials obscured armistice issues and even waited until after the war to accuse the communists of massive brutality against POWs. Chinese accusations of germ warfare were inexplicably comical to many people since they did not know that voluntary repatriation had prolonged the war and turned it into a propaganda match. Secrecy about the war prevented participation in democratic process. The Korean War was also important in creating the military-industrial complex. POWs sacrificed an extra measure for this since their freedom was delayed over the contrived issue of voluntary repatriation.

This chapter extends and revises Jacques Rancière’s reading of von Trier’s Dogville (2003) as a cinematic expression of the contemporary “ethical turn.” For Rancière, Dogville expresses how, within the post–September 11 power formation, programs of ethical commitment, which oscillate incoherently between universalist devotion to humanity and defensive/vengeful loyalty to the nation, overshadow collective projects of political contestation. Hence, through many narrative, visual, and aural elements, the film records and threatens to reinforce this hegemonic formation that merges humanitarianism with the military aggressions and control technologies of the national security state. Yet as the closing track (“Young Americans”) by David Bowie suggests, Dogville also evokes a counterhegemonic politics of style that Rancière neglects but still helps theorize. Such a politics involves reconfiguring distributions of the sensible, interrogating claims to authentic knowledge of justice, and subversively manipulating commodities.