by Michael Singh

    Since assuming office, U.S. President Donald Trump has overseen an unprecedented assault on the federal government. Initially, his agent in this campaign was the tech mogul Elon Musk, who was running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Musk described DOGE’s mission as reducing the United States’ $36 trillion in federal debt and ending the “tyranny of bureaucracy.” After a very public rift between the billionaires last week, Musk is on the outs with Trump, but the goal of downsizing the federal bureaucracy remains deeply ingrained in the administration. At the end of May, for instance, in a move not apparently initiated by Musk or his staff, the Trump administration cut dozens of staff from the National Security Council, which advises the president on international affairs and coordinates the interagency policymaking process. This move, according to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also replaced Mike Waltz to lead the NSC, is intended to make the NSC hew more closely to “its original purpose and the President’s vision.” But, according to Axios, an anonymous official put it more bluntly: “The NSC is the ultimate Deep State. . . . We’re gutting the Deep State.”

    Critics argue that such drastic cuts to the federal government will ultimately diminish U.S. influence in the world. Yet it is worth remembering that debates over the size and scope of the NSC and other parts of the national security bureaucracy fit squarely in a long-standing American political tradition. Indeed, the recent attacks on bureaucracy—and especially the national security bureaucracy—are reminiscent of the immediate aftermath of World War II.

    With the U.S. victory in 1945, the shattering of the international order that preceded it, and the emergence of the Soviet Union as a military and ideological rival, midcentury American political and intellectual circles broadly accepted that there could be no return to Washington’s pre-war military readiness or its foreign policy of relative aloofness from global affairs. But precisely what a “new normal” should look like was hotly debated. Internationalists believed the United States should maintain a robust overseas role, while conservatives were skeptical of international intervention. From those debates emerged the U.S. national security state—the collection of government agencies and organizations that focus on protecting citizens from external threats.

    Thanks to its success winning the Cold War, the national security state has been treated almost as sacrosanct by the U.S. foreign policy establishment, with its logic and institutions going unchallenged and unchecked for decades. Now that the Trump administration has revived a 75-year-old debate, however, the United States has an opportunity to remember and learn from those midcentury conversations—with the most important lesson of all being that the national security state was a product both of political compromise and of the particular threat it was designed to counter. Ensuring U.S. national security in the future requires not simply reversing DOGE’s cuts or restaffing various organizations but fighting for new compromises and considering new threats.

    BORN OF COMPROMISE

    In the aftermath of World War II, as communism and Soviet power spread abroad, the priority for American policymakers of all stripes was to defend the United States’ democracy and its way of life. Yet there were two distinct views on how to accomplish this, and each side felt the other’s proposed policies would bring about the very calamity they aimed to prevent. Internationalists believed that the United States had to cast off its historic caution overseas and take up the mantle of international leadership that had fallen in Washington’s lap. This meant, among other things, building lasting alliances, sustaining a permanent military presence abroad, and preparing for what was anticipated to be “total war” of one great power against another. Conservatives were appalled at these ideas, which in their view ran counter to traditional American political culture, represented the very sort of European imperialism America’s founders had rebelled against, and militarized U.S. society in a way that would erode democracy.

    Conservatives argued instead for focusing on domestic affairs, which had been relatively neglected during the war, and returning to an older approach to U.S. foreign policy—one that emphasized the Western Hemisphere and insisted on the reduction of defense budgets. In 1947, as President Harry Truman and his Secretary of State George Marshall peddled their proposal to provide billions of dollars in postwar reconstruction aid to Europe, Congressman Harold Knutson of Minnesota described the Marshall Plan as “tax-and-borrow-and-spend in other countries” and suggested the men were captive to the “intelligentsia, one-worlders, and do-gooders.” He derided supporters of the spending in his own party as “internationally-minded, ‘me-too’ Republicans”—echoes of today’s “RINO,” or Republican in name only, epithet. Internationalists returned the conservatives’ scorn in full measure, arguing that their “Fortress America” would allow adversaries to prosper and accumulate power and that the United States could not survive as a democratic island in a communist and authoritarian world.

    The end of this story is by now well known: the internationalists prevailed, their case helped immeasurably by global events, including crises in Czechoslovakia, Greece, and Turkey; the Soviet Union’s successful atomic test; and the triumph of communists in China. As Truman asserted in sketching his eponymous doctrine in 1947, it would be the “policy of the United States to support free peoples,” and the United States had every intention of remaining a global and interventionist power. Yet, as detailed by the American historian Michael Hogan in A Cross of Iron, the national security state Truman and other internationalists went on to build was nevertheless the product of compromise. Despite his foreign policy leanings, Truman sought to reduce defense spending and restore balanced budgets—which were still considered an American tradition—and he stood firm against the most ambitious proposals coming from his administration, such as the unification of the military under an all-powerful commander or the institution of universal military training for Americans.

    To be sure, the resulting national security system had a strong internationalist bias. The newly formed National Security Council, for example, rejected proposals to include once dominant domestic cabinet agencies such as Agriculture and Commerce—but checks on its power were included in its design. Rather than a single consolidated structure, the national security state worked via committee and coordination. Limits were imposed on both the military and the brand-new Central Intelligence Agency to prevent them from becoming more powerful. The CIA, for example, could not readily access domestic law enforcement information, nor could it participate in policy debates; and the secretary of defense received only a slim staff to allay concerns that the role would be too powerful.

    But if the national security state built after World War II was designed in part to accommodate conservative concerns about imperial overreach, that compromise quickly fell by the wayside.

    GROWTH SPURT

    After the 1950s, the national security apparatus grew inexorably: the U.S. Information Agency, which aimed to influence foreign public opinion, was created in 1953; eight years later, the government created the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which administers foreign aid and development assistance, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, which provides intelligence support to the Department of Defense and the U.S. military; and other organizations devoted to preventing and resolving conflicts abroad such as the National Endowment for Democracy and the U.S. Institute of Peace were created in the 1980s. Each new body had a logic of its own, but each also pushed the United States further from its roots as a noninterventionist state.

    By the 1990s, the national security state had succeeded in the mission it was designed for: to secure victory in the Cold War. Yet that success carried significant costs, many of which were predicted by conservative commentators. Conservatives of the late 1940s, for instance, worried that the creation of the national security state portended high taxes, permanent budget deficits, the growth of presidential power, and the atrophying of traditional domestic institutions such as local governments and religious organizations that had until then dominated American life. Conservatives and self-professed realists had also warned that the internationalists’ logic was a recipe for fruitless conflict. The political commentator Walter Lippmann, for example, thought that the policy of containment articulated by the U.S. diplomat George Kennan played to Soviet rather than American advantages: Lippmann wrote that Kennan’s strategy meant that “Moscow, not Washington, would select the ground where the conflict was to be waged, and would choose the weapons.” Washington, he believed, would be drawn into conflicts by partners about whom it knew little and would ultimately be forced either to abandon them or to indefinitely defend them at enormous cost. Although Lippmann was wrong about the failure of the United States’ Cold War strategy, warnings such as these proved prescient in Vietnam and elsewhere.

    Congressional conservatives made a brief comeback in the 1990s, under former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s leadership, but a full-throated debate over the national security state’s merits still did not resume. If anything, the quick and overwhelming victory in the Gulf War coupled with victory in the Cold War led many to believe the United States was “uniquely capable of influencing world events,” as the Clinton administration official Martin Indyk put it. By the time of the 9/11 attacks, the national security state was primed and ready to resume its expansion. Indeed, facing an urgent crisis, the administration of George W. Bush largely repurposed, strengthened, and expanded the existing national security state, with violent Islamist extremism standing in for communism. The government created the Department of Homeland Security, the Homeland Security Council, and the office of the Director of National Intelligence and partially eased the restrictions on intelligence sharing originally meant to dampen the CIA’s power. The NSC staff, which numbered 34 in the early 1970s and roughly 50 in the early 1990s, grew to over 200.

    DON’T CALL IT A COMEBACK

    The widespread perception that Washington’s post-9/11 wars—and by implication, the policy apparatus behind them—had failed to deliver gains took hold as early as the end of Bush’s second term. A decade later, it had become conventional wisdom. This perception helped to finally reignite the debate that conservatives initiated in the late 1940s, along with calls to end “forever wars” and to redirect U.S. resources to domestic needs. These sentiments became the mainstream Republican view with Trump’s rise to power, which occurred in parallel with the emergence of think tanks devoted to isolationism or restraint, such as the Quincy Institute and Defense Priorities.

    The second Trump administration is arguably the first in which this faction of conservatives, a throwback to the days of Herbert Hoover and Robert Taft, have a major role in national security issues. After many years in exile, it should be little surprise that they have largely picked up where their political and intellectual predecessors left off and are now bringing the rest of the party with them. One-time internationalist hawks such as Rubio, for instance, are helping to lead the reorientation in U.S. foreign policy. In his first official remarks as secretary of state, he called for a greater emphasis on hemispheric issues and on internal security, and he has been eager to slash budgets and shrink the agencies he oversees, including the NSC, USAID, and the State Department. These priorities reflect a political tradition largely relegated to the fringes during the Cold War and the so-called war on terror, but one that remained alive, relevant to political debates, and deeply rooted in American society even when it was not dominant. Although its adherents are not monolithic in their views by any means, it is a tradition that differs from internationalism in that it views broad U.S. entanglement in international affairs as delivering more risk than reward, more cost than benefit.

    Yet there is an incoherence to many of Trump’s initiatives that would cause midcentury conservatives to blanch. Budget deficits, for example, have grown not as a result of the national security state but because of the expansion of entitlements and the growing number of Americans who qualify for them as the population ages. According to the Petersen Foundation, from 2001 to 2023, discretionary outlays, which include all spending on national security, grew from 6.2 to 6.4 percent of GDP. Mandatory outlays, which include social security, Medicare, and Medicaid, grew from 9.6 to 13.9 percent of GDP over that same period, as net interest on the U.S. debt grew from 2.0 to 2.4 percent of GDP. DOGE efforts, such as gutting USAID and the U.S. Institute of Peace, will not only fail to put a dent in this problem but ironically target spending that may be among the national security state’s most efficient. For the cost of a couple of fighter jets, these agencies aim to prevent or slow the growth of conflicts and crises that, if left unaddressed, might become far more costly for the United States. These cuts also exacerbate a risk that used to alarm the sort of conservatives now in power in Washington: foreign partners may increasingly see the U.S. military as their most stable and effective counterpart in Washington. This trend is already noticeable with the rise of powerful combatant commanders in Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific.

    More fundamentally, the Trump administration’s efforts to kneecap the national security state have been paired with the expansion of Trump’s presidential power. The unilateral imposition of tariffs is one example, but so is a more hierarchical method of crafting national security policy: presidential comments or social media posts, for example, have replaced the postwar bottom-up system. Although small-government conservatism and limits on the power of the presidency are as old as the Republic, this trend is newer and arguably began with conservative frustrations in the 1980s that President Ronald Reagan was hampered in his ability to carry out his agenda by a too-powerful Congress. Whatever the merits of Trump’s campaign, the combined effect of an increase in presidential power and a dismantling of national security institutions means there will be ever-greater power concentrated in ever-fewer hands—the very outcome that postwar conservatives were determined to avert.

    “IN CRISIS, OPPORTUNITY”

    In the debates preceding the construction of the national security state in the 1940s and 1950s, there was a surprising degree of consensus regarding the threats faced by the United States. For all the acrimony that has attended DOGE’s scorched-earth campaign against the national security state and Trump’s efforts to consolidate power in his own hands, the same degree of consensus exists today: there is near unanimity among national security experts regarding the futility of recent wars and the need to focus on nuclear-armed great-power rivals—namely, China and Russia. Differences among ideological factions regarding how to address those threats are sharp, but no more so than those in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Indeed, the debates and the rhetoric are eerily similar. It is worth remembering how those earlier debates led to compromises that produced a thoroughgoing reform of the bureaucracy that, while imperfect, served American needs at a critical time.

    For their part, modern-day internationalists should recognize that the national security system that won the Cold War is not sacrosanct but in need of reconsideration: it was designed for different threats in a different century, and its failings provide useful lessons for the current generation of policymakers. Merely reversing Trump’s cuts and repurposing the old system for new threats—such as arguing that competition with China is a “new cold war”—is insufficient. Yet they are right that U.S. engagement in the world is more necessary than ever; any notion of retreating to our own hemisphere or carving the world into spheres of influence is nonsensical when facing adversaries with innumerable ways to cause the United States direct harm. And they are right that the nonmilitary tools of power are critical if war is to be avoided and peace won. The federal government must provide a home both to those with critical skills of the obscure sort—such as nuclear weapons scientists or pathogen researchers—and those with highly marketable expertise in emerging technologies.

    Newly triumphant traditional conservatives, meanwhile, are right that a slimmer national security state could serve U.S. interests better than the bloated structure that emerged from the Cold War and the war on terror. Communication between capitals is far more direct than in the past, and the policy process must unfold more quickly to keep up with the pace of information and events. Most important, the United States must more ruthlessly prioritize given the sharp decrease in its advantages in relative power. But they should also instinctively recognize the danger in sweeping away a system that served U.S. national security well for decades, with no plan or strategy for replacing it beyond trusting in the intelligence, goodwill, and restraint of the handful of officials who accumulate power in the wake of the cuts.

    Just as in the aftermath of World War II, it is not in the single-minded pursuit of either side’s vision that the United States will find success, but in achieving compromise between them. The Silicon Valley ethos embraced by DOGE is often described as “move fast and break things.” Washington’s ethos, however, has often been described as “in crisis, opportunity.” The breaking of the national security state is indeed a crisis, but it also creates an opportunity for the Trump administration or its successors to finally build a new national security state tailored to the world’s present-day threats as well as the United States’ deep-rooted and disparate political traditions.