Politics and National Security

Abstract

Julian Zelizer has written a useful and instructive book. It is useful because it reminds us of an important fact: national security policy is affected by domestic politics and, in turn, affects domestic politics. It is instructive because it suggests important lessons about how to go about writing a book in terms of research, methodology, analysis, and structure. Zelizer believes that there has been a worrisome intellectual divorce between diplomatic and political history. Scholars, he argues, have paid too little attention to the intimate and inextricable links between national security decision making and the dynamics of domestic politics. In short, he concludes “domestic politics mattered very much throughout the period in American history when the nation developed a permanent national security state” (p. 506). Recognizing that he is not alone to think this way, he goes on to say in his conclusion: this book provides a much more dynamic and complex definition of politics than previous interpretation have offered—one that is less instrumental or predictable, one that is more varied and robust. There is no single model that explains how this relationship works over time…. [D]omestic politics has included a variety of pressures: electoral, ideological, partisan, and institutional. Politicians have thus faced multiple forms of pressure when dealing with international threats. (Ibid.)