Throughout the history of the United States, national security and the many strategies and policies that arise around that drive for security, has been a moving attachment to the very growth this nation has experienced since its founding over two centuries ago. Americans have had a unique relationship with national security that has separated them from the rest of the globe and especially its allies and fellow partners of the Western world on the European continent. The period of economic and territorial growth and expansion from the 19th century all the way up to the time of the Cold War, beginning in the late 1940s, was a period in which the United States assumed the role of global leader and shed its policy of political isolation. The concept of security for the nation during this time period experienced a very dramatic shift into a whole new arena of domestic and international policies. National security and how it was maintained and implemented became a key point in the minds of American citizens when the Cold War broke out in 1947. However, a hundred and fifty years earlier at the beginning of the 19th century, the idea of national security and the state of this nation were in very different forms from what we as citizens now live through and see day in and day out.
When the United States entered the 19th century, the problems of security the nation faced were numerous and in some cases very foreign to the problems that Americans faced during the time of the Cold War. “ There had been periods, for all Americans, in which security had been problematic: the dangers of immigration in the first place, and of life on the frontier once there, the struggle for independence, secure borders, and maritime rights in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries” (Gaddis, pg 8). These security issues along with military threats from Great Britain and the wars fought on the frontier against Native American tribes were the dangers Americans faced and were the reasons for certain policies that the leaders of the nation enacted in order to suppress those threats. The policy of isolationism had been a policy of both choice and geographical fate that, except for a few violent instances, allowed the United States to remain secure within its borders and expand its level of influence and power almost entirely unhindered. “ With the exception of Pancho Villa’s raids into the Southwest in the second decade of the twentieth century and a few submarine incursions during World War 2 along the West Coast, the forty-eight contiguous states were safe from the danger of physical harm from 1814, when the British left at the end of the War of 1812, until 1957, when the successful testing of a Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) made the United States vulnerable to nuclear missile attacks” (Snow, pg.79).
Isolationism came in two forms and the political form was what allowed the United States to emerge as a separate entity from its contemporaries in Europe. American leaders wanted to build an independent nation in the North American continent, one that was independent and territorially free of the European powers and one that could compete economically. Unilateralism became a policy of necessity as Americans became aware of their vulnerability to external attacks. “ The idea here was that the United States could not rely upon the goodwill of others to secure its safety, and therefore should be prepared to act on its own” (Gaddis, pg23). Americans learned a variety of hard lessons during the fight for independence against Great Britain in the previous century and one of those lessons was to not depend on other powers to secure the future of the American nation through fighting or by any other means. America had to be secured by the strength of its citizens and its citizens alone.
The period of the 19th century was a time of true territorial expansion and the issues of security and political isolation were coursing through the veins of the young nation and reached the surface of national consciousness as it engaged in war with Great Britain in 1812. It was in this war the United States suffered humiliating defeats and through those defeats altered its political thinking and maneuvering. When the capitol and the White House were burned by the British, having invaded the United States, American leaders were unprepared for the true impact those fires would have on the populace. “ Prior to the War of 1812, however, there was no long-term strategy linking security to expansion” (Gaddis, pg 14). A few years after the devastating war the United States issued the Monroe Doctrine, which went hand in hand with the concept of Manifest Destiny. America, and America alone, would have political and military say over both the North and South American continents and that European powers must stay out of the New World. To be a hemispherical power America had to secure its borders. Our leaders went about that mission by expanding those borders through war and conquest. However, with new conquests came new threats against the national security, which prompted new security policies to evolve and adapt to the changing political landscape.
The end of the 19th century saw America at a national crossroads when it entered into a war with Spain in 1898, a war that transformed the United States from a continental power into a global power. America won the war quickly and decisively, acquiring the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam from Spain. These acquisitions brought America out of political isolation and onto the stage of the global leaders who were the European powers, which had by that point carved the world up into their own colonial empires. America had to improve upon its security policies having just gathered itself a small empire of its own. Containing and responding to external threats had spread off the continent and into the Pacific and the Caribbean. The policy of unilateralism remained intact and although America had emerged globally it did not lose that image of isolationism. The years following the Spanish-American War showed little impact from the United States in the form of global leadership or real global power until the outbreak of World War 1. World War 1 was the incident that brought the United States out of its isolationist roots, at least for a few years, and into the realm of European politics and European warfare.
The United States became involved in the Great War in 1917 and the president at the time, Woodrow Wilson, had a vision of America taking a larger role in global dealings after the war came to an end. The policy of multilateralism came into effect with American involvement in the war and this was a clear sign of America on the edge of experiencing true restructuring in the sphere of national security. However, after the war ended in 1919, America returned to the policy of isolationism just when the nation was called upon to help lead the new order that was taking place with the birth of the League of Nations. For the next twenty years the United States maintained that policy of isolationism, ignoring the call of multilateralism from Europe, as continued with policies from a past century. These policies were antiques in the face of growing aggression from the impact of the Great Depression and the rise of dictators in Europe. The outbreak of World War 2 in 1939 along with FDR in the White House was the combination that finally brought the United States into its modern role of being a global leader and a global power. Unilateralism and isolationism were superceded by multilateralism and global engagement as America fought the war on both fronts and committed the entire nation to the war effort abroad and at home.
The aftermath of the second world war brought the United States to its greatest position of power domestically as well as globally. America had reached a level of influence militarily and politically that surpassed the former great powers of Europe, all of which had been decimated by the carnage that had lasted for six years. America had become a changed nation from its experience of the war and what emerged in 1945 was a nation finally capable of filling the leadership position. National security entered a new phase of its being, and a reforming of policy had to occur. However, two years after the ending of the bloodiest conflict in modern history, the last two remaining superpowers entered into a new type of conflict that became known as the Cold War. National security took on a whole new meaning when citizens were faced with a powerful and nuclear Soviet Union accompanied by the spreading of communism to other parts of the globe. The evolution of 19th century policies to the ones the United States created in order to face the new threat of world communism was an evolutionary path that encountered many obstacles and went down a number of political avenues. America, by the time of Cold War confrontation, was not even a shadow of its 19th century self and the policies for security had caught up and adjusted to modern times. The evolution and shifting of the American vision on what security meant to this nation and its people had finally come to fruition with the external threat of communism, a threat that lasted for another four decades and held the populace in an attentive grip from one heartbeat to the next.
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