According to Andrew Preston, many of the longstanding problems with US foreign policy and military overreach should be traced back to changes in posture and discourse that occurred under the leadership of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the 1930s, Preston argues, Roosevelt and other American policymakers and intellectuals developed new ideas about “national security.” In the early years of Roosevelt’s presidency, New Dealers used this term to describe new domestic welfare programs. But by the latter part of the decade, Roosevelt and others started to use the phrase “national security” to justify their efforts to expand US diplomatic and military activities around the world.

Total Defense builds on Preston’s influential journal article, “Monsters Everywhere: A Genealogy of National Security” (Diplomatic History 38, no. 3 [June 2014]: 477–500). Plenty of other scholars, including John A. Thompson and Melvyn P. Leffler, had previously discussed the history of discourses of “national security.” But Preston’s 2014 article did even more to emphasize the importance of Roosevelt and the 1930s. The article evidently influenced some of the most interesting recent books about mid-twentieth US foreign policy discourses from junior scholars, including Stephen Wertheim, Tomorrow the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Cambridge, MA, 2020), and Peter Roady, The Contest over National Security: FDR, Conservatives, and the Struggle to Claim the Most Powerful Phrase in American Politics (Cambridge, MA, 2024). In Total Defense, Preston offers his own book-length treatment of the subject. In the book, Preston assembles a large cast of characters, including novelists, filmmakers, economists, and politicians. But the key players, besides Roosevelt himself, are Ivy League foreign policy intellectuals, including the political scientists Edward Mead Earle and Arnold Wolfers.

Preston begins his narrative by explaining that for more than a century, starting in 1815, the United States enjoyed a considerable amount of what the historian C. Vann Woodward once called “free security.” Insulated by vast oceans, and without dangerous military rivals in the Americas, the United States did not need to worry about being invaded by other nations. According to Preston, during the decades before World War I, “America’s place in the international system changed very little” (p. 50).

In Preston’s telling, the key years of change were in the 1930s. Faced with the crisis of the Great Depression, the New Dealers moved to shore up what they called “national security” by creating a stronger social welfare state. Then, later in the decade, as militarism rose in Europe and Asia, President Roosevelt and foreign policy elites suddenly re-purposed the theory and language of “national security” to launch what would become the USA’s rise to global superpower. Preston argues that when it came to designing costly insurance policies to protect Americans from real or imagined dangers around the corner, “the hard conceptual groundwork had already been done by economic and social planners. All geostrategists and military analysts had to do was apply the basis of socioeconomic security to quickly changing world conditions, and the transformation of national security into a doctrine of defense against external threats was complete” (p. 128).

Preston’s discussion of the relationship between social insurance and military power is intriguing but rather thin; it deserves deeper investigation in future studies. But the insistence in Total Defense that the 1930s must be seen as the critical US foreign policy watershed can go too far. According to Preston, American diplomats and scholars “who thought systematically about national security in the early Cold War,” including George Kennan and Arnold Wolfers, “didn’t add anything theoretically or conceptually new” (p. 213). But Total Defense has little to say about events after 1947 and barely discusses nuclear weapons. Preston suggests that the rather perverse redefinition of “national security” to embrace any problem related to the USA’s global diplomatic and military operations contributed to a dangerous foreign policy posture that has often refused to recognize any reasonable boundaries. This view is compelling and deserves more attention from many policymakers and voters. But it also fails to do enough to acknowledge that US foreign policy and warmaking since 1945, despite its many errors and excesses, has in fact been constrained by all kinds of limits: economic, military, and political.

Some readers may wonder if Preston is ultimately too critical of Roosevelt and other proponents of an expansive notion of “national security.” Preston claims that in the 1930s, Roosevelt “had to stoke fears about America’s place in the world,” and “had to exaggerate American vulnerability” (p. 11). This may seem to be an uncontroversial point, but it is representative of the book’s tendency to favor a narrower idea of military security, focused on “the immediate safety of the continental United States itself” (p. 13). This is a legitimate point of view, but as the example of Roosevelt surely suggests, the historical record also supplies plenty of reasons to respect foreign policy thinkers who thought in more global terms and used longer time horizons.

Total Defense, like the related recent contributions of Wertheim, Roady, and other scholars, provides a timely call for more reflection about the meanings of “national security,” and deeper thinking about how the term might be updated to promote a more truly secure future. But more than Preston suggests, this re-imagining will likely require more than a simple return to an earlier era when the language of security focused on domestic economic and social concerns, and when military policy concentrated on the limited task of defense against the immediate threat of physical invasion.