Writing for Foreign Affairs in 2024, Daniel Drezner gave a famous lament with his piece “Everything Became National Security,” arguing that every dimension of strategic, economic, and social weal was being erroneously linked back to concepts of national security in political discourse.¹ “Suddenly, every issue is viewed as a possible tipping point that could hasten further decline in national power,” Drezner posited. “Security becomes a totalizing issue as officials perceive anything and everything as an existential threat… If everything is defined as national security, nothing is a national security priority.” Other academics, including Monika Gabriela Bartoszewicz, have since advanced a similar framing.²

But the increasingly recurrent and diffuse invocation of “national security” is a positive development in our national consciousness. Most every policy issue does, in fact, impact our national security and the recurrence of this metric resembles a more classical care for the Res Publica – literally translated as the public thing, but understood by us today as the namesake of this journal.

The mere invocation of “national security” should not stifle policy disagreement. But framing political questions in these terms, even when the connection is indirect, performs a civic purpose, reminding the American people of their membership in a national enterprise. In a multi-ethnic, culturally diffuse, remarkably free empire, it is especially vital that this feeling is cultivated. Drezner finds the invocation of national security to be tiresome and excessive when it should be viewed as a fundamentally healthy reorientation of American political consciousness toward the basic national interest of our republic.

This sort of thinking about the competitiveness and safety of our country is exactly what we require in a moment of political division and international upheaval. Recovering a broadly shared, supra-political orientation toward the national interest in foreign affairs would help shift the minds of Americans away from infighting and toward a common purpose. Such psychological concord has existed in American life before; it can exist again. Its erosion is inhibiting and, at present, its restoration is the most important ideological undertaking in the American subconscious.

Culturally speaking, we must get serious about foreign affairs en masse.

To all this, one might object that foreign policy is, in fact, a prominent theme in American politics today. Many young people were so bewitched by the chimera of Palestine that it palpably hampered Democrats’ reelection attempts in 2024. But the current preoccupation with international relations is deeply partisan and fractious, and not what I am endorsing. There is little consensus amongst the populace, at least on the surface, for how best to proceed in the international sphere, and foreign policy has mostly become prominent in the context of what the opposing party is doing wrong. Too often, the loudest arguments are rooted in loyalties to malign outside actors. There is an overabundance of partisan and partial thinking and a scarcity of national thinking. In short, the American public is too incensed and divided by foreign affairs for this momentous hour of history.

So often, foreign propaganda seeks to keep us distracted and disunified; to fixate upon our fellow countrymen instead of coherently tracking the highest sphere of human competition. We desperately need a cultural awareness of this tactic. Victory in what Kipling called “the great game” is perhaps the paramount aim of the state.³ Americans ought to view both national security and the success of our republic in foreign affairs as items above the struggles of contemporary politics. This line of thinking also serves to unify our national consciousness which is at risk of metastasizing into two distinct identities at odds with each other. Many would say it already has, but bitter factionalism has recurred throughout American history, and we managed to transcend our differences by moving forward through shared aims. Third-Worldists and their legions of far-flung trolls tend to decry any convergence of American opinion in foreign policy as a manifestation of the dreaded “uniparty,” but no great power throughout history could sustain itself without a partially overlapping paradigm underwriting its political and civil servant classes.⁴ We have largely lost this, but can regain it again through conscious commitment.

America’s Fractured Psyche

A house divided against itself cannot stand, and a house in disagreement over how to comport itself in the neighborhood — over what to do about pressing threats — may fall to ruin. As a citizenry, we must zoom outward and once again think of ourselves as Americans in the world; to rally round questions of national security and national interest because these are the most important questions. Border security is the first and foremost of these and it seems the American people have definitively litigated that issue for the time being. Still, other questions remain. In particular, we must impartially deliberate upon how to carry through the Monroe Doctrine, how best to answer the China question, how to nullify threats in the Middle East, and how to reach a sustainable balance of power in Europe. I am not remotely saying that these questions have objective answers — nor do they demand an objective level of attention from us — merely that they are prime geographic spheres in which the aforementioned “great game” is being played most furiously.

Along these dimensions, the current administration has pursued several foreign policy objects to historic effect that warrant impartial assessment; the Democrats should be willing to evaluate them on their merits rather than opposing them reflexively. Sadly, this has become an uncommon posture, at least publicly, in Washington and across the country. One need not endorse any administration wholesale to acknowledge that debilitating and potentially neutralizing hostile regimes in Venezuela, Iran, and likely Cuba, are objectives that transcend partisanship and, in the abstract, lie plainly in the national interest. The specifics of priority, timing, and execution are always legitimate subjects for disagreement, but the weakening of these regimes ought to be applauded prima facie. Both Kennedy and Nixon, for example, would be supporting the pursuit and realization of these objectives by the president, despite their political differences. It is a great shame for our country, then, that the Trump administration’s efforts toward these ends are not lauded or sympathized with for their basic objective by all American representatives and their constituents. Let those politicians who disagree not with these ends but only the means to achieve them profess as much and precede their critiques with basic credit.

Senator John Fetterman, unfortunately, stands out as a lonely voice among Democratic politicians willing not only to concede but to praise these nationally consequential maneuvers. “I am open to better opportunities, you know, and I have to call it necessary — it is positive, and I cannot just condemn it just because I happen to be a Democrat,” Fetterman said of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s capture in January.⁵ The Pennsylvania senator has been equally outspoken in his praise for American action in Iran, and his magnanimity is held in perfect contrast to the conduct of his colleague from Connecticut, Senator Chris Murphy, who deemed it “awesome” that Iran was evading American maneuvers in the region this April.⁶ Even if we take the latter at his belated word that he was being sarcastic, it still seems that Fetterman was thinking here as an American while Murphy was thinking as a partisan. We need more of the former in foreign policy and, needless to say, the same ought apply should the shoe fall on the other political foot.

Toward a Basic Paradigm

If we are to prevail in the present world crisis, we must collectively consider the aforementioned national security questions on a higher plane than political debate and reach for the psychological unison that our country requires in a moment of global flux. Our ostensible rivals have certainly reached this plane. Of course, this is because they do not allow dissent. Just like in the Cold War, we must pursue that same cultural unity through merit that our competitors impose through force. Yet our means make for both a nobler and more effective end than theirs if we can reach it. While there remains strategic overlap in the DC foreign policy community, shared foreign policy views are seldom acknowledged between average American voters and their spokespeople. This needs to change and we can all play a part.

What I find less subjective than the questions presented by these various theaters, where I find less grey area, is in the precept that America ought to be the global hegemon. Every good citizen will want his or her country to be the most powerful, most prosperous, and most capable in the world. History would look confusedly upon any Athenians who opposed their city-state’s predominance over the Delian league, upon any Romans who might have preferred the eternal city did not expand its borders, or any Victorian Britons who believed it would be best if Britannia did not rule the waves. No matter our political affiliation, it seems common sense that we ought to desire a priori that America remain the most powerful country in the world in a financially sustainable and just fashion. This is only one of the many points that should and could serve to form the basis of a renewed national identity in an international context.

A rehabilitated, shared focus on national security offers one of the few viable paths out of today’s polarization and toward said identity. Elevating national security as a common priority — treating it not as a partisan tool but as a first principle for governance — can help restore strategic coherence and strengthen the United States’ geopolitical position. It can be safely said that national security is an end that the vast majority of politicians, and an even greater majority of the American public, supports. We may disagree, sometimes sharply, about how to pursue this objective, but the universal nature of the objective itself already brings us together under a supraordinate principle.

Numerous domains that appear mundane in isolation are, in fact, central to this collective effort. Strengthening the electrical grid, expanding nuclear energy capacity, sustaining an edge in artificial intelligence while preserving social cohesion, securing critical supply chains, bolstering our defense industrial base, advancing reindustrialization, and reshoring jobs all carry clear national security implications (and, notably, command a meaningful degree of bipartisan convergence).

Yet the scope of national security extends further still. Improvements in any sphere from educational attainment, forest management, medicine, obesity prevention, family formation, and the preservation of public order all variously shape the potency of the American citizen and the American economy, and therefore the engines of national prowess. A broader recognition of these interdependencies would strengthen the res publica in a time of Cold World War.

We must rediscover again what it means to be an American in the world because our challenges are global. Sustained American preeminence is contingent upon alertness and unity of purpose in the national psyche. Our country will benefit immensely by concord: by all hands on deck working to beat the same threats rather than working to beat each other. Not only will we have a better chance of solving such problems with this mindset, but hopefully we will mend our gaping wounds at home in the process. Here, the basic counsel of Kennedy, who would very much support quick yet decisive action in Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba, might help in shifting the paradigm: for matters of national security, “let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer.”⁷

1. Daniel Drezner, ‘How Everything Became National Security’.Foreign Affairs (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, August 2024). ↩︎
2. Monika Gabriela Bartoszewicz. ‘Hybrid Everything, Operational Nothing: Conceptual Drift, Perpetual Crisis, and the Failure to Prepare for Proxy Terrorism,’ European Journal for Security Research (Switzerland: Springer, 2025). ↩︎
3. Rudyard Kipling.Kim (New York: Scholastic Book Services, 1962), 158. ↩︎
4. Sulaiman Ahmed, ‘JUST IN: ‘Bunker Buster Act’ to provide Israel with America’s B-2…’, X (2025). ↩︎
5. Ray Lewis, ‘Fetterman supports Trump’s ousting of Maduro,’ abc7 (Hunt Valley, 2026). ↩︎
6. Sydney Topf, ‘Fetterman praises US strikes in Iran: Trump’s ‘willing to do what’s right’.The Washington Examiner (Washington, D.C., 2026), ; Chris Murphy, ‘awesome’, X (2026). ↩︎
7. John F. Kennedy, ‘Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy at the Loyola College annual alumni banquet’.John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum (Baltimore, 1958). ↩︎