Book Talk | Total Defense: The New Deal and the Origins of National Security
The concept of “national security” has tremendous weight in Washington DC. It is used to justify an enormous range of government activities that sprawl far beyond territorial defense of the United States. Yet we spend very little time considering what “national security” really means or how this vague concept came to play such a central role in American foreign policy.
Focusing on this critical idea, the Quincy Institute will hold a book talk to discuss Andrew Preston’s new book, “Total Defense: The New Deal and the Invention of National Security“. This book examines the origins of the doctrine of “national security” in the 1930s in the New Deal and WW2 period, and the continuing relevance of those origins to debates in Washington today. Discussing the book with Dr. Preston will be Stephen Wertheim, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of “Tomorrow, The World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy“, another important study of the origins of the national security state in the WW2 period. Marcus Stanley, director of studies at the Quincy Institute, will moderate the conversation.
The discussion will take place on Tuesday, July 15th from 1:00 – 2:00 PM Eastern Time.
Program
Entities
Panelists
Andrew Preston
Andrew Preston is the W.L. Lyons Brown Jr. Jefferson Scholars Foundation distinguished professor in Diplomacy and Statecraft in the University of Virginia's Corcoran Department of History. He previously spent nineteen years as a professor of history at Cambridge University, where he was a fellow of Clare College. Before Cambridge, he taught at Yale University, the University of Victoria, and the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, and was a fellow at the Cold War Studies Program at the London School of Economics. He is the author of "The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam" (Harvard University Press, 2006), and co-editor, with Fredrik Logevall, of "Nixon in the World: American Foreign Relations, 1969-1977"(Oxford University Press, 2008).
Stephen Wertheim
Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a historian of U.S. foreign policy and international order and writes widely about contemporary problems in American grand strategy. He has published scholarly research on U.S. ideas and projects of diplomatic engagement, international law, world organization, colonial empire, and humanitarian intervention. In his book, "Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy" (Harvard University Press, 2020), he reveals how U.S. leaders made a decision early in World War II to pursue global military dominance long into the future.
Marcus Stanley
Marcus Stanley is director of studies at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Prior to joining the Quincy Institute, he spent a decade at Americans for Financial Reform, where he played a leadership role in policy formulation and advocacy to reform regulation of the U.S. financial system. He helped direct the efforts of a coalition of 200 organizations on a range of legislative and regulatory initiatives to challenge the power of Wall Street. Before that, he was an economic and policy advisor to Senator Barbara Boxer, as a senior economist at the U.S. Joint Economic Committee. While there, he produced “War at Any Price?” — a seminal study on the full costs of the Iraq invasion, used to build political support to end the U.S. role in the war.