Unhealthy attitudes and national insecurity

A few weeks ago, I was in a political science class when a classmate tried to justify the Obama administration’s health care law by arguing that it was primarily a national security bill.

A healthy populace, you see, is key to protecting the United States.

I don’t blame him for this kind of thinking — it’s very tempting — but it’s nevertheless disappointing and far too common.


The crime here is “securitization,” in which we evaluate actions primarily based on their impact on our national security.

In the case of the health care bill, for example, it makes a healthy populace a means rather than an end. Rather than having the goal of just saving lives, it has the goal of “protecting” us by making us more secure from outside harm.

Securitization is abused and overused in political debates in the U.S.

The justification for everything from restricting free speech to building highways is that these policies will make us safer. It’s used time and again.

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently argued that education could be “our greatest national security challenge.”

Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough also recently argued that preventing global human trafficking is “a national security issue.”

And in the biggest stretch to securitize an issue, first lady Michelle Obama, in support of her health-food initiative, stated that poor nutrition is “a national security issue.”

I’m not going to argue that none of these have any impact on national security.

McDonough, for example, points out that human trafficking funds international terrorism groups.

Securitization is bad because it is, at its heart, a threat aimed at the lowest common political denominator — fear of death. Disagreement with proposed policy will lead to your death.

There is a positive to securitization, obviously. It does its job. Aline Leboeuf and Emma Broughton of the French Institute of International Relations point out that securitization has “encouraged the development of new policies, the creation of new agencies, institutions, norms, or governance options to try to solve these issues.”

But there are real costs to it, as well.

What does it say when our primary concern with an obese person is that he or she can’t be a soldier and not that he or she is unhealthy?

Or when our primary concern with human trafficking is that it funds our enemies, not that it’s a human rights violation?

It’s also dangerous. In the original realm of national security, we have clear enemies: those who want to kill us.

When we securitize, though, we make new enemies.

When access to oil becomes a national security issue rather than an economic one, those who threaten that access or who also want that oil (so, everyone) become enemies rather than just market competitors.

And then what happens? Surely we’d stop this rhetoric before it resulted in, I don’t know, military intervention in the Middle East?

­— schlumorg@indiana.edu