The biggest mistake America has ever made since the nation’s founding was the conversion of the federal government from a limited-government republic to a national-security state. If the American people are ever going to achieve a genuinely free society, a necessary prerequisite is the dismantling of the national-security establishment and the restoration of America’s founding governmental system of a limited-government republic.
America’s national-security state is a gigantic military-intelligence entity that is divided into three major parts — the Pentagon, the CIA, and the National Security Agency (NSA). To a certain extent, the FBI can also be considered to be part of this massive apparatus. Since the late 1940s and early 1950s as part of the Cold War and America’s anticommunist crusade, the national-security establishment has become the dominant, controlling branch of the federal government.
One of the best books that has ever been written on America’s national-security state is National Security and Double Government by Michael J. Glennon, a professor of law at Tufts University and a former counsel to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I wish every American would read this book because it holds a key to getting our nation back on the right track.
Glennon’s thesis is a simple but ominous one: It is the national-security sector of the federal government — that is, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA — that is actually running the federal government. It permits the other three branches — the executive, legislative, and judicial branches — to have the appearance of being in charge. That enables the American people to have a sense that everything is as it always has been, but the reality is that it’s the national-security branch that is in charge.
Limited Powers versus Omnipotent Powers
The difference between a limited-government republic and a national-security state is the difference between day and night. Under a limited-government republic, the federal government’s powers were extremely limited. In fact, the only powers the federal government could legally exercise were those enumerated in the Constitution. There was a relatively small military force, and since it fell within the executive branch of the federal government, its powers were limited to the powers enumerated in the Constitution.
The last thing that the American people wanted was a government that wielded omnipotent, totalitarian-like powers. They understood that people would not be free under that type of government. People would inevitably have their rights and freedoms restricted and even destroyed by a government wielding such powers. In other words, the more restricted the powers, the freer the people would be. The more unrestricted the powers, the less free the people would be.
Thus, if the Constitution had called for a national-security state form of government, there is no doubt whatsoever that our American ancestors would have rejected it. That would have meant that the United States would have continued operating under the Articles of Confederation, another type of governmental system under which the federal government’s powers were so weak that it didn’t even have the power to tax.
That’s what Americans wanted — a federal government with extremely weak powers. They understood what modern-day Americans do not understand — that the greatest danger to their freedom and well-being lay not in some foreign threat but rather with their very own government.
Even with the limited-powers concept under the Constitution, our American ancestors were still not satisfied. As a condition of approving the Constitution, they demanded the enactment of the Bill of Rights, which actually should be called a Bill of Prohibitions. That’s because those amendments do not give people rights, any more than the Constitution does. Our ancestors understood that people’s rights come from nature and God, as the Declaration of Independence had pointed out. The Bill of Rights was designed to prohibit federal officials from infringing on or destroying natural, God-given rights that preexist government.
In other words, our ancestors understood that the federal government would inevitably attract the type of people who would use governmental force to destroy people’s rights. Thus, they wanted the Bill of Rights enacted to send a clear message to those kind of people — a message that stated that the federal government lacked the power to destroy the rights, lives, liberties, and properties of the American people.
A Remarkable System
Given that governments are ruled by human beings, no governmental system is ever going to work perfectly. In fact, as everyone knows, America’s founding governmental system had some major flaws from the very beginning, with slavery being the biggest one and with secondary ones like the violation of women’s rights and tariffs. Nonetheless, by 1890, Americans had brought into existence the most unique and freest economic system that mankind has ever seen — a system based on free markets, voluntary charity, private property, and limited government that any libertarian today would marvel about.
Imagine: No income taxation or IRS, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, minimum-wage laws, (few) economic regulations, Federal Reserve System, paper money (gold coins and silver coins were the official money), public (i.e., government) schooling systems, Pentagon, CIA, NSA, FBI, massive military-intelligence establishment, foreign military bases, foreign interventionism, (limited) immigration controls, state-sponsored assassinations, torture, indefinite detention, drug laws, and gun control.
That was one remarkable system. From 1890 to 1910, America was the most prosperous, most charitable, and most peaceful nation in history. If our nation had followed that trajectory into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the result would have been unbelievably incredible in terms of freedom, peace, prosperity, charity, and harmony with the people of the world.
Alas, it was not to be. In the twentieth century, Americans converted the federal government to a welfare state, a regulated, managed economy, and a national-security state, abandoning America’s founding foreign policy of noninterventionism.
While Americans have been taught to believe that the military-intelligence part of the government falls within the executive branch, such is not the case. That’s the way things were when the federal government was a limited-government republic. But once the conversion to a national-security state took place, the acquisition of overwhelming power by the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA effectively brought into existence a fourth branch of the federal government — the national-security branch, which is, as Michael Glennon details so well in his book, the branch in charge of the federal government, with the other three branches deferring to its predominate role within the government.
One big problem is that every American has been born and raised under our national-security state system. Therefore, since Americans are inculcated with the notion that they are a free people, they do not question the national-security state form of government. Instead, they are convinced that it’s part and parcel of a free society, notwithstanding the fact that such authoritarian and dictatorial regimes as Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, Egypt, and many others are also national-security states. They all have been inculcated with the notion that the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA are necessary for their safety and security.
Lessons from Abroad
Sometimes it is instructive to consider matters in foreign regimes to see what’s wrong with our own country. Russia, for example, recently released a Wall Street Journal reporter named Evan Gershkovich. He had been writing critical articles about Russian president Vladimir Putin and Russia’s war on Ukraine when he was suddenly arrested in Russia on charges of espionage. After a secret trial, he was convicted and sentenced to 16 years in prison. He was released as part of a big prisoner trade between the United States and Russia.
U.S. officials and the mainstream press correctly pointed out the kangaroo nature of Gershkovich’s trial. They pointed out that in the United States, thanks to the Bill of Rights, trials have to be held in public. Moreover, the accused here in the United States is entitled to have a jury, rather than a judge or commission, decide whether one is guilty.
What these American critics forget, however, is that while those procedural protections apply to America’s federal-court system, they do not apply to the national-security establishment’s judicial system that was established at its military prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. That judicial system mirrors the system used in Russia.
For example, at Gitmo the speedy-trial requirement in the Bill of Rights doesn’t apply. People who are accused of terrorism can be imprisoned for life without a trial. And if a trial is ever held, the accused is not accorded a jury trial, as the Bill of Rights guarantees; instead a military commission decides guilt or innocence.
Moreover, unlike the federal-court system, defendants in the Pentagon-CIA-NSA system can be tortured into confessing to a crime. Witnesses also can be tortured into providing evidence against the accused. Unlike the federal-court system, hearsay is admissible to help convict the accused. While the federal judiciary has created the appearance of establishing jurisdiction over the judicial system at Gitmo, the people who have been incarcerated at Gitmo for 20 years without a trial know that U.S. judicial control is just a veneer.
Assassins and Assassinations
With respect to the recent prisoner trade between Russia and the United States, the mainstream press and U.S. officials emphasized that Russia was simply interested in getting one of its assassins freed from prison and returned to Russia. Left unsaid, however, is the fact that the U.S. national-security establishment has assassins too. In fact, assassination is one of the omnipotent powers that came with the conversion to a national-security state. Just a few years ago, the Pentagon assassinated an American citizen as well as an Iranian general. Those assassins — and the federal officials who ordered those assassinations — are still free. U.S. officials are as determined to keep them free as Putin is in keeping his assassins free.
It’s worth noting that assassination is another area in which the federal judiciary has deferred to the power of the national-security establishment. The Fifth Amendment expressly prohibits the federal government from killing anyone, foreigner or American, without due process of law, which means formal notice and a trial. If the DEA or ICE, for example, were to begin assassinating suspected drug-war violators or illegal immigrants, there is no doubt that the federal judiciary would immediately enjoin them from doing so, based on the Fifth Amendment. Not so, however, with the national-security branch of the government. The federal judiciary has made it very clear that it will never interfere with any assassination of either a foreign citizen or an American citizen as long as it relates to the protection of “national security.”
Most of the time, the president and the national-security establishment are on the same page when it comes to matters relating to foreign policy and assassination. Sometimes, however, there is a conflict of visions in which the president wishes to go in one direction while the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA are determined to go in another direction. When that happens, given its overwhelming power within the governmental structure, the national-security branch will inevitably prevail, no matter what the Constitution says about removing people from office.
Two good examples are Chile in 1973 and the United States in 1963. The Chilean people had elected a socialist named Salvador Allende to the presidency of the country. The U.S. national-security establishment convinced the Chilean national-security establishment that it had a moral duty to save the country by ousting Allende and replacing him with a patriotic procapitalist military general. Ten years before, the U.S. national-security establishment believed that it was saving America by assassinating a U.S. president who was implementing policies that it believed were going to result in a communist takeover of the United States. While the Chilean people ultimately brought some of their malefactors to justice, none of the U.S. malefactors in the 1963 regime-change operation were ever brought to justice; even if they had been, there is no doubt that the federal judiciary would have protected them with grants of immunity.
The Second Amendment
One good thing about all this is the Second Amendment. Our ancestors understood that the right to keep and bear arms provides protection for people’s other rights.
The national-security establishment knows that if it gets overly tyrannical, people have the means to resist violently, which helps to keep the national-security establishment in check.
But while the Second Amendment serves as an insurance policy, it still doesn’t alter what the national-security state and its omnipotent power have done to destroy the freedom of the American people. To restore the rights and liberties of the American people, it is necessary that Americans dismantle the national-security state and restore our nation’s founding system of a limited-government republic. Given the overarching power of the national-security state, the question that arises, of course, is how to accomplish that.
This article was originally published in the October 2024 issue of Future of Freedom.
Originally Posted at https://mises.org/