Trump talks the talk on national security — but Americans are much less safe from real threats under him

The United States has built a formidable national security state. It spends more on national defense than any nation in history and more than the next seven countries combined. It also spends formidably on intelligence—in excess of $80 billion.

No country has ever invested more in security and, in a real sense, very little actually threatens its survival. Yet the government repeatedly invokes national security not as a shield to protect its citizens, but as a sword to prevent accountability, to deprive individuals of their rights and to justify xenophobia. Conversely, the government largely ignores, denies or starves of resources those threats which truly implicate national security.

The US government sees the power of the state as perpetually endangered by individuals. Thus, the United States seeks to put Julian Assange in jail for 170 years for threatening national security when he publishes documents that the government itself had failed to protect (I serve as an expert in the Assange extradition matter pending in Great Britain).

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said at the time of the 2009 Wikileaks publications for which Assange was charged, "Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for US foreign policy? I think fairly modest." The most controversial publication was a video of US troops in Iraq shooting unarmed civilians — precisely the sort of government misconduct that should not be shielded from accountability by spurious and facile claims about threatening national security.

The government also invoked national security to prevent my client, a US citizen journalist, from challenging his right not be placed on a “kill list” while reporting on the Syrian civil war and speaking to all participants. The court recognized that there is a due process right not to be targeted for death without adequate legal basis. In response, the government invoked the “state secrets” privilege, arguing that that whether there is a “kill list” and whether our client is on it are absolutely privileged facts (despite the fact that the Obama administration admitted there was a kill list — or “disposition matrix” in Orwellian security speak.) Presumably whether an American journalist was on that list, and why, was not integral to our national security. But the invocation of state secrets effectively ended the case, which is on appeal.

Guantanamo Bay was created as a legal black hole to prevent detainees captured during the Afghan war from claiming any rights. Rather than assuring national security, it stands as an enormous moral hazard, tempting politicians to stash human rights violations out of sight and mind. The vast majority of detainees who were sent to Guantanamo were captured by warlords for bounties and did nothing wrong or were trivial foot soldiers. And illustrating the risk, a senior Trump administration official writing anonymously in the newly released book, A Warning, stated that President Trump proposed designating all migrants entering the United States without documentation as “enemy combatants,” and sending them to Guantanamo. He called the border issue “the biggest crisis in the history of the country.”

Would our national security be any greater if Julian Assange were not put in prison; if citizen journalists were allowed to challenge whether they were properly targeted for killing; if Guantanamo Bay detainees were tried in a US court or released; if migrants were accorded asylum rights guaranteed under international law? Do these individuals truly threaten the future of the United States? Or is national security used to prevent the disclosure of that which is “embarrassing” or “awkward,” or to provide a lazy rationale for political agendas?

The wall is a national security emergency. Crime is a national security emergency. If everything is a national security emergency, we risk ignoring true emergencies, which are difficult, complex and frightening.

Is it, for example, a national security threat if terrorist groups get access to small nuclear devices that can be smuggled into the United States or Europe from declared or undeclared nuclear powers? Nobel Prize-winning physicist and former Department of Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz chairs the Nuclear Threat Initiative, which in its most recent report stated, “Many policy-makers and analysts appear to believe that …the danger of terrorists carrying out a nuclear attack is vanishingly small — unless, perhaps, they were sponsored by a state with nuclear capabilities. Unfortunately, this view is profoundly wrong.”

The NTI detailed just how possible such a threat might be: “Typical nuclear weapons could readily be smuggled across America’s or other nations’ borders. The nuclear material needed for a bomb could easily fit in a suitcase. Even an assembled bomb could fit in a van, a cargo container, or a yacht sailed into a US harbor. Or the materials could be smuggled in and the bomb built at the site of its intended use.” The NTI concluded, “The bottom line is that if a sophisticated terrorist group gained control of a stolen nuclear bomb or enough nuclear material to make one, there would be little grounds for confidence that they would be unable to use it.”

So what have we done to avoid what appears to be an inarguable existential threat rather than a political bogeyman? For the third year in a row, the Trump administration is proposing to reduce funding for core US nuclear security and nonproliferation programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). A policy brief from Harvard University’s Managing the Atom Project published in April argued that the “budget request for programs to reduce the dangers of nuclear theft and terrorism is too small to implement the ambitious approach that is needed.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has withdrawn from the Iran nuclear deal, increasing the timing and likelihood of a destabilizing regional power having nuclear capability. Trump’s “falling in love” with Kim Jong-un has not stopped North Korean nuclear testing. Less noticed but perhaps more important, he has pulled the US out of the INF intermediate-range nuclear agreement, which eliminated short-range weapons that could be used for a tactical nuclear war in Europe. Last month, the first low-yield battlefield nuclear weapons rolled off a Texas assembly line as part of the United States’ new $17 billion entry in a new nuclear arms race featuring smaller, more mobile, and more difficult-to-detect weapons.

National security has been drained of meaning. It has become an ipse dixit to prevent inquiry into government action or government accountability. It is a rationale for unlimited spending on weapons systems that are destabilizing and cannot make the country safer. Yet when our national security is truly threatened, when what is needed is negotiation and statecraft rather than bluster and bullying, this US government shows that it has no genuine commitment to fulfilling its fundamental purpose of keeping its citizens safe.