What Will COVID 19 Cast Us? 'A U.S. government strong enough to mobilize all of society's resources against all threats would compel us to depart from our founding traditions, and ultimately would threaten Americans' freedom and prosperity'.

• Author: Preble, Christopher

EVEN AS AMERICANS struggle to deal with a deadly and seemingly unprecedented pandemic, it is not too soon to wonder how the present crisis will shape our collective understanding about the dangers that we face, and the best means for addressing them.

One thing, however, is obvious: the military and other tools of force and coercion that generally are useful against traditional threats--from invading foreign armies to swarms of killer drones--essentially are irrelevant against killer bugs. Indeed, as the plight of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt reminds us, military personnel might be more vulnerable to infectious diseases than the general population.

So, does COVID-19 change everything when it comes to U.S. national security strategy? It might, if it reorients the way we think about what we need to keep us safe and upends the old politics of hawks versus doves.

Any possible transformation must begin with a reassessment of how we approach foreign dangers. Though many Americans often fail to appreciate it, the U.S. is remarkably secure from many traditional threats. Indeed, blessed by weak and friendly neighbors to the north and south, and wide oceans east and west, we often seem to care about the security of others--sometimes even more than they do--precisely because we are (or at least have been) less concerned about more-proximate dangers. We are less troubled, for example, about the Chinese threat to Hawaii than to Taiwan. Unconcerned about cross-border invasions by Canadian Mounties into Montana, we worry about Russian tanks rolling into Estonia, or Vladimir Putin's "little green men" slipping into Ukraine.

The pattern was established in the earliest days of the Cold War and was informed by the experience between the First and Second World Wars. For decades, U.S. policymakers have sought to keep potential adversaries at a distance. Defeating them "over there" was the goal. Being proactive might even stop a global war, something that the U.S.'s hands-off approach of the 1930s failed to do. The military sometimes complains about the tyranny of distance, but the ability to fight forward is a luxury, one that most other countries simply do not have.

After 9/11, a new danger grabbed our attention, and there was a brief focus on terrorism as a chiefly domestic problem. We debated the creation of a new cabinet level agency to protect the homeland and new airport screeners. We tolerated countless intrusions of privacy, and routine...