National Security As An Architecture of Bullsh*t

The authority being used to detain and deport Mahmoud Khalil reveals--for the millionth time--the false foundations of national security.

I hope you’re tracking the ongoing story of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University student that ICE illegally snatched in the middle of the night, now detains, and plans to deport. It’s triggered massive and growing protests in New York:

My boy Spencer Ackerman has the best take on Khalil I’ve seen so far.

People are right to be freaking out about this—one of a growing number of issues where leftists, well-to-do liberals, and working-class folks all converge with a common outrage and a common fear.

The egregiousness here is precisely that Khalil has broken no laws, and is not being charged with having broken any laws. Yet he is being disappeared all the same. If the Trump administration can do this to Khalil because Khalil says things the snow-flake White House doesn’t like, they can literally do this to anybody—the reasoning is so specious to the point of being flagrantly illegal. It’s not Khalil but rather the US security state operating on Trump’s orders that has broken the law here.

So what’s the reasoning?

According to the right-wing Free Press, a White House official said:

Khalil posed a “threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States”—and that his case is a blueprint for more arrests.

Indeed, it’s Marco Rubio who’s actually the authorizing official here, wielding the bureaucratic tool of tyranny, specifically the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, which gives the Secretary of State the ability to personally designate a person:

alien whose presence or activities in the US the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the US is deportable.

There are at least two major problems that run deeper than the events themselves.

One is that the Khalil case—which is a five-alarm fire worthy of every feeling it incites in you—is a perfect illustration of why national security reasoning collapses in on itself if you take its logic seriously. I’ve given multiple lectures (as the seedbed for a future book) critiquing the concept of the national interest. Not because words matter (though they do), or because it’s a social construction (though it is).

My whole point is that the national interest—in practice and as an idea—is full of contradictions that make a mockery of what the phrase “national interest” is supposed to represent—that which is beneficial to all those belonging to the nation. Check out those lectures if you want to know what I mean specifically, but the gist is that the ideology of national-security politics reduces, ultimately, to the national interest, and the national interest is nothing but the language that political actors use to justify the accumulation or use of state power.

The actually existing (not idealized) national security state pisses me off—and it should piss you off too—because it uses the most fallacious reasoning imaginable to do the worst things imaginable, and at great expense. National security is an egregious form of class war from above.

The Trump administration’s only accusation against Khalil is that he has transgressed the “national interest,” which in this case specifically means he protested for Palestinians to not be slaughtered—a free speech matter, not terrorism, not terrorist-adjacent, and not illegal. Meanwhile, the only people on my timeline who aren’t saying a god-damn thing about Khalil are the national-security bros, who are too busy wringing their hands about China and fucking supply-chain resilience. National interest my ass.

And let’s not kid ourselves about who benefits from this overreaching exercise of power—reactionaries and oligarchs, enemies of the working class. If the courts don’t rule against the Trump administration—and whether they do hinges indirectly on how much noise gets made in the streets and by the opposition Democrats—then the tool Rubio is wielding in the Khalil case can be used against any form of protest action, including against striking workers. Doubtless worker demands for a living wage are against the interests of the owners of capital, and when has the “national interest” not also been the interests of society’s wealth-hoarders?

There’s a second problem deeper than but still reflected in what’s happening now: While there is a popular outrage about the state overstepping its legitimate authority, this is not new. This is every issue that’s ever come up ever—Gaza, Ukraine, George Floyd, Iraq, Vietnam, the Black Panthers, the Second Red Scare, the Palmer Raids, you name it. We experience these moments in history where something is beyond the pale, and the masses demand change. But the immediate situation is only ever a symptom or expression of a deeper rot that needs to be addressed. Even if the streets prevail in their immediate demand—which is rare—an opportunity has been missed.

If you wish to prevent further Khalils (or Gazas or Iraqs etc), you can’t be satisfied with perpetually fighting at the one-yard line. Rather, you must push the other team back as far down the field as possible, away from your goal, even seizing the ball if you can. Situations like Khalil are ripe for making gains in precisely that way because they present the contradictions of state power in extremis; even dummies can understand that something ain’t right.

The sickening power of the national security state—which can just say something violates the national interest and magically the state can do whatever it wants—is the well-spring of this Khalil decision. The entire US Senate is implicated in this Khalil decision (because they unanimously confirmed Rubio for the Secretary of State position). Cold War liberalism gave us this decision, not just because it birthed the national security state, but also because it gave us the specific law that Rubio is using to rubber stamp Khalil’s disappearance. And of course, during the Global War on Terror, there were countless cases in which citizens’ rights were stripped away in ways that echo what’s happening right now.

Stopping further Khalils means repudiating the Global War on Terror and its underlying logic. It means contesting the legitimacy of MAGA puppets like Rubio. It means dispensing with Cold War liberalism and the tools it uses even today to take our freedom and deny us security.

But right now we are on the one-yard line. This is not a time to be complacent or silent. So move. Speak. Write. Fight. ✌️