Since assuming office, U.S. President Donald Trump has overseen an unprecedented assault on the federal government. Initially, his agent in this campaign was the tech mogul Elon Musk, who was running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Musk described DOGE’s mission as reducing the United States’ $36 trillion in federal debt and ending the “tyranny of bureaucracy.” After a very public rift between the billionaires last week, Musk is on the outs with Trump, but the goal of downsizing the federal bureaucracy remains deeply ingrained in the administration. At the end of May, for instance, in a move not apparently initiated by Musk or his staff, the Trump administration cut dozens of staff from the National Security Council, which advises the president on international affairs and coordinates the interagency policymaking process. This move, according to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also replaced Mike Waltz to lead the NSC, is intended to make the NSC hew more closely to “its original purpose and the President’s vision.” But, according to Axios, an anonymous official put it more bluntly: “The NSC is the ultimate Deep State. . . . We’re gutting the Deep State.”

Critics argue that such drastic cuts to the federal government will ultimately diminish U.S. influence in the world. Yet it is worth remembering that debates over the size and scope of the NSC and other parts of the national security bureaucracy fit squarely in a long-standing American political tradition. Indeed, the recent attacks on bureaucracy—and especially the national security bureaucracy—are reminiscent of the immediate aftermath of World War II.

With the U.S. victory in 1945, the shattering of the international order that preceded it, and the emergence of the Soviet Union as a military and ideological rival, midcentury American political and intellectual circles broadly accepted that there could be no return to Washington’s pre-war military readiness or its foreign policy of relative aloofness from global affairs. But precisely what a “new normal” should look like was hotly debated. Internationalists believed the United States should maintain a robust overseas role, while conservatives were skeptical of international intervention. From those debates emerged the U.S. national security state—the collection of government agencies and organizations that focus on protecting citizens from external threats.

Thanks to its success winning the Cold War, the national security state has been treated almost as sacrosanct by the U.S. foreign policy establishment, with its logic and institutions going unchallenged and unchecked for decades. Now that the Trump administration has revived a 75-year-old debate, however, the United States has an opportunity to remember and learn from those midcentury conversations—with the most important lesson of all being that the national security state was a product both of political compromise and of the particular threat it was designed to counter. Ensuring U.S. national security in the future requires not simply reversing DOGE’s cuts or restaffing various organizations but fighting for new compromises and considering new threats.

In the aftermath of World War II, as communism and Soviet power spread abroad, the priority for American policymakers of all stripes was to defend the United States’ democracy and its way of life. Yet there were two distinct views on how to accomplish this, and each side felt the other’s proposed policies would bring about the very calamity they aimed to prevent. Internationalists believed that the United States had to cast off its historic caution overseas and take up the mantle of international leadership that had fallen in Washington’s lap. This meant, among other things, building lasting alliances, sustaining a permanent military presence abroad, and preparing for what was anticipated to be “total war” of one great power against another. Conservatives were appalled at these ideas, which in their view ran counter to traditional American political culture, represented the very sort of European imperialism America’s founders had rebelled against, and militarized U.S. society in a way that would erode democracy.

Conservatives argued instead for focusing on domestic affairs, which had been relatively neglected during the war, and returning to an older approach to U.S. foreign policy—one that emphasized the Western Hemisphere and insisted on the reduction of defense budgets. In 1947, as President Harry Truman and his Secretary of State George Marshall peddled their........

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