Anyone who’s camped out at a folk music festival and has been woken up at 2 a.m. by a blaringly rendered version of “Bella Ciao” knows that trumpet players are terrorists. But the Trump administration is taking that a bit literally: The Department of Commerce announced in early August that it plans to implement a 25 percent tariff on brass instruments, citing national security concerns about America’s perceived overreliance on foreign copper alloys. The move throws into sharp relief how far the term “national security” has wandered from its bare-bones literal meaning: defending a country from threats.

Our leaders have been referencing “national security” more or less since the founding. In a 1791 address to Congress, George Washington argued that militias were “of primary importance” to the young country’s “national security” to, among other things, fight against the “deluded tribes.”

But the term didn’t enter everyday vernacular until much later. During the New Deal era, as historian Andrew Preston put it in his book Total Defense, its meaning expanded: “Security became ideological as well as territorial, normative as well as physical, global and not just continental. It became, as it still is today, all-encompassing.”

Americans’ anti-communist fervor during the Cold War then laid the groundwork for today’s formalized national security state. The National Security Act of 1947 created many of the structures we now see as intrinsic to our national security, such as the CIA, the National Security Council, and the Department of Defense—even if it never actually defined the........

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