ABSTRACT
National-security policies reflect the culture of the society creating them. The culture of a society—its ethos—defines distinctive patterns of individual and group behavior. The United States has a national mission that is both protective and proselytizing. The impulse to national expansion is seen as an expression of domestic disease. America is marked by its sense of mission, for it was a concept before it was a place, and a place before it was a nation. National security in American life exists as an icon and instrumentality lying between the Old World and the New. Society has shaped its armed forces not simply to defend, but to represent America and serve as the physical mechanism of its separation from or involvement in the larger world. The key is that American values and goals are to be realized through the physical growth of the United States.
