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The writer teaches at Dartmouth College and served as senior director for counterterrorism and, later, the Middle East and north Africa at the US National Security Council
When I worked in Bill Clinton’s White House, my colleagues and I drafted a directive for the president titled “Defense of the Homeland”. I objected to this tag, not because I opposed the policy substance, but because the word itself made me uneasy. “Homeland” felt faintly illiberal, even un-American. At the time, I could not fully articulate why. I was overruled.
In retrospect, the source of my unease has become much clearer. In 1998, Clinton signed a directive on “Protection Against Unconventional Threats to the Homeland and Americans Overseas”. It was a serious, sober document designed to improve the government’s ability to respond to terrorism. The policy was defensible. The word choice was not.
For most of US history, our constitutional vocabulary spoke of the Union, the Republic, the People and later the nation. These were civic, legal and institutional concepts. They described a political order created by consent, governed by law and open to newcomers.
Homeland is different. It refers not to a system of government but to a place of belonging. It evokes origin, inheritance, and prior attachment. One is born into a homeland; one does not choose it. That distinction may seem semantic, but in politics it matters a great deal.
The US has long resisted grounding legitimacy in territory or ancestry. Unlike many European states, it did not emerge from an ethnic core or a shared language. Citizenship was a legal status, not a bloodline. Loyalty was owed to a constitution, not to soil. Even when nationalism surged in the 19th and early 20th centuries, American political language remained abstract: rights, liberties, representation, federalism.
That is why homeland sounded foreign when it first appeared in official US executive branch documents in the 1990s. It entered quietly, almost accidentally, through the side door of counterterrorism and infrastructure protection. The cold war vocabulary of national security had focused on Soviet threats to the “US homeland”. Then, the term was used rhetorically and apocalyptically — referring to nuclear war — not to frame government operations.
By the late 1990s, Washington was grappling with something new: terrorism that blurred the line between foreign and domestic, military and civilian. The temptation to reach for a new concept was understandable — but ultimately dangerous.
Elsewhere, the term carries a heavier ideological load. In Germany, Heimat has long referred to a place of rootedness, memory and cultural belonging — so freighted by history that modern German governments handle the term with caution. In France, la patrie reflects a revolutionary tradition that explicitly binds citizenship to national identity and collective destiny. In Israel, talk of the homeland is tied to existential angst and historical territorial claims.
America’s more legalistic tradition had the virtue of limiting the emotional claims the state could make on its citizens. It also made emergency power harder to justify and easier to roll back. When JD Vance repudiates the idea of the US as a “creedal nation” he reduces the essence of America to blood and soil. Likewise, the word homeland reframes what is being defended. A homeland, unlike a republic, is never fully secure. It can always be infiltrated, contaminated, violated. None of this is to deny states must protect their populations. Language alone does not determine policy. But it shapes what kinds of policies become thinkable. Once the homeland is the object of defence, extraordinary measures become normalised.
This shift in language also erodes an older American distinction between foreign and domestic spheres. Traditionally, national defence was outward-facing; policing was inward-facing and tightly constrained. Homeland collapses that distinction. The interior becomes a theatre of defence. Surveillance, border control, immigration enforcement, counterterrorism and disaster response are folded into a single conceptual frame. That frame hardened after 9/11, when the US created the Department of Homeland Security.
By then, the term had ceased to be rhetorical and had become structural. The word had imported, quietly and without debate, a theory of the state America had long resisted: one oriented around territory rather than law and ancestry rather than values.
The irony is that the US was historically strongest when it resisted precisely that form of politics. Its confidence lay in the belief that a constitutional order could survive shocks without redefining itself around fear. Emergencies were temporary, but rights were permanent.
We rarely notice when a single word reorients a political imagination. Today the term homeland is so commonplace that it is difficult to recall how strange it once sounded to American ears.
Perhaps it is too late to undo that shift. But it is not too late to name it. Words matter not because they compel outcomes, but because they legitimise trajectories. Homeland redefined what the US understood itself to be defending — and, in doing so, what kind of state it was willing to become.