The holiday from history is over.
The holiday from history is over.
Y ou can be forgiven if you hadn’t noticed our three-decade holiday from history lately. It hasn’t exactly felt like party time in the United States since the 1991 disintegration of the Soviet Union, a competing hegemon and existential threat.
In the decade that followed, we endured a spate of terrorist attacks, culminating in the 9/11 jihadist strikes that killed more Americans than died in Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor — the 1941 sneak attack that vaulted the U.S. into World War II, the deadliest conflict in history. There followed military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan that, combined, lasted over 20 years. In the interim, we suffered through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. By 2021, amid the Biden administration’s provocatively humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, we were struggling to move beyond a once-in-a-century pandemic, to which over a million Americans deaths are attributed.
Nevertheless, we’ll remember these as the good times. Everything, of course, is relative. Indeed, we will never break out of our all-id-all-the-time style of governance — where passions overwhelm reason, where rash officials act first and assess later, if ever — unless we learn to pause and put things in perspective.
In their moment, the ghastly jihadist attacks appeared to signal a major geopolitical threat: They were executed by the militant factions of a global Islamic-supremacist movement, they were conducted across continents, they often targeted government installations, and they were mass-casualty strikes that, in combination, killed and wounded thousands, with billions in property-destruction costs. Still, even with sinister state sponsors (principally Iran), the terrorist organizations were comparatively tiny. That is part of why, for a time, our government convinced itself that the threat they posed could be managed as a crime problem rather than a national-security challenge.
When that approach was finally supplemented by combat operations, the jihadists could not compete. They could not project power on the scale of modern Western military forces, and they could not hold territory when the U.S. and our allies were disposed to engage them. Global Islamic supremacism is riven by internal strife and dysfunction. Its aspirations of conquest were never realistic. The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan went on for decades only because, after lightning-quick combat victories, we tried to transform fundamentalist Muslim societies that remain intractably hostile to the West. The wars were too insignificant, in national-security terms, to commit the resources needed to win, but hopelessly muddled sharia-democracy promotion got us too bogged down in the internecine hatreds of these societies to make a prudent exit. It is laughable to label these conflicts “endless wars.” By the time we quit, they’d long ceased to be wars in the sense of combating meaningful threats to our security; but they did indeed seem endless. More importantly — putting things in perspective — we had the luxury of pursuing this course, of spending trillions of dollars on military and nation-building enterprises that most Americans ignored, because there was no real threat on the horizon.
The Great Recession was also deeply painful but not existential, at least not in the short term —at our current inflection point, we can’t confidently say that the constitutional deformities, financial malpractices, and delusional notions about debt it lulled us into won’t kill us off in the long run. And again, we have to keep reminding ourselves that we don’t act in a vacuum. The daunting economic challenges we now face, substantially but by no means exclusively stemming from the global financial crisis of 2007–09, result from actions our government was able to take because our advanced economy began in better shape than others, and then weathered the storm better. Our allies have nothing close to our defense commitments, yet their prospects for recovery and sustained prosperity were, and are, dimmer.
Covid, too, has been a disaster, but I suspect it will eventually be seen as more damaging to our economic, social, educational, and constitutional health than to medical health. As the eminent historian Niall Ferguson relates in Doom — The Politics of Catastrophe, even if we credited high-side estimates of excess mortality, which would peg pandemic-related deaths at 0.29 percent of the global population, that would be an order of magnitude less than the estimated 1.7 percent of the world population whose deaths were attributed to the 1918–19 Spanish influenza; and Covid is not even in the same league as, say, bubonic plague (the “Black Death” of the 14th century may have killed roughly a third of the world’s population).
Moreover, for all our missteps at various levels of government and the public-health bureaucracies, the U.S. developed vaccines and treatments with stunning rapidity. As a medical issue, now-endemic Covid is a lingering challenge, particularly as new strains diminish vaccine efficacy. But the virus was never an existential threat. Like climate, another real but hard-to-quantify challenge best addressed by technology and ingenuity, Covid was regarded as an existential crisis only by irrational people, very much including political leaders, who’ve lacked actual existential crises to fret over.
We no longer have that luxury.
China has emerged over the past 30 years as a hostile and formidable rival, angling to supplant us as the dominant world power. To be sure, it has profound internal problems. Years of prosperity and miraculous growth were never going to hide the monstrosities of communism forever. Plus, China’s economy has markedly slowed, while its aggression, corruption, repression, and lack of reliable legal and market institutions ensure that harder times are ahead as its population ages and plummets. We should take little comfort in this, though.
As demonstrated by Putin’s Russia, which remains a geopolitical rival but not nearly of China’s dimension, periods of internal strife and decline tend to be when authoritarian aggressors are at their most perilous. After Russia gobbled Crimea with virtual impunity, there was nary a peep when China took Hong Kong. The greatest ambition of the new Mao, Xi Jinping, is to take Taiwan. While we tell ourselves he won’t really do it, or that the possibility of an invasion is five or more years away, the truth is: It could happen at any time. Our commitment to defend Taiwan is uncertain: If we mass allies and go to war over it, it is by no means clear that we, from 8,000 miles away, would win in militarized China’s backyard; on the other hand, if we fail to defend Taiwan, then the world will have become a much more dangerous place,and our place in it would be in grave doubt.
In the interim (however brief that may be), the spark that could ignite World War III could happen in the Middle East tinderbox at any moment. Iran appears poised to attack Saudi Arabia, whose stability is diminished by President Biden’s foolishness in ostracizing it to appease his political base, and by the heedless incompetence of his pullout from Afghanistan, which has emboldened anti-American aggressors everywhere. Further, Biden’s mulish insistence on appeasing Tehran and attempting to revive President Obama’s feckless Iran nuclear deal has made a regional war more likely: Israel cannot abide an Iran with nukes, and Iran with its jihadist proxies could decide to strike first.
All this is playing out during Europe’s first land war in 75 years, with Russia threatening to use tactical nukes and Europe facing the winter cold bereft of the Russian oil and gas on which it glided so cavalierly into dependence. Nevertheless, as we strain to keep Ukrainian forces in the fight, our own forces are in crisis.
Recruitment has plummeted . . . as one might expect in a country where academe and popular culture marinate young people in anti-Americanism, and where life expectancy — in the world’s most advanced country, well into the 21st century — is actually falling, due in no small part to drug addiction and obesity. The recruiting crisis comes as our military readiness has degraded precipitously. In fact, the Heritage Foundation’s annual Index of Military Strength now rates American military power as “weak” in the aggregate. The ominous analysis concludes that our armed forces are “at significant risk of not being able to meet the demands of a single major regional conflict.” This, the analysts concluded,
is the logical consequence of years of sustained use, underfunding, poorly defined priorities, wildly shifting security policies, exceedingly poor discipline in program execution, and a profound lack of seriousness across the national security establishment even as threats to U.S. interests have surged.
The response to such a predicament, as significant threats to the homeland and American interests worldwide loom, should obviously be to ramp up spending. In an adult republic, even with careful scrutiny of the armed forces’ wayward procurement practices, that would entail cutting other expenses. But even if we were sufficiently grown-up about our straits and the decades it will take to reverse things, one must ask: ramp up spending with what?
We’re tapped out. We’ve refused to pay the taxes necessary for our bloated Leviathan to give us security, in addition to the countless other services and comforts we demand of it. We prefer, instead, to borrow . . . and borrow . . . and borrow, condemning our children and grandchildren to foot the bill. That is the leitmotif of our 30-year holiday from history. The debt owed by the United States to its creditors at home and abroad has now surged past $24 trillion. It is now over 100 percent of gross domestic product — a figure that would be even more shocking if we threw in the additional $7 trillion or so in debt that the government owes its own agencies (total debt is actually $31 trillion). To compare, in the Reagan era, when the government ramped up defense spending to face down the Soviet menace, the debt-to-GDP ratio was less than 30 percent.
Our debt continues to explode. Republicans used to care about that, but under President Trump, as Brian Riedl has shown (see here and here), debt rose more, and more quickly, than it had under his two predecessors — who were not exactly deficit-spending pikers. Of course, much of this insane borrowing occurred when money was loose. Now it is tightening in response to the scourge of inflation. As interest rates rise, so does debt service. It is the fastest growing part of the mammoth federal budget.
At present, debt service costs taxpayers a $400 billion per year. Believe it or not, we’ll soon remember that staggering sum as modest because interest rates have been artificially low. Now, as they climb, debt-service costs climb with them. With every trillion added to the debt, the increasing rates supercharge debt service even more. Right now, we pay more for debt service than for most federal programs, including Social Security. In the near future, if there is no course correction, debt service could top $1 trillion per year, outpacing military spending, and pretty much canceling out non-defense spending other than so-called entitlements.
And speaking of entitlements . . . they’re not just “broken” in the precious Washington parlance about problems we’re too craven to confront. They’re broke. If we look at them in terms of spending that has been promised but not provided for, they’re underwater. By a lot. Cato’s Chris Edwards has run the ugly numbers, calculating unfunded liabilities of $163 trillion. How big is that unfathomable number? The Federal Reserve estimates that the household net worth of the entire United States, the richest nation in the history of the world, is $144 trillion — significantly less than our entitlements tab.
As the economists used to say before Modern Monetary Theory inebriated them, what can’t go on won’t go on. It is just a matter of when the music stops.
It is Thanksgiving weekend, and our theme is keeping things in perspective, so let’s try to place our daunting challenges in a hopeful context. We are still blessed by God to live in the greatest country, the greatest republic, ever known. We have faced dark times: internal divisions that exploded into civil war, periods of panic and privation, and foreign enemies who were both mighty and bent on destroying us. We’ve managed to survive and thrive.
I believe it is because, having exhausted other options, when it came time to get serious we got serious. It is time to get serious.
We are now revving up for two years of presidential electoral politics. It is not 1991 anymore, though. I’d like to say we are about to enter uncharted waters of peril, except we’re already in hip deep, ready or not. Inevitably, maybe sooner than later, we will be forced to deal with existential threats from without, as well as financial ruin and potentially unbridgeable political divides from within. It will take a great deal of time and effort to address what confronts us. But we must get serious about addressing it. We have to be clear-eyed about the dangers. The coming presidential campaign can’t be a clown show. We can’t allow it to descend inexorably into another choice between the lesser of two abominations. We are back in precarious times. Once again, we need extraordinary Americans.