Greeting Threat Inflation with a Yawn

Walter Russell Mead is sad that people aren’t panicking about the latest round of threat inflation:

Even more appalling than the report is the general indifference with which it has been received. Aside from a few honorable exceptions…the commission’s report sank like a stone. There has been no uproar in the press, no speechifying by presidential candidates, no storm on social media, no sign that the American political class takes the slightest interest in the increasing fragility of the peace on which everything we cherish depends.

If few people are paying any attention to the report, one reason for that might be that there is so much hawkish harping about foreign threats that it all tends to blur together into one constant whine of noise. It is natural for people to block out the endless drone of fearmongering emanating from the Beltway. Another possible reason why it hasn’t received more attention is that the report is marred by its irresponsible exaggeration of current dangers. [https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/nds_commission_final_report.pdf]

According to the first sentence of the summary, “The threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945 and include the potential for near-term major war.” It is difficult to take seriously any assessment that brackets off the entire Cold War as a period when the U.S. supposedly faced threats less challenging than it does today. Many people in Washington use this line about threats being greater than at any time since 1945, but isn’t true. This report amounts to having a bunch of people in Washington telling each other the same false talking points and then writing it all down.

The report’s authors are dismayed that the public is not sufficiently frightened of the threats they are exaggerating. They lament that the public is “largely unaware of the dangers the United States faces or the costs (financial and otherwise) required to adequately prepare,” and they recommend that the public be propagandized as quickly as possible. They write, “A bipartisan “call to arms” is urgently needed so that the United States can make the major changes and significant investments now rather than wait for the next Pearl Harbor or 9/11.” Past propaganda efforts have succeeded in mobilizing the public behind bad policies, but I’m not so sure it will work as well this time.

My guess is that the report’s authors underestimate how sick much of the country is of calls to arms and demands for more military spending. If the American people are told that they have to continue neglecting domestic needs for a few more decades to sustain “global leadership,” they might decide that “global leadership” is a waste of resources that could be put to better use somewhere else. High military spending has been politically sustainable as long as the government could finance it through borrowing, but the increases that hawks have in mind are vast and will have to be funded at least partly through unpopular tax increases. The report does acknowledge later on that “increased security spending should be accompanied by additional taxes and reforms to entitlement spending,” but there seems to be no awareness of how politically toxic this combination of domestic spending cuts, higher taxes, and more militarism will be.

The public has understandably become more cynical and disillusioned with our leadership class after decades of major foreign policy failures. A great many Americans won’t buy what these people are selling. Our political leaders have invented or overstated foreign threats so many times over so many decades that discounting their warnings is a natural and sensible response.

The report’s authors assume that there should be a broad national consensus on these questions, and they want to have as little debate as possible. As they say, “We would be far stronger if we returned to the maxim that politics ends at the water’s edge.” That maxim has rarely ever been observed in practice, and the U.S. has usually come to regret it when it has acted on the basis of such overwhelming bipartisan consensus. That is how the U.S. went into Vietnam and Iraq, and it would be terrible if the U.S. ended up repeating those errors by marching in lockstep towards the next unnecessary war. Politics can’t end at the water’s edge without marginalizing dissent and stifling debate, and our foreign policy always ends up being worse when groupthink takes hold.

If it tells us anything useful, the commission report is evidence of how out of touch with the country our policymakers are.

Daniel Larison is a Ph.D. in History from The University of Chicago Contributor, Responsible Statecraft