America Faces the Constraints of Democracy
Domestic spending crowded out defense, and the world is more dangerous as a result.
By Walter Russell Mead
U.S. on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, March 4. -/US NAVY/US Central Command Public Affairs/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images“We don’t want to fight but by jingo if we do / We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too!”
That was the refrain to a music-hall hit from the 1870s.
It warned Russia not to tangle with the British Lion and expressed imperial Britain’s self-confidence at the height of its power.
The British haven’t had that swagger in a long time.
As the unholy alliance of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea escalates its strategic confrontation with the U.S., shortages of missiles and ships are beginning to make Americans worry about the limits of our military power.
Worse, financial markets fret that with the national debt passing $40 trillion and interest rates close to 20-year highs, Uncle Sam might just be maxing out his last credit card.
We are moving from the post-Cold War era of living as if American power was largely unlimited and unconstrained to one in which we have less freedom to choose our responses and threats grow more challenging.
Domestically we are undergoing a similar shift, from an era when federal spending was largely unfettered to a new age in which, thanks to inflation and higher interest rates, the costs of excessive spending become unbearably high.
None of it was unpredictable.
The consequences are dire.
Kyiv is in flames because politicians and military planners fooled themselves into believing we could safely squeeze defense spending and avoid the hard problems of Pentagon reform even as the geopolitical challenges intensified.
In prosecuting the war with Iran, American strategists face the consequences of these same decisions in our inability to protect our own bases, much less the military assets and cities of our allies.
And as the last American aircraft carrier leaves the Western Pacific, the empty storage facilities where defensive missiles once waited raise doubts about America’s ability to fulfill treaty commitments to South Korea and Japan.
A new and darker era seems to be opening across the Pacific.
The economic news is hardly more reassuring, and the coming clash between the urgent need to accelerate defense spending dramatically and the chronic hunger of large domestic constituencies for federal largess could define an era of American politics.
Not since the earliest days of the Cold War have Americans had to live in a world of real limits—security threats that we lacked the weapons or the troops to counter right away, or urgent domestic priorities that we lacked the resources to address.
This is the new normal and, for a while at least, we are going to have to get used to it.
It isn’t the end of the world.
America’s greatest Cold War historian, John Lewis Gaddis, makes the point that presidents like Dwight Eisenhower, who believed that America’s limited resources needed to be carefully husbanded, often proved to be wiser and more effective strategists than those like Lyndon B. Johnson, who thought we had the money and the power to accomplish virtually anything we could think of.
President Trump’s many critics and political enemies would like to put all blame for the current state of affairs on his shoulders, and certainly he and his team have made decisions, sometimes rashly, that have exacerbated the underlying problems.
But lectures on prudence and virtue have a hollow ring when they come from those who neglected the urgent problems of our defense industrial base, temporized with our opponents, underfunded national defense and fecklessly accelerated the unsustainable course of federal spending.
For now, the nation faces two tasks.
First, the administration must find a way to get the most vital jobs done even if it lacks all the tools one would want for the task.
Mr. Trump’s willingness to discard convention and business as usual can be an asset—though it’s an unforgiving environment, and undisciplined shenanigans as opposed to creative innovation will carry heavy costs.
Second, the public needs to wake up and demand better from our elected politicians.
It’s easy to criticize political elites for the generational failures of strategic and fiscal policy that got us into this mess, but those failures were popular.
Too many Americans wanted to hear that we could have a peaceful and democratic world without the costly inconvenience of maintaining an adequate defense industrial base, the trouble of making the Pentagon efficient, and the risks and costs of countering China’s record-breaking military buildup.
Too many more of us wanted to hear that we could indefinitely afford the unlimited expansion of poorly designed entitlement programs and cover our ever-escalating deficits with borrowed cash.
“Democracy,” H.L. Mencken wrote, “is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”
We are getting it good and hard now; the question is whether we can wise up fast enough to avoid the worst.
Walter Russell Mead is the Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at Hudson Institute, the Global View Columnist at The Wall Street Journal and the Alexander Hamilton Professor of Strategy and Statecraft with the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida.
He is also a member of Aspen Institute Italy and board member of Aspenia. Before joining Hudson, Mr. Mead was a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations as the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy. He has authored numerous books, including the widely-recognized Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004). Mr. Mead’s most recent book is titled The Arc of A Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People.
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