Considering these questions, it’s hard not to
conclude that the American government’s national
security priorities have been so askew of reality
that they left the country dramatically unprepared
for an acute threat to millions of its people.
The government’s focus has been overwhelmingly
on the threat of extremist groups and unfriendly
regimes abroad, mostly in the Middle East. Over
a period of two decades, the United States spent
trillions of dollars waging wars and occupations
across the region. These confrontations have won
America an ever-growing list of enemies around
the world. They are still making life miserable
for millions in the Middle East. But their
impact on the United States itself is now also
being painfully revealed: a country that has
spent trillions on foreign wars but is unable to
defend its citizens from basic threats like
disease and economic collapse.
The last few weeks
have revealed a spectacle of a federal
government apparently incapable of doing what is
required to stop the spread of a pandemic on
American soil. Not only has testing capacity
lagged far behind much smaller and less wealthy
countries like Taiwan and South Korea, but
shortages of critical health infrastructure will
likely mean the excess deaths of potentially
hundreds of thousands of Americans in
the foreseeable future. Governors of large
states have been
publicly begging
the federal government for ventilators, masks,
and other basic tools to deal with the outbreak.
There is
little sign
that the capacity even exists at present to
respond to these requests.
Meanwhile, the avalanche of military spending
that was released after the September 11 attacks
continues to roll onwards. According to Brown
University’s
Costs of War Project,
the U.S. government has spent a staggering $6.4
trillion on its wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and
Pakistan since 2001. This gargantuan number does
not even account for interest payments on the
borrowing needed to pay for the wars, which
could run to as much as $8 trillion by
midcentury, let alone the opportunity costs to
American society of this massive spending on
foreign adventurism. Then there are the
attendant inflations of the Pentagon’s base
budget; domestic “war on terror” spending at the
Departments of Justice and Homeland Security;
and of course the wild expansion of our
intelligence apparatuses, all but unaccountable
to the general public in both their acts and
spending.
That American counterterrorism wars have killed
hundreds of thousands of people while failing to
achieve any clear political or strategic benefit
makes the
squandering of this generational wealth
even more bitter.