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Dissent for a Democratic Revival
If hope is to survive these dark and dangerous times, the scattered majority cannot afford to lose its democratic voice.
Sep 24, 2025
The premise of After Empire: Myth, Rhetoric, and Democratic Revival (which I coauthored with Oscar Giner last year) is that the backlash to the decline of US empire bodes ill for democracy. Indeed, the roots of democracy are being torn up in the name of “Making America Great Again.” Authoritarian rule is ascendant. While not dead yet, collective self-rule in America—whether it is called liberal democracy, electoral democracy, representative democracy, or constitutional democracy—is rapidly disintegrating. The alternative of reviving the nation’s flagging democracy, I want to suggest, must include the practice of deliberative dissent.
One can hope that democracy will bounce back, starting with the 2026 election, eventually to recover its previous status and perhaps even deepen its cultural roots. It is too early not to hope. Already, though, those who would defend democracy are operating on undemocratic terrain. Citizens speak up at the risk of their freedom and livelihood. Intimidation suppresses deliberation. Dissent is rendered unpatriotic. Voting, along with the attack on freedom of speech, is being engineered to prevent free and fair elections. And there is little evidence so far that the party out of power will rally the country’s scattered, fragmented, bullied, and increasingly demoralized majority to turn the tide of authoritarian rule.
If hope is to survive these dark and dangerous times, the scattered majority cannot afford to lose its democratic voice. The spirit of First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, of the right to assemble peacefully, to protest, and to hold government accountable is a commitment to deliberation and nonviolent dissent as the lifeblood of democratic citizenship. Confronted with government intimidation and coercion, citizens who would, in the language of the First Amendment, “petition the Government for a redress of grievances” must weigh the consequences of silence relative to the costs of voicing criticism, and they must pragmatically consider whom to address, what to say, and how to say it. When and where to speak are less essential questions in a digital world where nearly anything said can be retrieved, decontextualized, and disciplined.
One can hope that democracy will bounce back...
Democratic dissent is rapidly becoming a fugitive practice. Fugitive democracy, in the late Sheldon Wolin’s terms, is “the best hope for a democratic revival” in exigent circumstances. It is necessarily an episodic intervention “in the service of commonality.” To become a small-d democrat, he maintains, is “to learn how to act collectively” as “democratic citizenries,” which requires going public, thereby helping “to constitute a ‘public’ and an ‘open’ politics.” (Democracy Incorporated, pp. 287, 289-90).
Deliberative democratic dissent (deliberative dissent for short) refers here to a hybrid political discourse that enacts democracy by objecting strongly to a perceived injustice in order to promote public deliberation and hold governing power accountable. It serves as a prompt to consider the reasons for and against a challenged measure, rule, policy, law, practice, or proposal, that is, to open debate and decision-making to public scrutiny, privileging nonviolence and persuasion in support of collective self-rule. The deliberative hybrid of dissent is realized most fully in discursive forms of speaking and writing, such as a speech delivered at a political rally or in a deliberative body, or an editorial or commentary published in a newspaper, magazine, or blog.
As a fugitive act against authoritarian rule, the challenge and the risk of engaging in deliberative democratic dissent necessitates careful consideration of how it is enacted, that is, how to cultivate a public prudently. Mitigating risk—short of eliminating it, for there is always a degree of risk when speaking publicly—is constructive. Speaking not only of democratic principles but in those principled ways contributes to the formation of a public confronting the emergence of an authoritarian juggernaut. Moreover, it advances democratic principles and practices in a manner harder to assail as radical, hateful, unpatriotic, conspiratorial, vengeful, violent, criminal, and otherwise alien.
Speaking of and in democratic terms is a gesture of affirmation, one of the two gestures essential to deliberative dissent. The other essential gesture is one of opposition. A gesture of affirmation locates the argument and its intended audience at a point of shared perception, opinion, attitude, or value. It identifies the speaker with the listener and claims shared convictions. The gesture of opposition locates a point of negation, disagreement, and disapproval resistant to a political or governmental posture, proposal, practice, or policy. The two gestures complement one another to constitute a statement of what one is for and against, consistent with democratic principles.
By way of brief example, both gestures were evident and intertwined when Illinois Governor JB Pritzker spoke out on August 25 against Trump’s developing plan to occupy Chicago with military troops, supposedly to fight crime. The governor’s gesture of opposition and disapproval took various forms. Among them, he insisted “there is no emergency in Chicago that calls for armed military intervention,” and he then proceeded to elaborate on this point of disagreement with the Trump administration.
Pritzker reinforced the significance of his objection by interweaving a gesture of affirmation grounded in democratic principles that would be violated by a military intervention. The planned action, Pritzker insisted, is an illegal, unconstitutional, un-American invasion of the city for partisan gain. “This is not a time to fall back into the reflexive crouch that I so often see,” Pritzker warned, “where the authoritarian creep by this administration is ignored.” The public is asked to stand up for democracy over authoritarianism.
Enacting the double gesture of deliberative dissent is a principled and politically pragmatic way of reconstituting a democratic public. It sets in motion myriad ways of revivifying the nation’s democratic heritage and reframes present struggles in terms of democratic aspirations. It is a corrective to the downward spiral of a discourse of recrimination. It is dissent in a constructive voice, avoiding pitfalls while building a dynamic community that respects diversity, safeguards freedom, upholds equality, privileges the rule of law, seeks justice, conducts free and fair elections, and pursues the common good.
Enacting the double gesture of deliberative dissent is a principled and politically pragmatic way of reconstituting a democratic public.
William Connolly’s Aspirational Fascism (2017) draws on the principles of pluralism and egalitarianism to resist Trump’s endangerment of democracy. A politics of egalitarianism, he argues, is “the best available antidote to aspirational fascism.” Egalitarianism is relational, an engagement that traverses pluralism’s diversity—a diversity that includes working and middle classes, environmentalists, ethnic and racial minorities, and gender and sexual orientation communities among others—by articulating “agonistic respect across intersecting [and interdependent] constituencies” with a “focus on the question of equality.” Developing an egalitarian agenda is necessary “to recapture a [larger segment of a working-class] constituency that has been pulling away from pluralism,” he maintains. Doing so offers the best chance of drawing together disaffected citizenries, for “you cannot secure democratic pluralism unless and until its active supporters also become profoundly committed to reducing significantly class inequalities of income, job security, educational opportunity, retirement prospects, wealth, and conditions of work” (pp. xlii, 86, 97, 99, 105-6). Thus, Connolly develops a detailed agenda that aims to pull together and broaden a coalition of progressives.
Whether or not Connolly’s particular vision of a coalitional agenda gains traction in the current political crisis, it illustrates a process of constructing a positive defense of democracy in democratic terms. One might even ask if, through a similar process, an agenda could be constructed to bring progressives together with moderates on democratic grounds to blunt authoritarianism. In one configuration or another, exercising the democratic voice of deliberative dissent raises the prospect of forming a working coalition of the currently fragmented majority split along multiple fault lines. No one subset of a democratic public can achieve its aims alone, nor can it achieve everything it seeks in coalition with other subsets. But the collective public might advance together in sufficient numbers and on democratic terms in these exigent circumstances under a banner of intersecting interests and in the service of a commonality of citizenries to resist the authoritarian advance. One can hope.
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Is Gaza the Next Sarajevo? Examining Parallels to WWI & American Empire's Suez Canal Moment
As important as declining U.S. economic and military power are to collapsing American influence in the world, declining U.S. diplomatic power is equally important.
Nov 27, 2023
Is Gaza the Sarajevo on the Sinai or the U.S.’ Suez? That is, is it the starting point of World War III, or the apex of U.S. empire, signaling irreversible decline? The difference could not be more important.
Sarajevo was the city in Bosnia where World War I started. The Great War, as it was called, industrialized human slaughter, destroyed four great empires, led eleven countries to become dictatorships, and laid out the contours of the modern Middle East. It was the moment when the center of global leadership shifted from Europe, where it had resided for the prior 400 years, to the United States.
World War I rearranged the architecture of global power more quickly, completely, and to lasting effect than any event of the last 1,000 years. It is useful to understand what the War was all about and what it can tell us about today.
The War was the result of ascendant German power threatening to displace dominant British power. The parallel between ascendant China and dominant America is inescapable.
The peaking of economic vitality is one thing, military impotence still another.
Britain had invented the First Industrial Revolution, in the 1700s. It was based on iron, steam, and textiles. That was the reason Britain was the leading power in the world for the whole of the nineteenth century. But it was Germany that pioneered the Second Industrial Revolution, the one based on steel, internal combustion, and chemicals. As a result, by the end of the 1800s, Germany had surpassed Britain in industrial and commercial power. The numbers tell the story.
In 1860, Britain held 59% of global wealth to Germany’s 3%, a twenty-to-one advantage. But by 1913, the year before World War I started, Germany held 21% of global wealth to Britain’s 14%. The reversal in economic power was stunning. If it was not reversed, Britain would be eclipsed as the world’s leading power. So, they went to war.
Is this where the U.S. is today with regards to China? No historic comparisons are ever perfect, but the numbers are ominous.
In 1980, the U.S. produced 21% of the world’s economic output, measured as purchasing power parity. China’s share was just over 2%, a ten-to-one advantage for the U.S. But by 2022, the positions had switched. The U.S. produced 15% of global output, China, 21%. The reversal in economic power is stunning, and the gap is increasing. China is simply blowing by the U.S. If it is not reversed—and there’s no sign that it will be—the U.S. will be eclipsed as the world’s leading power. The parallel to World War I is inescapable.
U.S. national security dogma echoes the concern with this dynamic. Documents describe China as the U.S.’ “pacing challenger.” Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has stated that, “China is the only nation that has both the means and intent to challenge U.S. leadership of the global order.” An Air Force general has ruminated that he believes the U.S. will be in a kinetic war with China by 2025.
Is Gaza going to be the Sarajevo of World War III, the trigger that escalates to the point that global war—World War—is inevitable? Save for a cataclysmic error, it will not.
To be sure, Israel will do all that it can to goad the U.S. into attacking its (Israel’s) arch-enemy, Iran. It succeeded in getting the U.S. to take out its earlier rivals, Iraq and Libya, and attack Syria and Sudan. But the U.S. is too leery to commit to a war with Iran, which would inevitably drag in Iran’s allies, Russia, and China. That’s the potential path to War, but the U.S. has the most to lose from it.
Wars destroy economic orders, even for the victors, as Britain learned at such cost in World War I. As THE chief beneficiary of the global system, the U.S. has the most to lose by its destruction. Besides, its own war gaming exercises consistently show that it will lose a war against China. That is made much more likely now that the U.S. has stupidly driven Russia, the world’s #1 military power, into a deep strategic alliance with China.
Additionally, the U.S. has not been able to extricate itself from the Middle East and complete the “Pivot to Asia” that Barack Obama began in 2011. That was the purpose of the U.S.-sponsored Abraham Accords where Arab states would recognize and assume normal relations with Israel. The Gaza war has put an end to that. Until the U.S. can stabilize the Middle East in the hands of a group of collaborative, U.S.-friendly nations, it isn’t ready to carry out another war, certainly not a World War.
Most importantly, save for an all-out nuclear war that would destroy much of life on the planet, the U.S. is not even capable of winning a minor war, not to mention a World War.
It couldn’t win in Iraq, a nation of 45 million people that had been bombed nonstop for more than a decade before the calamitous U.S. invasion in 2003. It couldn’t win in twenty years in Afghanistan, either, a fourth-world country of 40 million, with no air force or even artillery. Its Taliban fighters had literally been living in caves.
And, it hasn’t been announced yet, for political reasons, and won’t be until after the 2024 elections, but the U.S. has been roundly defeated in Ukraine. Ukraine is a country that was willing to sacrifice more than 500,000 of its men (recall, the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam because it could not tolerate the loss of 58,000), but the U.S. could not even manage to keep it supplied with artillery shells.
Given all of this, it is laughable to even contemplate that the U.S. is ready to escalate to World War with China + Russia and their combined 1.6 billion people. They have been on notice of U.S. intentions for decades, have equal or superior weapons system to the U.S. (think hypersonic missiles of which the U.S. has none), and, of course, nukes.
So, if Gaza is not the world’s Sarajevo, is it the U.S.’ Suez? This is a much more likely scenario.
Suez was the event in 1956 that signaled the end of the British Empire. Britain had enlisted France and Israel to invade Egypt following Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. It was an all-but Keystone Cops caper that was ended when Eisenhower threatened to destroy the pound sterling if Britain did not desist.
So, Britain tucked its tail between its legs and slunk home. It was the moment of high humiliation for the country that once had boasted that “The sun never sets on the British Empire.” It was reduced to second class status as a world power and forced into selling off the family china to maintain appearances.
Suez is a much more likely portent of the future for the U.S. than is Sarajevo. The reasons are all around us.
First is the declining economic power, mentioned above. China simply offers a more compelling model to the world for how to organize a nation’s economy, not to mention a world’s. It has lifted more people out of poverty more quickly than has any nation in history. Its stunning ascent has been accomplished without the invasion, brutalizing, and pillaging of other nations that has been so prominent a feature of U.S. hegemony.
Besides, the U.S. abandoned industrial power beginning in the 1980s so that its industrialists could make more money by producing in China, paying workers $1 an hour, and shipping the goods to the U.S. It worked. The already-obscenely wealthy became the newly-Pharoically wealthy, but the result was/is a hollowed out economy and society that the MAGAts are all too happy destroy to somehow get revenge on the perpetrators.
In important ways, the U.S. economy is a basket case. It cannot begin to pay its bills. It only keeps the lights on by borrowing trillions of dollars a year from other nations. In the past 32 years, since the end of the Cold War, it has borrowed $30 trillion, basically a trillion dollars a year. Now, it’s up to $2 trillion a year. Nobody has any illusions that it will ever be paid back. This is not a model of economic vibrancy. When the rest of the world refuses to buy any more U.S. debt, it will be lights out on the American Imperium. The U.S.’ principal adversaries, China and Russia, are working feverishly to see that that day comes, soon.
Similarly, declining military power. Besides the humiliating losses mentioned above, the military come-uppance for the U.S. is palpable as smaller nations like Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, and even Yemen—the poorest nation in the Arab world—are no longer intimidated by U.S. bullying. This disdain for U.S. military power was made especially apparent in Ukraine where Russian-made weapons routinely made minced meat of supposedly superior American ones. All the world could see it.
As important as declining U.S. economic and military power are to collapsing American influence in the world, declining U.S. diplomatic power is equally important. Consider only the collapsing U.S. influence in the Middle East.
It lost its War in Iraq which was always premised on a lie, but not before killing more than 500,000 Iraqi children, a feat that U.S. Secretary of Madeleine Albright said on Sixty Minutes “was worth it.” Its use of depleted uranium weapons left Iraq the most radioactive country on earth. While in Iraq, the U.S. oversaw the creation of ISIS, not unlike its nurturing of al Qaeda in the Afghanistan war of the 1980s.
The U.S. shipped weapons from Libya, to ISIS in Syria, to help it overthrow the Syrian government, an ally of Iran. That’s what Benghazi was all about. But the U.S. plan failed when Russia intervened to stop the overthrow, in 2015. The U.S. still occupies Syrian oil fields in the east, stealing its oil to fund its black operations around the world. All the world sees it.
China pulled off a rapprochement between historic rivals Iran and long-time U.S. ally, Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia announced last year that it would soon begin selling oil in yuan, a body blow to the dollar as the international reserve currency. Saudi Arabia also threw in with Russia against the explicit request of Joe Biden that it lower oil prices to help Biden and the Democrats in the 2022 election. It also buried the hatchet in its hostility against Syria.
By ceding the diplomatic initiative and losing its wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon (via its proxy, Israel, in 2006), the U.S. has left its arch-enemy, Iran, with dominant influence over much of west Asia, from the Indian Ocean in the south to the Caspian Sea in the north, from the border with Afghanistan in the east, to the Mediterranean Sea in the west. It is a collapse in influence of startling speed and catastrophic proportions in one of the most important regions of the world.
It is likely that this plummeting loss of U.S. power and prestige was a factor behind Israel’s vastly disproportionate response to the Hamas attack in Gaza: it knew that U.S. influence was waning and that the U.S. would not be able to provide cover for it much longer. Collapsing power develops its own self-reinforcing dynamic.
Most important in defining Gaza as a Suez moment for the U.S. is its collapsed moral power.
The U.S. is deeply, inextricably complicit in the most notorious genocide of the twenty-first century. It is not only providing funding, weapons, intelligence, and military cover to Israel in the form of two full aircraft carrier groups in the eastern Mediterranean. For 75 years, it has provided the diplomatic cover at the United Nations that has allowed Israel to carry out its nakedly apartheid regime against the Palestinian people, and now, with impunity, its genocide.
Most of the rest of the world recognizes the overtly colonialist nature of the Israeli enterprise. It is a group of European- and later, American-descended settlers who came to the Middle East explicitly to dispossess the Palestinian people of their land through the process of ethnic cleansing. One of the ideological fathers of Zionism, Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, said exactly this in his infamous essay, The Iron Wall:
“We shall trace the root of the evil to this – that we are seeking to colonise a country against the wishes of its population, in other words, by force. Everything else that is undesirable grows out of this root.”
The first Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, by then engaged in the war that created Israel, laid out the mechanism—ethnic cleansing—by which this colonization would take place:
“The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.”
Everything in past 75 years of Israeli history is but a footnote to these two vestigial sins: colonization and ethnic cleansing. The present war is simply Netanyahu’s seizing the pretext of war, as Ben-Gurion commended, to carry out the Final Solution. The world sees this. It is as unmistakable as it is despicable, something no civilized nation could sanction. Yet, the U.S. claims impunity, for both itself and Israel, in supporting Israel’s destruction and rape of the Palestinian people.
It is important to understand why this is so abhorrent to most of the people of the world, and, therefore, so damaging to longer-term U.S. interests.
It is impossible to overstate the collapse of U.S. influence and prestige in the world, especially in the Middle East.
Most of the nations of the world were at one time in the not-too-distant past colonies of Western imperial powers. They carry in their cultural consciousness, their historical narratives, the obloquy, the shame and disgrace, of having been dominated and humiliated by white Western powers for decades, in some cases for centuries.
They see Israel and Palestine as simply an updated version of the same predation they suffered themselves before their struggles for national independence, beginning right after World War II. This is what the Wars for National Liberation were about in the 1950s and 1960s. More than 90 nations fought their Western imperial occupiers to achieve independence. Their names are the iconic battles of the Cold War: Algeria; Vietnam; Indonesia; Angola; Cuba; Congo; Nicaragua; Kenya…
What is different this time is the fact of pervasive global social media. No longer are local leaders, so often bought with U.S. money, able to dictate what their people know and are allowed to believe. No longer are U.S.-controlled mass media able to hide the truth to insulate the perpetrators of atrocities from the opprobrium, the stigma, of their heinous acts.
Four billion people are witnessing daily the unthinkable horrors inflicted by the Israelis on the Palestinians, and the U.S.’ breathless support for it: the murder of thousands of innocent, defenseless children; the intentional destruction of hospitals, schools, churches, mosques, relief agencies, escape convoys, water and power stations; the shutting off of food, water, electricity, medicine, and fuel, in the certainty that this will render Gaza uninhabitable, i.e., to complete the ethnic cleansing that has always, since the beginning of the enterprise, in the Zionists’ own words, been the goal.
The peaking of economic vitality is one thing, military impotence still another. The resultant diplomatic flaccidity (or, ineptness; it’s hard to say which) is an almost inevitable concomitant. But it is the moral collapse, obvious for all the world to see, that has cost the U.S. the most, has devastated its capacity to credibly claim to be “the leader of the world.” It believes itself impervious to the dictates of universal moral and ethical standards. It could not be more wrong.
It is impossible to overstate the collapse of U.S. influence and prestige in the world, especially in the Middle East. That is why Suez might be the right analogy for how the U.S. empire has peaked and is now destroying itself. It bumbles along, intoxicated with the childish delusion of its “exceptionalism” and its rosy remembrance of its once-great, glorious past. It is, instead, like a snowball, careening down a mountainside, oblivious of its path, heedless of its destructive, out-of-control nature, and picking up mass and momentum as it hurtles to its own demise. What lies at the bottom is impossible to know. But it will not be pretty.
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US Imperial Dominance Disguised as Democratic Deterrence
As a soaring Pentagon budget allows the American Empire to do what it likes, the rest of the world forced to suffer as a result.
Jan 16, 2023
More than two millennia ago, in the History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides recounted a disastrous conflict Athens waged against Sparta. A masterwork on strategy and war, the book is still taught at the U.S. Army War College and many other military institutions across the world. A passage from it describing an ultimatum Athens gave a weaker power has stayed with me all these years. And here it is, loosely translated from the Greek: “The strong do what they will and the weak suffer as they must.”
Recently, I read the latest National Defense Strategy, or NDS, issued in October 2022 by the Pentagon, and Thucydides’s ancient message, a warning as clear as it was undeniable, came to mind again. It summarized for me the true essence of that NDS: being strong, the United States does what it wants and weaker powers, of course, suffer as they must. Such a description runs contrary to the mythology of this country in which we invariably wage war not for our own imperial ends but to defend ourselves while advancing freedom and democracy. Recall that Athens, too, thought of itself as an enlightened democracy even as it waged its imperial war of dominance on the Peloponnesus. Athens lost that war, calamitously, but at least it did produce Thucydides, a military leader who became a historian and wrote all too bluntly about his country’s hubristic, ultimately fatal pursuit of hegemony.
Imperial military ambitions contributed disastrously to Athens’s exhaustion and ultimate collapse, a lesson completely foreign to U.S. strategists. Not surprisingly, then, you’ll find no such Thucydidean clarity in the latest NDS approved by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. In place of that Greek historian’s probity and timeless lessons, the NDS represents an assault not just on the English language but on our very future. In it, a policy of failing imperial dominance is eternally disguised as democratic deterrence, while the greatest “strategic” effort of all goes (remarkably successfully) into justifying massive Pentagon budget increases. Given the sustained record of failures in this century for what still passes as the greatest military power on the planet — Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, of course, but don’t forget Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and indeed the entire $8 trillion Global War on Terror in all its brutality — consider the NDS a rare recent “mission accomplished” moment. The 2023 baseline “defense” budget now sits at $858 billion, $45 billion more than even the Biden administration requested.
With that yearly budget climbing toward a trillion dollars (or more) annually, it’s easy to conclude that, at least when it comes to our military, nothing succeeds like failure. And, by the way, that not only applies to wars lost at a staggering cost but also financial audits blown without penalty. After all, the Pentagon only recently failed its fifth audit in a row. With money always overflowing, no matter how it may be spent, one thing seems guaranteed: some future American Thucydides will have the material to produce a volume or volumes beyond compare. Of course, whether this country goes the way of Athens — defeat driven by military exhaustion exacerbated by the betrayal of its supposedly deepest ideals leading to an ultimate collapse — remains to be seen. Still, given that America’s war colleges continue to assign Thucydides, no one can say that our military and future NDS writers didn’t get fair warning when it comes to what likely awaits them.
Bludgeoning America with Bureaucratese
If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with BS.
That’s a saying I learned early in my career as an Air Force officer, so I wasn’t exactly surprised to discover that it’s the NDS’s guiding philosophy. The document has an almost Alice in Wonderland-like quality to it as words and phrases take on new meanings. China, you won’t be surprised to learn, is a “pacing challenge” to U.S. security concerns; Russia, an “acute threat” to America due to its “unprovoked, unjust, and reckless invasion of Ukraine” and other forms of “irresponsible behavior”; and building “combat-credible forces” within a “defense ecosystem” is a major Pentagon goal, along with continuing “investments in mature, high-value assets” (like defective aircraft carriers, ultra-expensive bombers and fighter jets, and doomsday-promising new ICBMs).
Much talk is included about “leveraging” those “assets,” “risk mitigation,” and even “cost imposition,” a strange euphemism for bombing, killing, or otherwise inflicting pain on our enemies. Worse yet, there’s so much financial- and business-speak in the document that it’s hard not to wonder whether its authors don’t already have at least one foot in the revolving door that could, on their retirement from the military, swing them onto the corporate boards of major defense contractors like Boeing and Raytheon.
Perhaps my favorite redefined concept in that NDS lurks in the word “campaigning.” In the old days, armies fought campaigns in the field and generals like Frederick the Great or Napoleon truly came to know the price of them in blood and treasure. Unlike U.S. generals since 1945, they also knew the meaning of victory, as well as defeat. Perish the thought of that kind of campaigning now. The NDS redefines it, almost satirically, not to say incomprehensibly, as “the conduct and sequencing of logically-linked military initiatives aimed at advancing well-defined, strategy-aligned priorities over time.” Huh?
Campaigning, explains the cover letter signed by Secretary of Defense Austin (who won’t be mistaken for Frederick II in his bluntness or Napoleon in his military acuity), “is not business as usual — it is the deliberate effort to synchronize the [Defense] Department’s activities and investments to aggregate focus and resources to shift conditions in our favor.”
Got it? Good!
Of course, who knows what such impenetrable jargon really means to our military in 2023? This former military officer certainly prefers the plain and honest language of Thucydides. In his terms, America, the strong, intends to do what it will in the world to preserve and extend “conditions in our favor,” as the NDS puts it — a measure by which this country has failed dismally in this century. Weaker countries, especially those that are “irresponsible,” must simply suffer. If they resist, they must be prepared for some “cost imposition” events exercised by our “combat-credible forces.” Included in those are America’s “ultimate backstop” of cost imposition… gulp, its nuclear forces.
Again, the NDS is worthy of close reading (however pain-inducing that may be) precisely because the secretary of defense does claim that it’s his “preeminent guidance document.” I assume he’s not kidding about that, though I wish he were. To me, that document is to guidance as nuclear missiles are to “backstops.” If that last comparison is jarring, I challenge you to read it and then try to think or write clearly.
Bringing Clarity to America’s Military Strategy
To save you the trauma of even paging through the NDS, let me try to summarize it quickly in my version — if not the Pentagon’s — of English:
- China is the major threat to America on this planet.
- Russia, however, is a serious threat in Europe.
- The War on Terror continues to hum along successfully, even if at a significantly lower level.
- North Korea and Iran remain threats, mainly due to the first’s growing nuclear arsenal and the second’s supposed nuclear aspirations.
- Climate change, pandemics, and cyberwar must also be factored in as “transboundary challenges.”
“Deterrence” is frequently used as a cloak for the planetary dominance the Pentagon continues to dream of. Our military must remain beyond super-strong (and wildly overfunded) to deter nations and entities from striking “the homeland.” There’s also lots of talk about global challenges to be met, risks to be managed, “gray zone” methods to be employed, and references aplenty to “kinetic action” (combat, in case your translator isn’t working) and what’s known as “exploitable asymmetries.”
Count on one thing: whatever our disasters in the real world, nobody is going to beat America in the jargon war.
Missing in the NDS — and no surprise here — is any sense that war is humanity’s worst pastime. Even the mass murder implicit in nuclear weapons is glossed over. The harshest realities of conflict, nuclear war included, and the need to do anything in our power to prevent them, naturally go unmentioned. The very banality of the document serves to mask a key reality of our world: that Americans fund nothing as religiously as war, that most withering of evils.
Perhaps it’s not quite the banality of evil, to cite the telling phrase political philosopher Hannah Arendt used to describe the thoughts of the deskbound mass-murderers of the Holocaust, but it does have all of war’s brutality expunged from it. As we stare into the abyss, the NDS replies with mind-numbing phrases and terms that wouldn’t be out of place in a corporate report on rising profits and market dominance.
Yet as the military-industrial complex maneuvers and plots to become ever bigger, ever better funded, and ever more powerful, abetted by a Congress seemingly lustful for ever more military spending and weapons exports, hope for international cooperation, productive diplomacy, and democracy withers. Here, for instance, are a few of the things you’ll never see mentioned in this NDS:
- Any suggestion that the Pentagon budget might be reduced. Ever.
- Any suggestion that the U.S. military’s mission or “footprint” should be downsized in any way at all.
- Any acknowledgement that the U.S. and its allies spend far more on their militaries than “pacing challengers” like China or “acute threats” like Russia.
- Any acknowledgment that the Pentagon’s budget is based not on deterrence but on dominance.
- Any acknowledgement that the U.S. military has been far less than dominant despite endless decades of massive military spending that produced lost or stalemated wars from Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq.
- Any suggestion that skilled diplomacy and common security could lead to greater cooperation or decreased tensions.
- Any serious talk of peace.
In brief, in that document and thanks to the staggering congressional funding that goes with it, America is being eternally spun back into an age of great-power rivalry, with Xi Jinping’s China taking the place of the old Soviet Union and Vladimir Putin’s Russia that of Mao Zedong’s China. Consistent with that retro-vision is the true end goal of the NDS: to eternally maximize the Pentagon budget and so the power and authority of the military-industrial-congressional complex.
Basically, any power that seeks to push back against the Pentagon’s vision of security through dominance is defined as a threat to be “deterred,” often in the most “kinetic” way. And the greatest threat of all, requiring the most “deterrence,” is, of course, China.
In a textbook case of strategic mirror-imaging, the Pentagon’s NDS sees that country and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) as acting almost exactly like the U.S. military. And that simply cannot be allowed.
Here’s the relevant NDS passage:
“In addition to expanding its conventional forces, the PLA is rapidly advancing and integrating its space, counterspace, cyber, electronic, and information warfare capabilities to support its holistic approach to joint warfare. The PLA seeks to target the ability of the [U.S.] Joint Force to project power to defend vital U.S. interests and aid our Allies in a crisis or conflict. The PRC [China] is also expanding the PLA’s global footprint and working to establish a more robust overseas and basing infrastructure to allow it to project military power at greater distances. In parallel, the PRC is accelerating the modernization and expansion of its nuclear capabilities.”
How dare China become more like the United States! Only this country is allowed to aspire to “full-spectrum dominance” and global power, as manifested by its 750 military bases scattered around the world and its second-to-none, blue-water navy. Get back to thy place, China! Only “a free people devoted to democracy and the rule of law” can “sustain and strengthen an international system under threat.” China, you’ve been warned. Better not dare to keep pace with the U.S. of A. (And heaven forfend that, in a world overheating in a devastating way, the planet’s two greatest greenhouse gas emitters should work together to prevent true catastrophe!)
Revisiting the Oath of Office
Being a retired U.S. military officer, I always come back to the oath of office I once swore to uphold: “To support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Naturally, if China, Russia, or any other country or entity attacks or otherwise directly menaces the U.S., I expect our military to defend this country with all due vigor.
That said, I don’t see China, Russia, or weaker countries like Iran or North Korea risking attacks against America proper, despite breathless talk of world “flashpoints.” Why would they, when any such attack would incur a devastating counterattack, possibly including America’s trusty “backstop,” its nuclear weapons?
In truth, the NDS is all about the further expansion of the U.S. global military mission. Contraction is a concept never to be heard. Yet reducing our military’s presence abroad isn’t synonymous with isolationism, nor, as has become ever more obvious in recent years, is an expansive military structure a fail-safe guarantor of freedom and democracy at home. Quite the opposite, constant warfare and preparations for more of it overseas have led not only to costly defeats, most recently in Afghanistan, but also to the increasing militarization of our society, a phenomenon reflected, for instance, in the more heavily armed and armored police forces across America.
The Pentagon’s NDS is a classic case of threat inflation cloaked in bureaucratese where the “facts” are fixed around a policy that encourages the incessant and inflationary growth of the military-industrial complex. In turn, that complex empowers and drives a “rules-based international order” in which America, as hegemon, makes the rules. Again, as Thucydides put it, the strong do what they will and the weak suffer as they must.
Yet, to paraphrase another old book, what does it profit a people to gain the whole world yet lose their very soul? Like Athens before it, America was once a flawed democracy that nevertheless served as an inspiration to many because militarism, authoritarianism, and imperial pretense didn’t drive it. Today, this country is much like Thucydides’s Athens, projecting power ever-outwards in a misbegotten exercise to attain mastery through military supremacy.
It didn’t end well for Athens, nor will it for the United States.
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