After this pandemic passes, America needs a reckoning with its national security

After this pandemic passes, there must be a profound reckoning. I’m not referring to President Trump’s abysmal performance in the crisis; the election in November will render citizens’ judgment on that. No, there must be a reckoning with the profound failure of the United States’ domestic and foreign policies and priorities, a failure that was apparent even before covid-19 revealed the catastrophic bankruptcy of our national security strategy.

Less than 30 years ago, with the end of the Soviet Union, the United States basked in the role of the world’s sole superpower. An establishment consensus quickly congealed. Scholars proclaimed the “end of history,” announcing the U.S. model — liberal democracy and market fundamentalism — was the ultimate endpoint of human progress. Corporate-led globalization would bring untold prosperity to the United States and spread it across the globe. America’s unrivaled military dominance would enable it to police an unruly world, spreading the blessings of democracy. Though partisan differences might exist in emphasis and rhetoric, the consensus — and the overweening arrogance — would be unassailable. The United States, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright asserted, was the “indispensable nation,” while an anonymous George W. Bush adviser boasted, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

The results for the security of Americans have been ruinous. Under the rules rigged by corporations, globalization led to good jobs being shipped abroad, workers losing ground, wages stagnating and insecurity rising while inequality reached grotesque extremes. Trillions of dollars are devoted to building military power that is increasingly irrelevant to meeting the challenges of our time, while fundamental threats — catastrophic climate change, pandemics, mass migrations forced by failed states and endless wars — have been slighted. Americans grow more and more insecure, life expectancy has declined, and an entire generation has been left mired in debt. And the United States remains an outlier among developed countries in its failure to provide basic shared security — universal health care, decent wages, sick leave, first-rate public education and so on.