In 2019, I taught a course at UCLA on presidential rhetoric and American foreign policy. One of the speeches I had my students read was Bush’s address to Congress after 9/11, which still stands out as an exceptional piece of speechwriting. Just a couple of years younger than I was when I found those words so stirring, my students read the text as if it came from a different planet. Had the United States really made its entire national purpose a war against a group of terrorists? I asked them to list what they believed were the most pressing issues facing the country. Climate change topped the list. Economic inequality, student debt, structural racism, and a host of other issues filled it out. Not a single student mentioned terrorism. The generational appeal of Bernie Sanders—so out of step with the Democratic establishment I’d been a part of—was obvious in that room.
Trump likes to talk about ending America’s post-9/11 wars. But his latest defense budget is $112 billion higher than it was the year he took office. This additional spending appears guided by little beyond the president’s desire to declare that he’s investing more in the American military. The use of drones has increased. In Afghanistan and against ISIS, rules of engagement to limit civilian casualties have been relaxed. The number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan was increased. With the notable exception of a bizarre and hasty retreat from our counter-ISIS mission in Syria, the post-9/11 resourcing of America’s military and intelligence infrastructure is more robust than ever. Obama’s efforts to formulate a post-9/11 foreign policy—anchored in the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Paris Agreement—were scrapped. In their place came a constellation of policies under the “America first” banner—a mixture of restrictive immigration practices, scorn for traditional allies and international institutions, and a trade war with China.
Most acutely, Trump has fixated on Iran as a top priority. Since pulling out of the Iran deal, he has placed America on a constant precipice of war with the country. In addition to renewed sanctions, Trump has deployed nearly 20,000 additional U.S. troops to the Middle East, fueling Iranian provocations in response. (From the vantage point of quarantine, it’s hard to fathom that a couple of months ago we almost found ourselves in yet another post-9/11 war based on a presidential decision to kill someone.)
In his attitude and approach, Trump himself remains very much a president of the 9/11 era. He could not have become president without the architecture of right-wing media, chiefly Fox News, that blossomed after the attacks of 9/11. His personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani turned his laudable response to those attacks into a career of profiteering that led him all the way to Ukraine in pursuit of conspiracy theories about Joe Biden. Trump’s lie that Muslims in New Jersey celebrated the fall of the Twin Towers completes the distortion of that day from a moment of American common purpose to an expression of white identity politics against an encroaching “other.”
Trump successfully harnessed anger, grievance, nationalism, and crude racism to win political support. But that approach is useless in responding to an actual crisis. In COVID-19, Trump faces an adversary that doesn’t care what it’s called, recognizes no border, and plays not by the rules of America’s broken politics but rather by the rules of science and objective reality.
Whereas the attacks on 9/11 took place in only three locations, COVID-19 has already affected nearly everyone in the country. Most of the U.S. is under social-distancing orders. Clearly, we are entering a period of severe trauma. Many—if not most—of our fellow citizens will get the disease. An unspeakable number of people may die. Social order and cohesion may be tested in unforeseen ways. The American economy will go through a shock likely to rival the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Depression. As with those events, the geopolitical fallout will be profound and enduring.
The first months of this crisis suggest that the world order that emerges on the other end is likely to be permanently altered. America’s response to 9/11 committed the familiar mistake of hastening a superpower’s decline through overreach; the Trump presidency, and our failure to respond effectively to COVID-19, show us the dangers of a world in which America makes no effort at leadership at all.
Enormous upheaval, however, also offers the opportunity for enormous change. And that is what America needs. This is not simply a matter of winding down the remaining 9/11 wars—we need a transformation of what has been our whole way of looking at the world since 9/11. Yes, we have a continued need to fight terrorist groups, but the greatest threats we face going forward will come not from groups like al-Qaeda or ISIS, but from climate change, pandemics, the risks posed by emerging technologies, and the spread of a blend of nationalist authoritarianism and Chinese-style totalitarianism that could transform the way human beings live in every country, including our own.
To meet those challenges, Americans will have to rethink the current orientation of our own government and society, and move past our post-9/11 mindset. Any serious effort must change our government’s spending priorities. It makes no sense that the Pentagon budget is 13 times larger than the entire international-affairs budget, which funds the State Department, USAID, and global programs at other agencies. The entire pandemic-preparedness budget is a rounding error compared with a trillion-dollar plan to modernize America’s nuclear-weapons infrastructure. Smart investments in research and development, including for agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, used to help make America a global leader in health, science, and technology; now we are behind countries such as Germany and South Korea—countries we helped rebuild or build during the Cold War—in developing and deploying COVID-19 tests.
We need to change the way we think about national security and foreign policy. In the Obama administration, efforts to ramp up climate-change and global-health security didn’t mesh well with America’s sprawling counterterrorism infrastructure, or with the interests of Congress. These defining challenges must become the focus of far more personnel—at the White House, the State Department, and other agencies—and they must galvanize partnerships outside government. Meanwhile, if we are to continue to deploy the rhetoric about democracy that we have used since 9/11 toward our adversaries, we and our allies must live up to it ourselves.
We need to change our attitude about government itself. The multidecade assault on the role of government in American life led to a Trump administration that disregards expertise and disdains career civil servants. The COVID-19 crisis has revealed that government is essential; that public service is valuable; that facts and science should guide decisions; and that competence matters more than Washington’s endless gamesmanship.
Donald Trump is the embodiment of trends that have been advancing for a long time—the crudeness of our culture, the meanness of our politics, the disintegration of our media. All those trends have accelerated since September 11, 2001. As we go through an indeterminate period of time separated from the normal rhythm of our lives, Americans are going to be forced to consider what’s most important to them. The answer, so far, appears to be family, community, and a sense of decency—whether it’s in the heroism of health-care workers or in the video that your friend shared of some random act of kindness. Our politics and government should reflect that decency in the priorities we set at home and the actions we take abroad.
Trump likes to talk about ending America’s post-9/11 wars. But his latest defense budget is $112 billion higher than it was the year he took office. This additional spending appears guided by little beyond the president’s desire to declare that he’s investing more in the American military. The use of drones has increased. In Afghanistan and against ISIS, rules of engagement to limit civilian casualties have been relaxed. The number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan was increased. With the notable exception of a bizarre and hasty retreat from our counter-ISIS mission in Syria, the post-9/11 resourcing of America’s military and intelligence infrastructure is more robust than ever. Obama’s efforts to formulate a post-9/11 foreign policy—anchored in the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Paris Agreement—were scrapped. In their place came a constellation of policies under the “America first” banner—a mixture of restrictive immigration practices, scorn for traditional allies and international institutions, and a trade war with China.
Most acutely, Trump has fixated on Iran as a top priority. Since pulling out of the Iran deal, he has placed America on a constant precipice of war with the country. In addition to renewed sanctions, Trump has deployed nearly 20,000 additional U.S. troops to the Middle East, fueling Iranian provocations in response. (From the vantage point of quarantine, it’s hard to fathom that a couple of months ago we almost found ourselves in yet another post-9/11 war based on a presidential decision to kill someone.)In his attitude and approach, Trump himself remains very much a president of the 9/11 era. He could not have become president without the architecture of right-wing media, chiefly Fox News, that blossomed after the attacks of 9/11. His personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani turned his laudable response to those attacks into a career of profiteering that led him all the way to Ukraine in pursuit of conspiracy theories about Joe Biden. Trump’s lie that Muslims in New Jersey celebrated the fall of the Twin Towers completes the distortion of that day from a moment of American common purpose to an expression of white identity politics against an encroaching “other.”
Trump successfully harnessed anger, grievance, nationalism, and crude racism to win political support. But that approach is useless in responding to an actual crisis. In COVID-19, Trump faces an adversary that doesn’t care what it’s called, recognizes no border, and plays not by the rules of America’s broken politics but rather by the rules of science and objective reality.
Whereas the attacks on 9/11 took place in only three locations, COVID-19 has already affected nearly everyone in the country. Most of the U.S. is under social-distancing orders. Clearly, we are entering a period of severe trauma. Many—if not most—of our fellow citizens will get the disease. An unspeakable number of people may die. Social order and cohesion may be tested in unforeseen ways. The American economy will go through a shock likely to rival the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Depression. As with those events, the geopolitical fallout will be profound and enduring.
The first months of this crisis suggest that the world order that emerges on the other end is likely to be permanently altered. America’s response to 9/11 committed the familiar mistake of hastening a superpower’s decline through overreach; the Trump presidency, and our failure to respond effectively to COVID-19, show us the dangers of a world in which America makes no effort at leadership at all.
Enormous upheaval, however, also offers the opportunity for enormous change. And that is what America needs. This is not simply a matter of winding down the remaining 9/11 wars—we need a transformation of what has been our whole way of looking at the world since 9/11. Yes, we have a continued need to fight terrorist groups, but the greatest threats we face going forward will come not from groups like al-Qaeda or ISIS, but from climate change, pandemics, the risks posed by emerging technologies, and the spread of a blend of nationalist authoritarianism and Chinese-style totalitarianism that could transform the way human beings live in every country, including our own.
To meet those challenges, Americans will have to rethink the current orientation of our own government and society, and move past our post-9/11 mindset. Any serious effort must change our government’s spending priorities. It makes no sense that the Pentagon budget is 13 times larger than the entire international-affairs budget, which funds the State Department, USAID, and global programs at other agencies. The entire pandemic-preparedness budget is a rounding error compared with a trillion-dollar plan to modernize America’s nuclear-weapons infrastructure. Smart investments in research and development, including for agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, used to help make America a global leader in health, science, and technology; now we are behind countries such as Germany and South Korea—countries we helped rebuild or build during the Cold War—in developing and deploying COVID-19 tests.
We need to change the way we think about national security and foreign policy. In the Obama administration, efforts to ramp up climate-change and global-health security didn’t mesh well with America’s sprawling counterterrorism infrastructure, or with the interests of Congress. These defining challenges must become the focus of far more personnel—at the White House, the State Department, and other agencies—and they must galvanize partnerships outside government. Meanwhile, if we are to continue to deploy the rhetoric about democracy that we have used since 9/11 toward our adversaries, we and our allies must live up to it ourselves.
We need to change our attitude about government itself. The multidecade assault on the role of government in American life led to a Trump administration that disregards expertise and disdains career civil servants. The COVID-19 crisis has revealed that government is essential; that public service is valuable; that facts and science should guide decisions; and that competence matters more than Washington’s endless gamesmanship.
Donald Trump is the embodiment of trends that have been advancing for a long time—the crudeness of our culture, the meanness of our politics, the disintegration of our media. All those trends have accelerated since September 11, 2001. As we go through an indeterminate period of time separated from the normal rhythm of our lives, Americans are going to be forced to consider what’s most important to them. The answer, so far, appears to be family, community, and a sense of decency—whether it’s in the heroism of health-care workers or in the video that your friend shared of some random act of kindness. Our politics and government should reflect that decency in the priorities we set at home and the actions we take abroad.
by Ben Rhodes, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Ray Stubblebine/Reuters
