I can understand why many Americans seem dispirited about world affairs. Things are indeed a mess.
What I cannot understand, however, is the electorate’s seeming indifference to the global mess: an indifference that manifests itself in our national failure to demand that our wannabe leaders address the new world disorder seriously rather than through sound bites and snarky slogans (“endless wars,” “adventurism,” “global policeman,” etc.). This is irresponsible politically and, if I may say, morally. The Lord’s injunction in Luke 12:48—“Everyone to whom much has been given, of him much will be required”—is primarily addressed to us as individuals. But it is not stretching the biblical text beyond the breaking point to suggest that it also applies to the wealthiest, most powerful country on the planet.
Whether we like it or not, our allies around the world look to us for leadership, as those who would harm us look at us for signs of weakness. Yes, America has arguably borne more than its rightful share of the financial and human burden of leadership in the post–Cold War world. But is the world going to be a safer place for everyone (including us) if the Great Scuttle from Afghanistan—in which we abandoned co-workers and left Afghan women and girls to the tender mercies of the maniacally misogynistic Taliban—becomes the twenty-first-century metaphor for America’s global role? Is the world going to be more secure if we abandon Ukraine to Putin’s Russia and Taiwan to Xi Jinping’s China, either by deliberate policy or by displays of fecklessness? Would an Iran with nuclear weapons make the world a better place?
It seems very unlikely.
In a rare moment of bipartisan seriousness, Congress created the Commission on the National Defense Strategy in 2022, with a membership of eight distinguished, experienced Americans from both parties. The Commission’s recently released report is, to put it gently, sobering—or should be for any thoughtful citizen. The crux of this lengthy document can be found in the first paragraph of its summary:
The threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945 and include the potential for near-term major war. The United States last fought a global conflict during World War II, which ended nearly 80 years ago. The nation was last prepared for such a fight during the Cold War, which ended 35 years ago. It is not prepared today.
The report goes on to make scathing criticisms of the Department of Defense (“The Commission finds that DoD’s business practices, byzantine research and development (R&D) and procurement systems, reliance on decades-old military hardware, and culture of risk avoidance . . . are not suited to today’s strategic environment”). But what concerns me more than the situation at the Pentagon—which could be addressed by a president and Congress willing to do so—is the culture of insouciance about world affairs in the public at large. For without a durable public commitment to using American hard and soft power in shaping a secure international environment, no president and no Congress is going to take the decisive action necessary to forestall another world war.
In the first book of his six-volume history, The Second World War, Winston Churchill recounted a conversation he had with President Franklin Roosevelt, shortly after Pearl Harbor and Germany’s declaration of war brought the United States openly into that conflagration. Roosevelt, always attuned to public relations, was seeking suggestions for what the war should be called and asked the British prime minister his view. Churchill immediately replied, “The Unnecessary War.” It wasn’t a snappy moniker around which Americans (or anyone else) could enthusiastically rally. It was true, however.
The refusal of Great Britain and France to take Hitler at his word, especially about his geopolitical intentions, helped bring on World War II in Europe. So did American public and political indifference to what was afoot on that continent from 1933 on. Are we in the same state of denial, insouciance, or indifference—call it what you will—today? Putin has made clear that he intends to reverse history’s verdict in the Cold War, ingesting Ukraine as a mere antipasto. Xi Jinping has made clear that he intends to respond to what he regards as China’s “Century of Humiliation” by making his totalitarian state the world hegemon. The Iranian mullahs take their vision of a Shiite apocalypse seriously, even if secularists in the State Department and other foreign ministries dismiss them as medieval fantasists.
Ignoring these realities is gross moral and political irresponsibility, because it makes a cataclysm of unprecedented lethality more likely.
George Weigel’s column “The Catholic Difference” is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington, D.C.’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.
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Photo by 李 季霖, provided by Flickr, via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
