Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
—Bertrand Russell
On a crisp January day in 2016, in the small hamlet of Pittsfield, New Hampshire, several hundred voters were gathered for what is a quadrennial rite of passage in the Granite State: listening to a politician make his or her pitch to be the next president of the United States. The speaker this day was Chris Christie, who was then the Republican governor of New Jersey and one of more than a dozen presidential candidates campaigning across the state.
Christie discussed everything from illicit drugs and immigration to the federal budget and the U.S. war against the self-proclaimed Islamic State. “He was pretty good,” one woman unenthusiastically shrugged after he finished. But as she struggled to say anything of substance, it seemed clear that Christie had not made much of an impression. When asked, though, if any specific policy issue took on particular importance, her face lit up: “ISIS. I’m really worried about ISIS.” The thought of her kids and grandkids growing up in a world where groups like the Islamic State would be threatening their future seemed to cause her genuine and palpable concern.1
The woman’s anxieties were sincere, but her fear could not have been more misplaced. The Islamic State had yet to launch even one direct terrorist attack within the United States, and if the group had drawn up a list of potential targets, the chances that Pittsfield, New Hampshire—an hour’s drive north of Manchester—would be high on that list were decidedly slim. At a time of ever-widening income inequality, stagnant wage growth, gun violence, and a raging opioid epidemic that in the previous year had claimed 422 lives in New Hampshire alone, this woman considered a shadowy terrorist group that had not killed a single American on U.S. soil one of the biggest challenges facing the country.2 She was far from alone. Public opinion polling consistently shows that Americans have long exaggerated the danger that terrorism represents to the United States. Since 9/11 the average number of Americans killed yearly in a terrorist attack is twenty-seven—and 90 percent of them were in Afghanistan or Iraq. Yet, in 2018, 81 percent of Americans ranked “cyberterrorism” as the most critical threat facing the United States, followed by international terrorism at 75 percent.3 Eighty-three percent of voters expect that a major terrorist incident with large numbers of casualties is likely to occur in the near future. Remarkably, in November 2017, more than half (52 percent) of Americans thought the United States was less safe then than it was before 9/11—as if the trillions spent on homeland security and fighting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan had done nothing to make America less vulnerable to international terrorism. Seventeen years after September 11, the outsized fears of another 9/11-style terrorist attack provided compelling—and depressing—evidence that terrorist groups had succeeded, beyond their wildest imaginations, in transforming American society.4
It is not just armed jihadists that scare Americans. A 2012 poll showed that six out of seven Americans agree that “the United States faces greater threats to its security today than it did during the Cold War”—a time when the United States found itself in the crosshairs of approximately ten thousand nuclear weapons, each with a destructive power up to fifty times that of the nuclear bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.5
How Americans, such as this woman from a small town in the “Live Free or Die” state, became convinced that the United States faces such acute and harmful foreign threats is, at its core, the story of this book. The American public is being fed, by politicians and pundits alike, a steady diet of threat inflation that has made them deeply fearful of the world outside their borders. They have become convinced that overseas menaces are perpetually becoming more likely, lethal, and complex. The world is forever on fire; America is always getting weaker; and its citizens are facing a constant drumbeat of tremendous and unceasing risks. The pervasiveness of threat inflation is such conventional wisdom that alternative—or even less threatening—descriptions of the world are largely nonexistent in foreign policy debates. As a result, most Americans are simply unaware of the extraordinary and unprecedented political, economic, and social progress that has taken place in virtually every corner of the globe over the past three decades.
On that January day in New Hampshire, while alluding to the national debate on the balance between security and privacy, Christie declared ominously, “You can’t protect civil liberties from a coffin.” Pittsfield voters who had watched the most recently aired Republican presidential debate would have heard former Florida governor Jeb Bush tell them that the Islamic State had formed “a caliphate the size of Indiana with . . . 30,000 to 40,000 battle-tested soldiers that are organized to destroy our way of life.”6 They would have heard candidate and former pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson claim that dirty bombs and cyberattacks are, “in fact, an existential threat to us.”7 Those following the Republican primaries would have heard Donald Trump, the eventual Republican nominee and president of the United States, tell them that the only way to keep America safe was to ban all Muslims from entering the country, torture suspected terrorists, and “take out” (murder) their families.8
As regular consumers of news, Republican voters might have heard South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham tell Americans, “The world is literally about to blow up,” in January 2014 (spoiler: it did not).9 They might have caught Sen. John McCain, who, having been born in 1936, had lived through conflicts that killed an estimated sixty million people and had fought in one of those wars, say in 2015, “We are probably in the most serious period of turmoil in our lifetime.”10 Perhaps in the spring of 2017, they caught secretary for homeland security John Kelly claiming, “Make no mistake—we are a nation under attack” and “We are under attack every single day. The threats are relentless.”11 Or, in the summer of 2018, they might have heard his boss, President Trump, warn that “people coming in from the Middle East” would come across the border by using “children to get through the lines.”12
This incessant, default threat-mongering is neither a partisan issue nor a habit reserved for elected officials. Those Americans tuning in to CNN in October 2014 might have the chyron asking the hypothetical question “Ebola: ‘The ISIS of Biological Agents?’ ”13 Maybe they saw local reporting on defense secretary Chuck Hagel saying, “Cyber threats . . . are just as real and deadly and lethal as anything we’ve ever dealt with,” or New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand calling Iran an “existential threat” to America, or perhaps Arkansas senator Tom Cotton warning that the Islamic State, in coordination with Mexican drug cartels, could infiltrate the border and “attack us right here.”14
Even if viewers missed all that, they would have found it far more difficult to avoid the nonstop news coverage of the latest terrorist attack in Paris, Barcelona, or London.
Even more important than what Americans hear from the nation’s leaders is what they do not hear. They do not hear that terrorism harms fewer Americans each year than falling televisions and furniture, bathtub drownings, and lightning strikes do. Annually, more Americans lose their lives from these three rare killers—roughly thirty-three, eighty-five, and forty fatalities, respectively—than at the hands of wild-eyed Islamic jihadists.15 These numbers pale next to the number of Americans killed each year prematurely by preventable, noncommunicable diseases (more than 2.5 million), suicide (44,100), and gun homicides (14,400).
In short, Americans do not hear that America is unusually safe and secure from foreign threats. Part of this is a function of geography, but it is also true that the United States faces no serious great-power rival and no near-term political or economic competitor.
So it should not be surprising that 86 percent of Americans view Russia’s military power as either an important or a critical threat to America, even though Russia is hemmed in by NATO, has a moribund economy, and has no enduring military partnerships in South Asia, the Middle East (outside of Syria), or the Western Hemisphere. Nor should it be surprising that 87 percent of Americans are concerned about China’s military power even though China faces its own pressing social, economic, and environmental challenges—and its primary near-term interest is maintaining Communist Party rule, not directly challenging the United States. Nor should it be surprising that 75 percent of Americans called the development of nuclear weapons by Iran a “critical threat”—even though Iran has surrendered its nuclear fuel and has allowed invasive inspections of its nuclear facilities through at least 2030.16
Finally, we should not be surprised that half the American people believe that U.S. armed forces are not the number-one military in the world, even though the United States spends more on national defense than the next nine nations combined, is allied or has mutual defense treaties with five of those countries, enjoys long-term security partnerships in every region of the world (outside Antarctica), and is, quite simply, the world’s most dominant nation and more secure than any other great power in history.17
In addition, the Republican primary voters in Pittsfield—or those who voted for a president who regularly told them “the world is a mess”—almost certainly did not hear that the world today is cumulatively more peaceful, freer, healthier, better educated, and wealthier than at any point in human history.18 Like most Americans, they would not have heard that in the year 2015 the proportion of people living in extreme poverty (on less than two dollars a day) dropped to below 10 percent of the global population, the lowest level ever and down from close to 50 percent in 1981.19 They are likely unaware that AIDS deaths have declined for more than fifteen years in a row, global life expectancy has increased by seven years since 1990 alone, and child mortality rates (for children under five years old) has been halved over that same period. Unbeknownst to them and the overwhelming majority of Americans, improvements in polio vaccines and delivery methods have practically eradicated the disease (just eleven active global cases by July 2018), saving more than 650,000 lives since 1988.20 What is most remarkable about all these positive developments is that they are uncontestable—the data are simply that strong.
This fundamental disconnect between what Americans have been encouraged to believe about the world and the reality of global affairs is the most critical foreign policy issue facing the United States today. The American people are being sold a dangerous bill of goods that is distorting our foreign policy choices and leading politicians and policy makers to focus more on the threats that Americans perceive, rather than the ones that actually exist. This strategic misdiagnosis has led to consistently mistaken foreign (and domestic) policy choices that are diverting resources and attention away from the actual dangers that Americans face in their homes, neighborhoods, and workplaces. Every dollar spent bombing and then rebuilding Middle Eastern countries, modernizing a duplicative nuclear weapons arsenal, or building the next generation of combat aircraft that are intended to fight yesterday’s enemies means less money for America’s greatest domestic challenges. This includes America’s underperforming schools; a health care system that performs far worse than those of other affluent countries; crumbling roads, bridges, and water systems in places like Flint, Michigan; inadequate preparation for the inevitable and irreversible effects of climate change; and a tattered social safety net that is a far cry from those enjoyed by other developed countries.
Pointing out that foreign threats pose a relatively insignificant risk to Americans compared to vastly greater domestic dangers and systemic harms is not to suggest that the United States should pull up the drawbridge and abandon its global role. If anything, at a time of relative peace and stability in the world, smart American leadership and active involvement in global affairs are more important than ever. In the seventy-plus years since the end of World War II, the United States, along with its allies and partners, has helped construct an international system that limits large-scale interstate conflict; encourages democratization, adherence to the rule of law, and respect for human rights; and advances human development. The challenge for the next generation of U.S. policy makers is to solidify the gains that have been made and to ensure that this extraordinary progress is not reversed.
For that to happen, Americans must change the ways they think and talk about foreign policy and national security—and the first step is to acknowledge that foreign-threat inflation and the corresponding policy choices that it encourages are a problem. Americans need to think about the world in a whole new way, one that is more accurate and more uplifting than the dystopian view promoted by politicians and pundits. In the following six chapters, we will spell out how this paradigm shift might occur.
First, there must be greater recognition that potential rivals and complex issues—frequently portrayed as dangers to Americans—are, in reality, relatively minor threats to Americans. Great-power wars have disappeared, interstate wars have become vanishingly rare, and the world is a safer and freer place than it has ever been in human history.
Second, there needs to be better appreciation of the extraordinary global progress that has been made over the past several decades—and why it benefits the American people. The world today is healthier than would have been scarcely imaginable decades ago and is far richer and better educated than ever before. It is also more united and interconnected through travel, communications, economic links, and diplomatic relations. These trends make this current era of relative peace, safety, and prosperity not a momentary blip but, more likely than not, the future reality of global affairs.
Third, it is imperative that Americans rethink what “national security” means and focus on the systemic dangers that diminish economic opportunities and the American people’s basic quality of life. From noncommunicable diseases to gun violence to crippling political dysfunction, the things that actually injure and kill us receive rare moments of national attention, while foreign terrorists and other outside threats perpetually occupy our minds. Political attention, policy changes, and expanded government resources can significantly—and cost-effectively—reduce these risks, but that will happen only if Americans recognize the need to address them.
Fourth, the loose collection of politicians, government officials, pundits, private security firms, think tankers, academics, cable news hosts, and news editors that we call the Threat-Industrial Complex demands far greater scrutiny. These are the individuals—and institutions—who shape public perceptions about international relations and promulgate a false narrative of danger and insecurity.
Fifth, our modern era of threat inflation must be placed in a larger political and historical context: namely, as an enduring feature of American politics and foreign policy debates since World War II. From “missile gaps” and the “domino theory” to the “evil empire” and “evildoers,” foreign threats have been consistently manipulated both in times of actual danger and in times of genuine peace and security.
Sixth, to dramatize our argument, we offer a case study and cautionary tale of how threat inflation occurs and its larger political consequences: namely, the response to the tragedy of September 11. Public statements and policy decisions made by President George W. Bush and his administration set the tone, agenda, and political incentives of our contemporary fear-mongering but also wasted opportunities in a disproportionate response to a relatively minor and manageable threat.
Finally, we lay out recommendations for reversing this unbalanced perspective and approach to foreign policy that will answer the question of what a U.S. domestic and global policy—properly informed by a more accurate understanding of the world—should look like.
This book is not meant to be a comprehensive treatment of threat inflation or the final word about the nature and degree of foreign threats facing the United States and its citizens. As has been true for the past 240 years, the degree to which foreign dangers threaten America and its citizens has changed dramatically over time and will continue to evolve in ways that nobody can predict today. Nonetheless, it is quantitatively true that the current global environment is one of relatively few foreign threats, particularly in comparison to other great powers and to America’s historical experience. The fixation of American foreign policy and national security should not be what former president John Quincy Adams spoke of nearly two hundred years ago: namely, the impulse to look “abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Rather, it must be to remain focused on ensuring that today’s hopeful present is America’s brighter future.