Introduction
Epigraph: Bertrand Russell, An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish (Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius, 1943).
1. Based on author interview.
2. Holly Hedegaard, Margaret Warner, and Arialdi M. Miniño, “Drug Overdose Deaths in the United States, 1999–2015” (NCHS Data Brief No. 273, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, February 2017).
3. Jim Norman, “North Korea, Cyberterrorism Top Threats to U.S.,” Gallup, March 5, 2018.
4. Rasmussen Reports, “52% Say U.S. Less Safe Today than Before 9/11,” November 6, 2017.
5. Dartmouth College / YouGov, “Survey on Foreign Policy and Overseas Security Commitment,” May 2012.
6. OnTheIssues, “Jeb Bush on War & Peace,” accessed August 25, 2016, www.ontheissues.org/celeb/Jeb_Bush_War_+_Peace.htm.
7. “Republican Candidates Debate in North Charleston, South Carolina,” January 14, 2016, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=111395.
8. Jonathan Easley, “Trump Calls for Muslim Patrols, Torture in Wake of Brussels Attacks,” The Hill, March 22, 2016; Colin Campbell, “Trump: You Have to ‘Take Out’ Terrorists’ Families,” Business Insider, December 2, 2015.
9. Niels Lesniewski, “Graham Says World ‘Literally about to Blow Up,’ ” Roll Call, January 28, 2014.
10. Missy Ryan, “McCain Will Use Influential Senate Perch to Push for Expanded Middle East Response,” Washington Post, January 24, 2015.
11. John Kelly, “Home and Away: DHS and the Threats to America, Remarks Delivered by Secretary Kelly at George Washington University Center for Cyber and Homeland Security,” April 18, 2017, www.dhs.gov/news/2017/04/18/home-and-away-dhs-and-threats-america.
12. White House, “Remarks by President Trump and Vice President Pence in Meeting with Members of Congress,” June 20, 2018.
13. Christopher Hooton, “ ‘The ISIS of Biological Agents?’: CNN Is Asking the Stupid Ebola Questions,” Independent, October 7, 2014.
14. Department of Defense, “Remarks by Secretary Hagel at a Troop Event, San Diego, California,” August 12, 2014; Senate Armed Services Committee, “Hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee on the Nomination of Chuck Hagel to Be Secretary of Defense,” January 31, 2013; Greg Sargent, “Tom Cotton: Terrorists Collaborating with Mexican Drug Cartels to Infiltrate Arkansas,” Washington Post, October 7, 2014.
15. Adam Suchy, Product Instability or Tip-Over Injuries and Fatalities Associated with Televisions, Furniture, and Appliances: 2014 Report (Bethesda, MD: U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, August 2014); National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “2016 Lightning Fatalities,” May 2017, www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-fatalities16.
16. Jim Norman, “Four Nations Top U.S.’s Greatest Enemy List,” Gallup, February 22, 2016.
17. Samantha Tatro, “Americans Split on View of U.S. Military Power in the World, Gallup Poll Finds,” NBC San Diego, February 15, 2016.
18. “Transcript: ABC News Anchor David Muir Interviews President Trump,” ABC News, January 25, 2017.
19. By 2018, the number of people living in extreme poverty was estimated to have fallen further to 8.1 percent of the global population. See World Poverty Clock, accessed May 7, 2018, http://worldpoverty.io.
20. Global Polio Eradication Initiative, “This Week,” accessed July 4, 2018, http://polioeradication.org/polio-today/polio-now/this-week/; Angus Hervey, “11 Reasons Why 2015 Was a Great Year for Humanity,” Medium, December 14, 2015, http://medium.com/future-crunch/11-reasons-why-2015-was-a-great-year-for-humanity-70db584db748; Centers for Disease Control, “Today’s HIV/AIDS Epidemic,” fact sheet, August 2016; World Health Organization, “Maternal Mortality,” fact sheet, updated November 2015, www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs348/en/; World Health Organization, “Under-Five Mortality,” accessed March 14, 2016, www.who.int/gho/child_health/mortality/mortality_under_five_text/en/; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC’s Work to Eradicate Polio (Atlanta: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, September 2014).
A Safer and Freer World
Epigraph: White House, “Press Briefing by Press Secretary Sean Spicer,” February 7, 2017.
1. William Wan, “Xi Visits Iowa, Where the Diplomatic Equivalent of Love Is in the Air,” Washington Post, February 15, 2012.
2. U.S. Congress, House, Appropriations Committee, Defense Subcommittee, Department of Defense FY 2013 Budget Request, 112th Cong., 2nd sess. (February 16, 2012).
3. Monty G. Marshall, “Major Episodes of Political Violence, 1946–2015,” Center for Systemic Peace, accessed May 6, 2018, www.systemicpeace.org/warlist/warlist.htm.
4. The Impacts of Sequestration and/or a Full-Year Continuing Resolution on the Department of Defense: Hearing before the Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate, 113th Cong. (February 12, 2013).
5. Ali Watkins, “Here’s Twenty Years of Spy Chiefs Scaring the Hell Out of Congress,” Buzzfeed, February 9, 2016.
6. Impacts of Sequestration (February 12, 2013).
7. Missy Ryan, “McCain Will Use Influential Senate Perch to Push for Expanded Middle East Response,” Washington Post, January 24, 2015.
8. “OTH Video Interview: Lt Gen Steven Kwast,” Over the Horizon, November 28, 2017.
9. In 2014, a survey by the Pew Research Center and USA Today found that 65 percent of respondents said the world was more dangerous than it was several years ago, and just 7 percent said the world has gotten safer. Pew Research Center, As New Dangers Loom, More Think the U.S. Does “Too Little” to Solve World Problems (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, August 28, 2014).
10. “John McCain Reacts to Brussels Attacks,” MSNBC, March 22, 2016.
11. Niels Lesniewski, “Graham Says World ‘Literally about to Blow Up,’ ” Roll Call, January 28, 2014.
12. Therese Pettersson and Kristine Eck, “Organized Violence, 1989–2017,” Journal of Peace Research, June 18, 2018, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0022343318784101; Nils Petter Gleditsch, Peter Wallensteen, Mikael Eriksson, Margareta Sollenberg, and Håvard Strand, “Armed Conflict 1946–2001: A New Dataset,” Journal of Peace Research 39, no. 5 (2002): 615–637.
13. The 2014 Russian-supported armed separatist violence in Ukraine was an internationalized civil war, the conflict type that has grown slightly over the past six years or so, from six in 2011 to nineteen in 2015. See Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Yearbook 2011: Armaments, Disarmaments and International Security (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4.
14. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 7.
15. Max Hastings, Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (New York: Vintage Books, 2014).
16. Pettersson and Eck, “Organized Violence.”
17. Reena Flores, “Chris Christie: ‘We’re Already in World War III,’ ” CBS News, December 16, 2015.
18. “Syria Death Toll: UN Envoy Estimates 400,000 Killed,” Al Jazeera, April 23, 2016.
19. “How to Stop the Fighting, Sometimes,” Economist, November 11, 2013. In part, this reduction in the lethality of conflict is due to tremendous advances in battlefield medicine. See Tanisha M. Fazal, “Dead Wrong? Battle Deaths, Military Medicine, and Exaggerated Reports of War’s Demise,” International Security 39, no. 1 (2014): 95–125.
20. UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2017 (Geneva: UNHCR, June 2018).
21. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), The World Factbook 2016–17 (Washington, DC: CIA, 2016).
22. Meaning one thousand noncombatants or more over a one-year period.
23. Jay Ulfelder, “Trends over Time in State-Sponsored Mass Killing,” Dart-Throwing Chimp (blog), July 25, 2013, http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2013/07/25/trends-over-time-in-state-sponsored-mass-killing.
24. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision (New York: United Nations, 2017), custom data acquired via website.
25. Syrian Centre for Policy Research (SCPR), Alienation and Violence: Impact of Syria Crisis Report 2014 (Damascus: SCPR, March 10, 2015).
26. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2011: The Hidden Crisis: Armed Conflict and Education (Paris: UNESCO, March 1, 2011), 2; UNHCR, “Out-of-School Children in Refugee Settings, Education” (Issue Brief 2, UNHCR, July 2015), 3.
27. Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), Global Peace Index 2017 (Sydney: IEP, June 2017), 5, 54–59.
28. Clionadh Raleigh, “Civil War Risk in Democratic and Non-democratic Neighborhoods” (Post-Conflict Transitions Working Paper No. 17, World Bank, July 2007), 26.
29. Hearing before the Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate, to Receive Testimony on Worldwide Threats, 114th Cong. (February 9, 2016).
30. Marie Allansson, Erik Melander, and Lotta Themnér, “Organized Violence, 1989–2016,” Journal of Peace Research 54, no. 4 (2017): 574–587; Gleditsch et al., “Armed Conflict 1946–2001.” Data represented in Uppsala Conflict Data Program / Peace Research Institute Oslo’s “Armed Conflict Dataset,” version 17.2.
31. Amy F. Woolf, Nonstrategic Nuclear Weapons, CRS Report No. RL32572 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, March 23, 2016); Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, “U.S. Nuclear Weapons in Europe, 1954–2004,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 60, no. 6 (2004): 76–77; “Nuclear Notebook,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, accessed May 6, 2018, http://thebulletin.org/nuclear-notebook-multimedia; Arms Control Association, “The Lisbon Protocol at a Glance,” updated March 2014.
32. Pettersson and Eck, “Organized Violence.”
33. Michael J. Abramowitz, Freedom in the World 2018: Democracy in Crisis (Washington, DC: Freedom House, 2018).
34. Ibid. As of 2016, the figure is 61 percent of the sub-Saharan African population.
35. Ibid.
36. Jay Ulfelder, “Statistical Assessments of Coup Risk for 2015,” Dart-Throwing Chimp (blog), January 17, 2015, http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2015/01/17/statistical-assessments-of-coup-risk-for-2015.
37. Monty G. Marshall, “Polity IV Annual Time-Series, 1800–2016,” data set, Center for Systemic Peace.
38. Ibid.
39. Max Roser, “Human Rights vs. Type of Political Regime,” Our World in Data, accessed May 6, 2018, http://ourworldindata.org/grapher/human-rights-vs-the-political-regime.
40. “Daily Chart: Declining Trust in Government Is Denting Democracy,” Economist, January 25, 2017.
41. The Uppsala Conflict Data Program categorizes Middle East and Africa conflicts. North Africa was separated using UN designations for North African countries. Mark J. C. Crescenzi and Kelly M. Kadera, “Built to Last: Understanding the Link between Democracy and Conflict in the International System,” International Studies Quarterly 60, no. 3 (2016): 565–572; Michael Poznansky and Matt K. Scroggs, “Ballots and Blackmail: Coercive Diplomacy and the Democratic Peace,” International Studies Quarterly 60, no. 4 (2016): 731–741.
42. U.S. Department of State, Office of the Legal Adviser, “U.S. Collective Defense Arrangements,” accessed May 6, 2018, www.state.gov/s/l/treaty/collectivedefense; Allansson, Melander, and Themnér, “Organized Violence”; Gleditsch et al., “Armed Conflict 1946–2001.” Data represented in Uppsala Conflict Data Program / Peace Research Institute Oslo’s “Armed Conflict Dataset,” version 17.2.
43. Havard Hegre, “Democracy and Armed Conflict,” Journal of Peace Research 51, no. 2 (2014): 1–14; John R. O’Neal and Bruce M. Russett, “The Classical Liberals Were Right: Democracy, Interdependence, and Conflict, 1950–1985,” International Studies Quarterly 41, no. 2 (1997): 267–294; Erica Chenoweth, “Terrorism and Democracy,” Annual Review of Political Science 16 (May 2013): 355–378.
44. New America, “Part IV. What Is the Threat to the United States Today?,” in Terrorism in America after 9/11, accessed July 22, 2018, www.newamerica.org/in-depth/terrorism-in-america/what-threat-united-states-today.
45. Micah Zenko, “The State of Global Terrorism in 2015,” Politics, Power, and Preventive Action (blog), Council on Foreign Relations, June 2, 2016, www.cfr.org/blog/state-global-terrorism-2015.
46. New America, “Part IV. What Is the Threat to the United States Today?”
47. U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Counterterrorism, Patterns of Global Terrorism 2002 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, April 2003), xviii; U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Counterterrorism, Annex of Statistical Information: Country Reports on Terrorism 2017 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, September 2018), 4.
48. Institute for Conflict Management, South Asia Terrorism Portal, “Fatalities in Terrorist Violence in Pakistan 2003–2018,” accessed May 6, 2018, www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/pakistan/database/casualties.htm.
49. Robert D. Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (New York: Vintage, 2001); Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); Joel Kotkin, Tribes: How Race, Religion, and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy (New York: Random House, 1992).
50. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations; John J. Mearsheimer, “Why We Will Soon Miss the Cold War,” Atlantic Monthly, August 1990, 35–50.
51. Kaplan, Coming Anarchy; Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
52. Yahya Sadowski, The Myth of Global Chaos (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1998).
Healthier, Wealthier, Better Educated, and More Interconnected
Epigraph: Barack Obama, “Remarks by President Obama at YSEALI Town Hall,” September 7, 2016.
1. Novus and Gapminder, “The Ignorance Survey: United States,” 2013.
2. World Health Organization, “Global Health Observatory Data Repository: Polio (Pol3) Immunization Coverage Estimates by WHO Region,” last updated July 17, 2017.
3. The remaining 22 percent said “neither of those.” See Ipsos MORI (@IpsosMORI), “Only 13% of the public think the world is getting better (Belgians most gloomy = “must be the booze” says @benatipsosmori) #ipsosmorilive,” Twitter, December 6, 2017, 2:36 p.m.
4. Chelsea Follet, “Five Graphs That Will Change Your Mind about Poverty,” HumanProgress, March 14, 2017.
5. World Bank, “GDP Per Capita (Current US$),” accessed May 7, 2018, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD.
6. Ronald Inglehart, Roberto Foa, Christopher Peterson, and Christian Welzel, “Development, Freedom, and Rising Happiness: A Global Perspective (1981–2007),” Perspectives on Psychological Science 3, no. 4 (2008): 268.
7. World Bank and International Monetary Fund, Global Monitoring Report 2015/2016: Development Goals in an Era of Demographic Change (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2016).
8. Marcio Cruz, James Foster, Bryce Quillin, and Philip Schellekens, Ending Extreme Poverty and Sharing Prosperity: Progress and Policies (Washington, DC: World Bank, October 2015).
9. World Bank, “Transcript: World Bank Group Opening Press Conference by President Jim Yong Kim at the 2017 WBG/IMF Annual Meetings,” October 12, 2017.
10. World Bank, “Poverty & Equity: Iran (Poverty Headcount Ratio at $1.90 a Day (2011 PPP) (% of Population),” accessed July 4, 2018, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.DDAY.
11. World Bank, “Poverty & Equity: El Salvador (Poverty Headcount Ratio at $1.90 a Day (2011 PPP) (% of Population),” accessed July 4, 2018, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.DDAY; World Bank, “Ethiopia,” accessed July 4, 2018, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.DDAY.
12. World Bank, “Poverty & Equity Data Portal: Brazil,” accessed July 4, 2018, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.DDAY.
13. World Health Organization Regional Office for Africa, “Namibia: MDG Goal 1: Eradicate Extreme Poverty and Hunger—Other MDGs,” accessed May 10, 2018, http://www.aho.afro.who.int/profiles_information/index.php/Namibia:MDG_Goal_1:_Eradicate_extreme_poverty_and_hunger_-_Other_MDGs; United Nations Development Program, Poverty and Deprivation in Namibia 2015, accessed July 4, 2018, www.na.undp.org/content/dam/namibia/docs/povred/undp_na_povred_npcreportsum_2015.pdf.
14. World Bank, “Bangladesh,” accessed July 4, 2018, https://data.worldbank.org/country/bangladesh?view=chart.
15. Max Roser, “Hunger and Undernourishment,” Our World in Data, 2017, http://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment; World Bank, “Prevalence of Undernourishment (% of Population),” accessed July 4, 2018, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SN.ITK.DEFC.ZS.
16. Max Roser, “Famines,” Our World in Data, revised December 7, 2017, http://ourworldindata.org/famines.
17. David Cutler and Adriana Lleras-Muney, “Education and Health: Evaluating Theories and Evidence” (NBER Working Paper No. 12352, National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2006).
18. United Nations, Statistical Annex: Millennium Development Goals, Targets and Indicators, 2015, http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/Resources/Static/Products/Progress2015/StatAnnex.pdf.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. UNESCO, “Literacy Rates Continue to Rise from One Generation to the Next,” fact sheet 45, September 2017; World Bank, “Literacy Rate, Adult Total (% of People Ages 15 and Above),” accessed July 4, 2018, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS.
22. United Nations, Statistical Annex; Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser, “Global Rise of Education,” Our World in Data, 2016, http://ourworldindata.org/global-rise-of-education.
23. World Bank, “Labor Force, Female (% of Total Labor Force),” accessed July 4, 2018, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.TOTL.FE.ZS.
24. Gudrun Østby and Henrik Urdal, “Education and Conflict: What the Evidence Says” (policy brief, Centre for the Study of Civil War, Peace Research Institute Oslo, February 2011).
25. United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME), as published in UNICEF, Committing to Child Survival: A Promise Renewed—Progress Report (New York: UNICEF, 2015).
26. Lucia Breierova and Esther Duflo, “The Impact of Education on Fertility and Child Mortality: Do Fathers Really Matter Less than Mothers?” (NBER Working Paper No. 10513, National Bureau of Economic Research, May 2004); Karen Grépin and Prashant Bharadwaj, “Maternal Education and Child Mortality in Zimbabwe,” Journal of Health Economics 44 (2015): 97–117.
27. United Nations, Millennium Development Goals Report, 2015 (New York: United Nations, 2015), 6; United Nations, Trends in Maternal Mortality, 1990 to 2015 (New York: United Nations, 2015).
28. Guttmacher Institute, “Unintended Pregnancy Rates Declined Globally from 1990 to 2014,” press release, March 5, 2018.
29. United Nations, Statistical Annex; World Health Organization, “HIV/AIDS Fact Sheet,” November 2017.
30. World Health Organization, “Tuberculosis Fact Sheet,” January 2018; World Health Organization, “Measles: Key Facts,” January 22, 2018; Global Polio Eradication Initiative, “This Week,” accessed July 4, 2018, http://polioeradication.org/polio-today/polio-now/this-week/.
31. Global Polio Eradication Initiative, Global Polio Eradication: Progress 2000 (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2001); Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “CDC’s Work to Eradicate Polio,” fact sheet, last updated September 2014.
32. Carter Center, “Guinea Worm Case Totals,” last updated May 3, 2018, www.cartercenter.org/health/guinea_worm/case-totals.html.
33. Ibid.
34. World Bank, “Improved Sanitation Facilities (% of Population with Access),” 2016; Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz Ospina, “World Population Growth,” Our World in Data, 2017, http://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth. In addition, an extraordinary 2.1 billion people enjoy better sanitation, in large part because the proportion of people living in urban slums in the developing world has fallen from 39 percent to 29 percent since 2000. See World Health Organization, “Poliomyelitis,” fact sheet N144, April 2016; Global Polio Eradication Initiative, “Global Polio Eradication: Progress 2000”; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “CDC’s Work to Eradicate Polio.”
35. World Health Organization, “Key Facts from JMP 2015 Report,” 2015.
36. World Health Organization, “General Assembly Proclaims the Decade of Action on Nutrition,” April 1, 2016.
37. World Health Organization, “Life Expectancy Increased by 5 Years since 2000, but Health Inequalities Persist,” news release, May 19, 2016. An overall decrease in conflict in most of the developing world also helps explain this increase; in 2015, a group of Iranian researchers determined that peace had a statistically significant effect on life expectancy, even holding all other factors constant. See Vahid Yazdi Feyzabadi, Aliakbar Haghdoost, Mohammad Hossein Mehrolhassani, and Zahra Aminian, “The Association between Peace and Life Expectancy: An Empirical Study of the World Countries,” Iranian Journal of Public Health 44, no. 3 (2015): 341–351.
38. Laura Freschi, “The Millennium Development What?,” Aid Watch (blog), NYU Development Research Initiative, September 21, 2010.
39. UNCTAD, Investment Trends Monitor 28 (January 2018); Institute of International Finance, Capital Flows to Emerging Markets (Washington, DC: Institute of International Finance, May 8, 2018).
40. Rasmane Ouedraogo and Elodie Marlet, “Foreign Direct Investment and Women Empowerment: New Evidence on Developing Countries” (Working Paper No. 18/25, International Monetary Fund, January 25, 2018).
41. Zornitsa Kutlina-Dimitrova and Csilla Lakatos, “The Global Costs of Protectionism” (Policy Research Working Paper No. 8277, World Bank, December 2017).
42. International Monetary Fund, Group of Twenty, Global Prospects and Policy Challenges (Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund, September 2016).
43. Solomon William Polachek, “Conflict and Trade,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 24, no. 1 (1980): 55; Kristian Skrede, “Transnational Dimensions of Civil War,” Journal of Peace Research 44, no. 3 (2007): 303–304.
44. Solomon W. Polachek, Carlos Seiglie, and Jun Xiang, “Globalization and International Conflict: Can Foreign Direct Investment Increase Cooperation among Nations?,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Peace and Conflict, ed. Michelle R. Garfinkel and Stergios Skaperdas, 733–762 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
45. Statista, “Smartphones Industry: Statistics & Facts,” accessed May 7, 2018, www.statista.com/topics/840/smartphones; IDC, “Apple Tops Samsung in the Fourth Quarter to Close Out a Roller Coaster Year for the Smartphone Market, According to IDC,” press release, February 1, 2017.
46. Ericsson, Ericsson Mobility Report: Interim Update (Stockholm: Ericsson, February 2018); Ericsson, “Mobile Subscriptions Worldwide Outlook,” Ericsson Mobility Report, November 2017.
47. Peter Evans, “Afghanistan—Telecoms, Mobile and Broadband—Statistics and Analyses,” Budde.com, November 16, 2016, www.budde.com.au/Research/Afghanistan-Telecoms-Mobile-and-Broadband-Statistics-and-Analyses.
48. IHS Markit, “Apple iPhone X (A1865) Preliminary Cost Summary,” November 2017.
49. Dionne Searcey and Jaime Yaya Barry, “Inspired by the U.S., West Africans Wield Smartphones to Fight Police Abuse,” New York Times, September 17, 2016, A2.
50. Julian Smith, “Third World IOU,” IQ, October 6, 2015.
51. Tavneet Suri and William Jack, “The Long-Run Poverty and Gender Impacts of Mobile Money,” Science 354, no. 6317 (2016): 1288.
52. Ibid., 1290.
53. Vishwa Mohan, “E-NAM: Changing the Way Farmers Sell Their Produce,” Times of India, September 24, 2017.
54. Priya Jaisinghani and Mindy Hernandez, “Mobile Persuasion: Can Mobile Phones and Cutting-Edge Behavioral Science Improve Lives?,” Impact Blog, United States Agency for International Development, April 5, 2014.
55. Steven Radelet, The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016), 178.
56. Minahil Asim and Thomas Dee, “Mobile Phones, Civil Engagement, and School Performance in Pakistan” (NBER Working Paper No. 22764, National Bureau of Economic Research, October 2016).
57. Zeynep Taydas and Dursun Peksen, “Can States Buy Peace? Social Welfare Spending and Civil Conflicts,” Journal of Peace Research 49, no. 2 (2012): 277–278; Alan Smith and Tony Vaux, Education, Conflict, and International Development (London: UK Department for International Development, 2003), 17–18.
58. Chia-yi Lee, “Oil and Terrorism: Uncovering the Mechanisms,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 65, no. 5 (2016): 903–928.
59. World Health Organization, “World Hunger Again on the Rise, Driven by Conflict and Climate Change, New UN Report Says,” September 15, 2017, www.who.int/news-room/detail/15-09-2017-world-hunger-again-on-the-rise-driven-by-conflict-and-climate-change-new-un-report-says; UNESCO, Global Education Monitoring Report, 2017/18: Accountability in Education: Meeting Our Commitments (Paris: UNESCO, 2018), 124; UNAIDS, “Fact Sheet—Latest Statistics on the Status of the AIDS Epidemic,” accessed May 7, 2018, www.unaids.org/en/resources/fact-sheet; UNICEF and World Health Organization, Progress on Sanitation and Drinking Water: 2017 Update and MDG Assessment (Geneva: UNICEF, 2017), 3. In fact, the biggest growing threats to global health are not hunger, pandemics, and parasites that dominate news coverage but, rather, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and other noncommunicable diseases.
60. For a roadmap that the international community could use to save tens of millions of lives over the next dozen years, see Karin Stenberg, Odd Hanssen, Tessa Tan-Torres Edejer, et al., “Financing Transformative Health Systems towards Achievement of the Health Sustainable Development Goals: A Model for Projected Resource Needs in 67 Low-Income and Middle-Income Countries,” Lancet 5, no. 9 (2017): e875–e887.
That Which Harms Us
1. Sparks, Nevada, Police Department, Sparks Police Department Supplemental or Continuation Report, October 21, 2013.
2. Mike Spies, “The Undoing of Eddie Ray Routh,” The Trace, November 23, 2015.
3. Richard H. Ullman, “Redefining Security,” International Security 8, no. 1 (1983): 129–153.
4. Forrestal made this assertion when he was secretary of the Navy. See Forrestal, testimony before the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, October 22, 1945, in Hearings: Department of Armed Forces, Department of Military Security, 79:1 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1945), 97.
5. George H. W. Bush, National Security Strategy of the United States (Washington, DC: White House, 1993), 2.
6. Barack Obama, National Security Strategy of the United States (Washington, DC: White House, 2010), 9.
7. Strikingly, there is a marked disparity between avoidable-death rates of urban and rural Americans: those in nonmetropolitan areas are more likely to die from each of the leading causes of preventable deaths than are their metropolitan compatriots. See Lena H. Sun, “Rural Americans Are More Likely to Die from the Top Five Causes of Death,” Washington Post, January 12, 2017; World Health Organization, Noncommunicable Diseases Progress Monitor 2017 (Geneva: World Health Organization, September 2017), 201.
8. Emelia J. Benjamin, Salim S. Virani, Clifton W. Callaway, et al., “Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics—2018 Update,” Circulation 137, no. 12 (2018): e67–e492.
9. Brian Wansink and Jeffery Sobal, “Mindless Eating: The 200 Daily Food Decisions We Overlook,” Eating and Behavior 39, no. 1 (2007): 106–123.
10. Gitanjali M. Singh, Renata Micha, Shahab Khatibzadeh, Stephen Lim, Majid Ezzati, and Dariush Mozaffarian, “Estimated Global, Regional, and National Disease Burdens Related to Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Consumption in 2010,” Circulation 132, no. 8 (2015): 639–666.
11. Matthew P. Pase, Jayandra J. Himali, Alexa S. Beiser, Hugo J. Aparicio, Claudia L. Satizabal, Ramachandran S. Vasan, Sudha Seshadri, and Paul F. Jacques, “Sugar- and Artificially Sweetened Beverages and the Risks of Incident Stroke and Dementia,” Stroke 48, no. 5 (2017): 1139–1146.
12. Institute of Medicine and National Research Council, U.S. Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2013).
13. Ashish P. Thakrar, Alexandra D. Forrest, Mitchell G. Maltenfort, and Christopher B. Forrest, “Child Mortality in the US and 19 OECD Comparator Nations: A 50-Year Time-Trend Analysis,” Health Affairs 37, no. 1 (2018): 140–149.
14. Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Obesity Update 2017 (Paris: OECD, 2017).
15. Craig M. Hales, Margaret D. Carroll, Cheryl D. Fryar, and Cynthia L. Ogden, “Prevalence of Obesity among Adults and Youth: United States, 2015–2016” (NCHS Data Brief no. 288, National Center for Health Statistics, October 2017).
16. The NIH categorizes individuals with a body mass index (BMI, weight divided by the square of height in meters) of twenty-five or over as overweight and individuals with a BMI of thirty or higher as obese. See OECD, Obesity Update 2017.
17. The State of Obesity, “Adult Obesity in the United States,” accessed March 7, 2018, http://stateofobesity.org/adult-obesity.
18. Kenneth D. Kochanek, Sherry L. Murphy, Jiaquan Xu, and Elizabeth Arias, “Mortality in the United States, 2016” (NCHS Data Brief no. 293, National Center for Health Statistics, December 2017).
19. John Cawley, Chad Meyerhoefer, Adam Biener, Mette Hammer, and Neil Wintfeld, “Savings in Medical Expenditures Associated with Reductions in Body Mass Index among U.S. Adults with Obesity, by Diabetes Status,” PharmacoEconomics 33, no. 7 (2014): 707–722.
20. Ross A. Hammond and Ruth Levine, “The Economic Impact of Obesity in the United States,” Diabetes, Metabolic Syndrome and Obesity: Targets and Therapy 3 (August 2010): 285–295.
21. Avi Dor, Christine Ferguson, Casey Langwith, and Ellen Tan, A Heavy Burden: The Individual Costs of Being Overweight and Obese in the United States (Washington, DC: Department of Health Policy, School of Public Health and Health Services, George Washington University, September 21, 2010); Victoria Stilwell, “Obesity Is Hurting the U.S. Economy in Surprising Ways,” Bloomberg, March 5, 2015; and Eric A. Finkelstein, Marco daCosta Di Bonaventura, Somali M. Burgess, and Brent C. Hale, “The Costs of Obesity in the Workplace,” Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine 52, no. 10 (2010): 971–976.
22. Hammond and Levine, “Economic Impact of Obesity”; Stilwell, “Obesity Is Hurting the U.S. Economy”; F. S. Luppino, L. M. de Wit, P. F. Bouvy, T. Stijnen, P. Cuijpers, B. W. Pennix, and F. G. Zitman, “Overweight, Obesity and Depression: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Longitudinal Studies,” Archives of General Psychiatry 67, no. 3 (2010): 220–229.
23. The State of Obesity, “Fast Facts on the State of Obesity in America,” accessed March 7, 2018, http://stateofobesity.org/fastfacts.
24. General Richard B. Myers, “How Junk Food in Schools Affects the Military,” Politico, September 24, 2012.
25. George H. W. Bush, National Security Strategy of the United States (Washington, DC: White House, 1991), 7.
26. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, “Provision Drug Overdose Death Counts,” based on data available for analysis on September 5, 2018.
27. Josh Katz, “The First Count of Fentanyl Deaths in 2016: Up 540% in Three Years,” New York Times, September 2, 2017; Holly Hedegaard, Margaret Warner, and Arialdi M. Miniño, “Drug Overdose Deaths in the United States, 1999–2016” (NCHS Data Brief No. 294, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, December 2017).
28. Council of Economic Advisers, The Underestimated Costs of the Opioid Crisis (Washington, DC: White House, November 2017). The annual economic costs are certainly higher today, given the vast increase in users and overdoses.
29. David A. Nielsen, Amol Utrankar, Jennifer A. Reyes, Daniel D. Simons, and Thomas R. Kosten, “Epigenetics of Drug Abuse: Predisposition or Response,” Pharmacogenomics 13, no. 10 (2012): 1149–1160; National Institute on Drug Abuse, Drugs, Brains, and Behavior: The Science of Addiction, NIH Pub. No. 14-5605 (Bethesda, MD: National Institutes of Health, revised July 2014).
30. Hearing of the Joint Economic Committee on Economic Aspects of the Opioid Crisis, 115th Cong. (June 8, 2017).
31. Evan Osnos, “Making a Killing,” New Yorker, June 27, 2016, 36.
32. Nese F. DeBruyne, American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, April 26, 2017); Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Deaths Resulting from Firearm- and Motor-Vehicle-Related Injuries—United States, 1968–1991,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 43, no. 3 (1994): 37–42; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Web-Based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS), “Injury Mortality Reports, 1981–1998,” accessed May 6, 2018, http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate9.html; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention WISQARS, “Fatal Injury Reports, National and Regional, 1999–2013,” accessed May 6, 2018, http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate10_us.html.
33. What factors have caused the collapse in major violent crimes is highly contested by criminologists and sociologists. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “FastStats—All Injuries,” October 7, 2016, www.cdc.gov/nchs/faststats/injury.htm; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention WISQARS, “Firearm Deaths and Rates per 100,000 and Overall Firearm Gunshot Nonfatal Injuries and Rates per 100,000,” accessed May 6, 2018, www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/leading_causes_death.html.
34. Ashish P. Thakrar, Alexandra D. Forrest, Mitchell G. Maltenfort, and Christopher B. Forrest, “Child Mortality in the US and 19 OECD Comparator Nations: A 50-Year Time-Trend Analysis,” Health Affairs 37, no. 1 (2018): 140–149.
35. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention WISQARS, “Suicide Injury Deaths and Rates per 100,000,” accessed May 6, 2018, www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/leading_causes_death.html.
36. David Owens, Judith Horrocks, and Allan House, “Fatal and Non-fatal Repetition of Self-Harm. Systematic Review,” British Journal of Psychiatry 181 (2002): 193–999; Sabrina Tavernise, “To Reduce Suicide Rates, New Focus Turns to Guns,” New York Times, February 13, 2013.
37. Andrew Anglemyer, “The Accessibility of Firearms and Risk for Suicide and Homicide Victimization among Household Members: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis,” Annals of Internal Medicine 160, no. 2 (2014): 101–110.
38. As the NRA head Wayne LaPierre warned in 2016, “these bad guys we are facing . . . they’re trying to kill us.” Rebecca Savransky, “NRA’s LaPierre Blasts Dems’ Gun Control Push,” The Hill, June 19, 2016.
39. Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reporting Program (FBI UCR), “2016 Crime in the United States: Expanded Homicide Data Table 4: Murder Victims by Weapon, 2012–2016”; FBI UCR, “2015 Crime in the United States: Expanded Homicide Data Table 10: Murder Circumstances by Relationship, 2015.”
40. FBI UCR, “2016 Crime in the United States: Expanded Homicide Data Table 6: Justifiable Homicide by Weapon, Private Citizen, 2012–2016.”
41. EveryTown, “#NotAnAccident Index,” accessed July 4, 2018, https://everytownresearch.org/notanaccident/.
42. Christopher Ingraham, “American Toddlers Are Still Shooting People on a Weekly Basis This Year,” Washington Post, September 29, 2017
43. Michael Martinez and Tony Marco, “Mom Fatally Shot When Son, 2, Grabs Gun from Her Purse in Walmart,” CNN, December 31, 2014; David Chang and Alison Burdo, “Mom at Home When 11-Year-Old Daughter Shot, Killed: Police,” NBC, April 6, 2014; Jack Healy, Julie Bosman, Alan Blinder, and Julie Turkewitz, “One Week in April, Four Toddlers Shot and Killed Themselves,” New York Times, May 5, 2016.
44. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Unintentional Drowning: Get the Facts,” fact sheet, April 28, 2016.
45. Matthew Hnatov, Non-fire Carbon Monoxide Deaths Associated with the Use of Consumer Products 2012 Annual Estimates (Bethesda, MD: Consumer Product Safety Commission, January 7, 2016).
46. Adam Suchy, Product Instability or Tip-Over Injuries and Fatalities Associated with Televisions, Furniture, and Appliances: 2016 Report (Bethesda, MD: U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, August 2016).
47. Adam Suchy, Product Instability or Tip-Over Injuries and Fatalities Associated with Televisions, Furniture, and Appliances: 2014 Report (Bethesda, MD: Consumer Product Safety Commission, September 25, 2014).
48. This includes jihadist, far-right-wing, and black nationalist terrorist attacks. See New America, “What Is the Threat to the United States Today?,” accessed March 7, 2018, www.newamerica.org/in-depth/terrorism-in-america/what-threat-united-states-today.
49. John Kelly, remarks at “Home and Away: DHS and the Threats to America,” George Washington University Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, April 18, 2017.
50. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), “Terrorists are engaged in a war against civilization-it is up to all who value life to confront & defeat this evil,” http://45.wh.gov/ard1ny,” Twitter, May 26, 2017, 4:26 p.m.
51. Michael Cohen, “It’s Coming from Inside the House,” in A Dangerous World? Threat Perception and U.S. National Security, ed. Christopher Preble and John Mueller (Washington, DC: CATO Institute, 2014), 155–169; Richard Haass, Foreign Policy Begins at Home: The Case for Putting America’s House in Order (New York: Basic Books, 2013).
52. Christopher Ingraham, “This Is How Toxic Flint’s Water Really Is,” Washington Post, January 15, 2016.
53. Dina Gusovsky, “America’s Water Crisis Goes Beyond Flint, Michigan,” CNBC, March 24, 2016.
54. White House, An Economic Analysis of Transportation Infrastructure Investment (Washington, DC: White House, July 2014).
55. Jaeyoung Lee, BooHyun Nam, and Mohamed Abdel-Aty, “Effects of Pavement Surface Conditions on Traffic Crash Severity,” Journal of Transportation Engineering 141, no. 10 (2015). According to Federal Administration Highway statistics, just 59 percent of America’s public roads are in “good” condition. See Ranjitha Shivaram and Adie Tomer, “Do Our Infrastructure Systems Put People at Risk?,” The Avenue (blog), Brookings Institution, May 10, 2018, www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2018/05/10/do-our-infrastructure-systems-put-people-at-risk/.
56. World Health Organization, Global Status Report on Road Safety 2015 (Geneva: World Health Organization, October 2015).
57. Northeast Corridor Infrastructure and Operations Advisory Commission, The Northeast Corridor and the American Economy (Washington, DC: Northeast Corridor Commission, April 2014); Emily Nonko, “NYC Subway’s Failures Threaten City’s Financial Future, Says MTA Chief,” Curbed, November 21, 2017.
58. Tyler Kelley, “Choke Point of a Nation,” New York Times, November 27, 2016.
59. “America’s Aging Dams Are in Need of Repair,” New York Times, February 23, 2017.
60. Edward Alden and Rebecca Strauss, How America Stacks Up: Economic Competitiveness and U.S. Policy (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2016), 9.
61. OECD, Country Note: Key Findings from PISA 2015 for the United States (Paris: OECD, 2016), 18.
62. “Forty-Eighth Is Not a Good Place,” editorial, New York Times, October 26, 2010; OECD, “United States Country Note,” in Education at a Glance 2013: OECD Indicators (Paris: OECD, 2013); and “OECD Education Rankings—2013 Update,” Signs of Our Times (blog), April 10, 2008, https://ourtimes.wordpress.com/2008/04/10/oecd-education-rankings/.
63. National Center for Education Statistics, “The Nation’s Report Card,” accessed March 11, 2018, www.nationsreportcard.gov.
64. OECD, “United States Country Note,” in Education at a Glance 2014: OECD Indicators (Paris: OECD, 2014).
65. Richard Perez-Pena, “U.S. Adults Fare Poorly in a Study of Skills,” New York Times, October 8, 2013.
66. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “Rising Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife among White Non-Hispanic Americans in the Twenty-First Century,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 112, no. 49 (2015): 15078–15083.
67. Richard Dobbs, Anu Madgavkar, James Manyika, Jonathan Woetzel, Jacques Bughin, Eric Labaye, and Pranav Kashyap, Poorer than Their Parents? A New Perspective on Income Inequality (McKinsey & Company, July 2016).
68. Cohen, “It’s Coming from Inside the House.”
69. Bruce Stokes, Global Publics More Upbeat about the Economy (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, June 5, 2017).
70. Rakesh Kochhar and Anthony Cilluffo, “How Wealth Inequality Has Changed in the U.S. since the Great Recession, by Race, Ethnicity and Income,” Fact Tank, Pew Research Center, November 1, 2017.
71. Rakesh Kochhar and Richard Fry, “Wealth Inequality Has Widened along Racial, Ethnic Lines since End of Great Recession,” Fact Tank, Pew Research Center, December 12, 2014.
72. Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez, “Where Is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 129, no. 4 (2014): 1578.
73. World Inequality Database, accessed May 6, 2018, http://wid.world.
74. Estelle Sommeiller, Mark Price, and Ellis Wazeter, Income Inequality in the U.S. by State, Metropolitan Area, and County (Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, June 16, 2016).
75. United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, “Statement on Visit to the USA, by Professor Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights,” December 15, 2017.
76. Andrew G. Berg and Jonathan D. Ostry, “Inequality and Unsustainable Growth: Two Sides of the Same Coin?” (IMF Staff Discussion Note, International Monetary Fund, April 8, 2011), 3.
77. Marina Azzimonti, “Does Partisan Conflict Deter FDI Inflows to the US?” (NBER Working Paper No. 22336, National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2016).
78. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Technical Note: Gross Domestic Product Fourth Quarter of 2013 (Advance Estimate) (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, January 30, 2014); Council of Economic Advisers, Economic Activity during the Government Shutdown and Debt Limit Brinksmanship (Washington, DC: White House, October 2013).
79. Shaun Donovan, “The Economic Case for a Budget Deal That Lifts Sequestration,” White House Blog, September 17, 2015.
80. William C. Thompson Jr., One Year Later: The Fiscal Impact of 9/11 on New York City (New York: Comptroller of the City of New York, 2002).
81. American Heart Association, “Heart Disease Death Rate Continues to Drop,” December 9, 2015, https://news.heart.org/heart-disease-death-rate-continues-to-drop/.
82. Gina Kolata, “A Medical Mystery of the Best Kind: Major Diseases Are in Decline,” New York Times, July 8, 2016.
83. Office of the Surgeon General, The Health Consequences of Smoking—50 Years of Progress (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, January 2014).
84. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, “Trends in Current Cigarette Smoking among High School Students and Adults, United States, 1965–2014,” March 2016, www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/tables/trends/cig_smoking/index.htm; and “Only 15 Percent of U.S. Adults Now Smoke, CDC Finds,” Associated Press, May 24, 2016.
85. Pearl Bader, David Boisclair, and Roberta Ferrence, “Effects of Tobacco Taxation and Pricing on Smoking Behavior in High Risk Populations: A Knowledge Synthesis,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 8, no. 11 (2011): 4118–4139.
86. Stephanie L. Mayne, Amy H. Auchincloss, Mark F. Stehr, David M. Kern, Ana Navas-Acien, Joel D. Kaufman, Yvonne L. Michael, and Ana V. Diez Roux, “Longitudinal Associations of Local Cigarette Prices and Smoking Bans with Smoking Behavior in the Multi-ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis,” Epidemiology 28, no. 6 (2017): 863–871; World Bank, Curbing the Epidemic: Governments and the Economics of Tobacco Control (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1999).
87. Theodore R. Holford, “Tobacco Control and the Reduction in Smoking-Related Premature Deaths in the United States, 1964–2012,” Journal of the American Medical Association 311, no. 2 (2014): 164–171.
88. Insurance Institute for Highway Safety Highway Loss Data Institute, “General Statistics,” accessed May 6, 2018, www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/topicoverview.
89. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, “2016 Fatal Motor Vehicle Crashes: Overview” (Traffic Safety Facts Research Note, U.S. Department of Transportation, October 2017).
90. Ibid., 7.
91. “Death on Foot: Pedestrian Fatalities Skyrocket in U.S.,” Detroit Free Press, May 8, 2018.
92. Liisa Ecola, Steven W. Popper, Richard Silberglitt, and Laura Fraade-Blanar, The Road to Zero: A Vision for Achieving Zero Roadway Deaths by 2050 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2018).
93. Martin Makary and Daniel Michael, “Medical Error—The Third Leading Cause of Death in the U.S.,” BMJ 353 (May 2016).
94. Aaron E. Carroll, “Death by Medical Error: Adding Context to Scary Headlines,” New York Times, August 15, 2016.
95. Liz Kowalczyk, “Fourteen Instances of Right Procedure, Wrong Patient in Mass.,” Boston Globe, November 20 2016.
96. James Lieber, How Medical Error Became America’s Third Largest Cause of Death and What Can Be Done about It (New York: OR Books, 2015).
97. Yusuke Tsugawa, Anupam B. Jena, Jose F. Figueroa, E. John Orav, Daniel M. Blumenthal, and Ashish K. Jha, “Comparison of Hospital Mortality and Readmission Rates for Medicare Patients Treated by Male vs. Female Physicians,” JAMA Internal Medicine 177, no. 2 (2016): 206–213; Vanessa McMains, “Johns Hopkins Study Suggests Medical Errors Are Third-Leading Cause of Death in U.S.,” Johns Hopkins University Hub, May 3, 2016, https://hub.jhu.edu/2016/05/03/medical-errors-third-leading-cause-of-death/.
98. Jonathan Chait, “Republicans Own Health Care Now. How Many People Will They Let Suffer?,” New York, January 22, 2017.
The Grand American Tradition of Threat Inflation
Epigraph: Daniel Henninger, “George Bush Talks about ‘The Next Attack on America,’ ” Wall Street Journal, October 27, 2006.
1. Eric F. Goldman, The Crucial Decade—America 1945–1955 (New York: Knopf, 1965), 59.
2. Harry S. Truman, “Truman Doctrine,” speech delivered before a joint session of Congress, March 12, 1947.
3. Ibid. Joseph Jones, who drafted the Truman Doctrine speech, later noted that geostrategic, humanitarian, and loyalty considerations were consciously omitted from Truman’s address. Joseph M. Jones, The Fifteen Weeks: February 21—June 5, 1947 (New York: Viking, 1951), 151–198.
4. Jones, Fifteen Weeks, 179; Public Law 80–75, May 22, 1947.
5. C. L. Sulzberger, A Long Row of Candles: Memoirs and Diaries, 1934–1954 (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 364–365.
6. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945–1967, vol. 23, United States-Vietnam Relations, 1961–1963, ed. Edward C. Keefer (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1994), Document 4; Wolf Blitzer, “Search for the ‘Smoking Gun,’ ” CNN, January 10, 2003.
7. Thomas Christensen, Useful Adversaries: Grand Strategy, Domestic Mobilization, and Sino-American Conflict, 1947–1958 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
8. Benjamin Friedman, “Alarms and Excursions: Explaining Threat Inflation in U.S. Foreign Policy,” in A Dangerous World? Threat Perception and US National Security, ed. Christopher A. Preble and John E. Mueller (Washington, DC: CATO Institute, 2014), 289.
9. For an excellent overview of pre-Cold War threat inflation, see John A. Thompson, “The Exaggeration of American Vulnerability: The Anatomy of a Tradition,” Diplomatic History, 16, no. 1 (1992): 23–43.
10. Sean Cleary, “From the Times to the Tomes: Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain!,” American Experience, Public Broadcasting Service, May 20, 2010.
11. Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall, America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 117.
12. Harry S. Truman, “Radio and Television Address to the American People on the Situation in Korea,” July 19, 1950.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.; U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, “NSC-68, 1950.”
15. Craig and Logevall, America’s Cold War, 136.
16. President’s Science Advisory Committee, Security Resources Panel, Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear Age (the “Gaither Report” of 1957) (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976).
17. Christopher A. Preble, “Who Ever Believed in the ‘Missile Gap’? John F. Kennedy and the Politics of National Security,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 33, no. 4 (2003): 801–826.
18. Richard, Reeves, “Missile Gaps and Other Broken Promises,” New York Times, February 10, 2009; “Soviet Capabilities for Strategic Attack through Mid-1964,” National Intelligence Estimate 11-8-59, February 9, 1960; and “Soviet Capabilities for Long Range Attack through Mid-1965,” National Intelligence Estimate 11-8-60, August 1, 1960.
19. Memorandum regarding “Operation Candor,” July 22, 1953; Stewart Alsop, “Eisenhower Pushes Operation Candor,” Washington Post, September 21, 1953.
20. John F. Kennedy, “Inaugural Address,” January 20, 1961.
21. Stephen Schwartz, Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons since 1940 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1993), 186.
22. Robert S. McNamara, “Department of State Bulletin 57,” October 9, 1967, 443–445; Amy F. Woolf, U.S. Strategic Nuclear Forces: Background, Developments, and Issues (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2018).
23. Lyndon B. Johnson, “The President’s News Conference,” July 28, 1965.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Lyndon B. Johnson, “Remarks of Welcome to Vietnamese Leaders upon Arriving at Honolulu International Airport,” February 6, 1966.
27. Ibid.
28. Lyndon B. Johnson, “Address on Vietnam before the National Legislative Conference, San Antonio, Texas,” September 29, 1967.
29. Ibid.
30. George W. Bush, “Graduation Speech at West Point,” June 1, 2002.
31. U.S. Department of Defense, “U.S. Military Casualties—Vietnam Conflict Casualty Summary,” Defense Casualty Analysis System, August 1, 2016.
32. John Tirman, “Why Do We Ignore the Civilians Killed in American Wars?,” Washington Post, January 6, 2012.
33. Vietnamese estimates range from 2.1 million to 4.8 million Vietnamese exposed to Agent Orange, with at least 3 million suffering serious health problems from exposure. See Michael F. Martin, Vietnamese Victims of Agent Orange and U.S.-Vietnam Relations (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, August 29, 2012).
34. As CIA analysts warned after investigating the impact of U.S. bombing in Southwest Cambodia, “[The Khmer Rouge] are using damage caused by B-52 strikes as the main theme of their propaganda. The cadre tell the people that the Government of Lon Nol has requested the airstrikes and is responsible for the damage and the ‘suffering of innocent villagers.’ . . . This approach has resulted in the successful recruitment of a number of young men. . . . Residents . . . say that the propaganda campaign has been effective with refugees and in areas . . . which have been subject to B-52 strikes.” CIA, “Efforts of Khmer Insurgents to Exploit for Propaganda Purposes Damage Done by Airstrikes in Kandal Province,” Intelligence Information Cable, May 2, 1973. See Ben Kiernan, “Recovering History and Justice in Cambodia,” Comparativ 14, no. 5/6 (2004): 78.
35. Richard Nixon, “Address to the Nation on the Situation in Southeast Asia,” April 30, 1970.
36. Craig and Logevall, America’s Cold War, 269.
37. Anne Hessing Cahn, Killing Détente: The Right Attacks the CIA (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1998); Micah Zenko, Red Team: How to Succeed by Thinking like the Enemy (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 76–83.
38. Craig and Logevall, America’s Cold War, 286.
39. Ronald Reagan, “Speech to America,” March 31, 1976.
40. Julian E. Zelizer, Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security—From World War II to the War on Terrorism (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 331.
41. Ibid., 267.
42. Jimmy Carter, “Address at Commencement Exercises at the University of Notre Dame,” May 22, 1977.
43. Craig and Logevall, America’s Cold War, 304; Jimmy Carter, “The State of the Union Address Delivered before a Joint Session of the Congress,” January 23, 1980.
44. Carter, “The State of the Union Address Delivered before a Joint Session of the Congress,” January 23, 1980.
45. Komer, testimony before the Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East, House Committee on Foreign Affairs, April 2, 1980.
46. In April 2018, it became impossible for American citizens to know how many troops are in the Middle East, because the Pentagon suddenly stopped releasing data for Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. See Tara Copp, “Pentagon Strips Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria Troop Numbers from Web,” Stars and Stripes, April 9, 2018. For the last available data on troop numbers, see U.S. Department of Defense, Defense Manpower Data Center, “Military and Civilian Personnel by Service/Agency by State/Country,” accessed June 1, 2018, www.dmdc.osd.mil/appj/dwp/data_reqs.jsp. For Pentagon contractor data for the Middle East, which is still being released quarterly, see U.S. Central Command, Quarterly Contractor Census Reports, accessed July 4, 2018, www.acq.osd.mil/log/ps/centcom_reports.html.
47. Sidney Blumenthal, Pledging Allegiance: The Last Campaign of the Cold War (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 13.
48. Ronald Reagan, “Address to the National Association of Evangelicals,” March 8, 1983.
49. Ronald Reagan, “Excerpts from an Interview with Walter Cronkite of CBS News,” March 3, 1981.
50. Amy Belasco, Defense Spending and the Budget Control Act Limits (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, May 19, 2015); Zelizer, Arsenal of Democracy, 307; Craig and Logevall, America’s Cold War, 313; Ronald Reagan, “Interview with Garry Clifford and Patricia Ryan of People Magazine,” December 6, 1983.
51. Schwartz, Atomic Audit, 494.
52. Reagan, “Excerpts from an Interview with Walter Cronkite”; Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at a Fundraising Dinner for Governor James R. Thompson, Jr., in Chicago, Illinois,” July 7, 1981.
53. Ronald Reagan, “Address before a Joint Session of the Congress on the Program for Economic Recovery,” February 18, 1981.
54. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session with Reporters on the Announcement of the United States Strategic Weapons Program,” October 2, 1981.
55. Hans M. Kristensen and Robert S. Norris, “Nuclear Notebook,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, accessed January 3, 2017, http://thebulletin.org/nuclear-notebook-multimedia.
56. Daryl G. Kimball, “Looking Back: The Nuclear Arms Control Legacy of Ronald Reagan,” Arms Control Association, July 1, 2004, www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_07-08/Reagan.
57. Hank Steuver, “Yes, ‘The Day After’ Really Was the Profound TV Moment ‘The Americans’ Makes It Out to Be,” Washington Post, May 11, 2016.
58. Michael Weisskopf, “President’s Popularity Near Peak, Poll Shows,” Washington Post, November 17, 1985.
59. Ronald Reagan, “Radio Address to the Nation on Congressional Inaction on Proposed Legislation,” August 11, 1984.
60. Craig and Logevall, America’s Cold War, 322.
61. White House, “National Security Decision: Directive Number 32,” May 20, 1982.
62. White House, “U.S. Relations with the USSR: National Security Decision Directive Number 75,” January 17, 1983.
63. “Text of Reagan’s Letter to Congress on Marines in Lebanon,” New York Times, September 30, 1982.
64. Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: PublicAffairs, 1991).
65. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at a White House Meeting for Supporters of United States for the Nicaraguan Democratic Resistance,” March 3, 1986.
66. Bob Woodward, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981–1987 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 284; Stephen Kinzer, “Nicaraguan Says No Mines Are Left in Nation’s Port,” New York Times, April 13, 1984.
67. Department of Defense Authorization Act of 1983, Public Law 97–252.
68. While two hostages (the Reverend Benjamin Weir and Father Lawrence Jenco) were released during the weapons transfers, two more citizens (Frank Reed and Joseph Cicippio) were taken hostage.
69. Ronald Reagan, “Radio Address to the Nation on the Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan,” December 28, 1985.
70. Stephen Kaufman, “Pressure to End Apartheid Began at Grass Roots in U.S.,” U.S. Department of State Bureau of International Information Programs, December 16, 2013, https://geneva.usmission.gov/2013/12/17/pressure-to-end-apartheid-began-at-grass-roots-in-u-s/.
71. Even as a presidential candidate, Reagan warned of the limited American support for new interventions: “For too long, we have lived with the ‘Vietnam Syndrome.’ ” Ronald Reagan, “Remarks before the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention, Chicago, Illinois: Restoring the Margin of Safety,” August 18, 1980.
72. Ronald Reagan, National Security Strategy of the United States (Washington, DC: White House, May 1982); and Ronald Reagan, National Security Strategy of the United States (Washington, DC: White House, January 1988).
73. Reagan, National Security Strategy (1988).
74. Blumenthal, Pledging Allegiance, 319.
75. Bill Peterson, “A Campaign of Distortions, Untruths,” Washington Post, September 25, 1988.
76. Presidential debate, September 25, 1988; Bush’s “Revolving Door” and “Tank Ride” campaign commercials, 1988, accessed July 4, 2018, www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1988/revolving-door#4121 and www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1988/tank-ride#4119.
77. George H. W. Bush, speeches and press conferences between October 15, 1990, and February 5, 1991.
78. Gallup, “Presidential Approval Ratings—Gallup Historical Statistics and Trends,” accessed May 6, 2018, www.gallup.com/poll/116677/presidential-approval-ratings-gallup-historical-statistics-trends.aspx.
79. Joel Brinkley, “U.S. Looking for New Course as Superpower Conflict Ends,” New York Times, February 2, 1992.
The Threat-Industrial Complex
Epigraph: James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War (New York: Mariner, 2014), 203.
1. Jennifer L. Merolla and Elizabeth J. Zechmeister, Democracy at Risk: How Terrorist Threats Affect the Public (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). In 2018, Merolla, along with Kerstin Fisk and Jennifer M. Ramos, demonstrated that priming Americans with a short fictional news report of terrorist plots made them approximately 30 percent more supportive of drone strikes, compared to those who were not primed with threatening information. See Kerstin Fisk, Jennifer L. Merolla, and Jennifer M. Ramos, “Emotions, Terrorist Threat, and Drones,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, first published May 3, 2018.
2. The Fiscal Year 2019 National Defense Authorization Budget Request from the Department of Defense: Hearing before the Armed Services Committee, 115th Cong. (April 12, 2018).
3. Stephen M. Walt, “Imbalance of Power,” Foreign Policy, May 22, 2009.
4. Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Farewell Address to the Nation,” January 17, 1961.
5. Scott Eidelman, Christian S. Crandall, and Jennifer Pattershall, “The Existence Bias,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 97, no. 5 (2009): 765–775.
6. Glenn Greenwald, “NSA Collecting Phone Records of Millions of Verizon Customers Daily,” Guardian, June 6, 2013.
7. Barton Gellman and Greg Miller, “ ‘Black Budget’ Summary Details U.S. Spy Network’s Successes, Failures and Objectives,” Washington Post, August 29, 2013.
8. Amnesty International, Two Years after Snowden: Protecting Human Rights in an Age of Mass Surveillance (London: Amnesty International, June 4, 2015); Scott Shane, “No Morsel Too Minuscule for All-Consuming N.S.A.,” New York Times, November 2, 2013.
9. Jason Leopold, “Revealed: NSA Pushed 9/11 as Key ‘Sound Bite’ to Justify Surveillance,” Al Jazeera America, October 30, 2013.
10. Keith Alexander, “National Conversation on the Defense of Our Nation and Protection of Civil Liberties and Privacy: A Technical Perspective,” presentation, accessed May 6, 2018, www.propublica.org/documents/item/802262-us-13-alexander-keynote.html#document, 14; Office of the Director of National Intelligence, “Remarks by General Keith Alexander, Director, National Security Agency at AFCEA’s Conference,” IC on the Record Database, June 28, 2013, www.intelligence.gov/ic-on-the-record-database/results/41-remarks-by-general-keith-alexander,-director,-national-security-agency-at-afcea’s-conference.
11. 159 Cong. Rec. H5024 (July 24, 2013) (statement of Rep. Mike J. Rogers).
12. Justin Elliott and Theodoric Meyer, “Claim on ‘Attacks Thwarted’ by NSA Spreads Despite Lack of Evidence,” ProPublica, October 23, 2013.
13. Bailey Cahall, Peter Bergen, David Sterman, and Emily Schneider, “Do NSA’s Bulk Surveillance Programs Stop Terrorists?,” New America, January 13, 2014; Mattathias Schwartz, “The Whole Haystack,” New Yorker, January 26, 2015; and Ellen Nakashima, “NSA Cites Case as Success of Phone Data-Collection Program,” Washington Post, August 8, 2013. In November 2015, federal judge Richard Leon noted in his opinion that the federal government “does not cite a single instance in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack” and noted “the utter lack of evidence that a terrorist attack has ever been prevented because searching the NSA database was faster than other investigative tactics.” Klayman v. Obama, 957 F. Supp. 2d 1, 60–61 (D.D.C. 2013).
14. Continued Oversight of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act: Hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, 113th Cong. (October 2, 2013).
15. National Security Agency/Central Security Service, “What We Do,” accessed February 8, 2018, www.nsa.gov/what-we-do.
16. Walter Pincus, “Eisenhower’s Farewell Speech Has Wise Words on Split Government and Militarism,” Washington Post, December 13, 2010.
17. Marybeth Peterson Ulrich, “ ‘Cashing In’ Stars: Does the Professional Ethic Apply in Retirement?,” Strategic Studies Quarterly 9, no. 3 (2015): 102–125.
18. Bryan Bender, “From the Pentagon to the Private Sector,” Boston Globe, December 26, 2010. Another estimate “found 70 percent of the 108 three-and-four star generals and admirals who retired between 2009 and 2011 took jobs with defense contractors or consultants.” Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Strategic Maneuvers: The Revolving Door from the Pentagon to the Private Sector (Washington, DC: Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, 2012).
19. Sam Skolnik, “Revolving Door between Trump Pentagon, Contractors Spins Faster,” Bloomberg Government, February 1, 2018.
20. Moshe Schwartz, John F. Sargent Jr., and Christopher T. Mann, Defense Acquisitions: How and Where DOD Spends Its Contracting Dollars (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, July 2, 2018).
21. Ibid.
22. Heidi M. Peters, Moshe Schwartz, and Lawrence Kapp, Department of Defense Contractor and Troop Levels in Iraq and Afghanistan: 2007–2017 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, April 28, 2017).
23. Center for Responsive Politics, “Defense: Lobbying, 2017,” OpenSecrets.org, accessed May 15, 2017, www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indus.php?id=d&year=2017.
24. Michael Beschloss, “Inside the Vaults—The Writing of Eisenhower’s ‘Military-Industrial Complex’ Speech,” YouTube, February 11, 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=APmlPtDrQEo.
25. David Barstow, “Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand,” New York Times, April 20, 2008.
26. “Bush: ‘I’m the Decider’ on Rumsfeld,’ ” CNN, April 18, 2006.
27. U.S. Department of Defense Inspector General, Review of Matters Related to the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs) Retired Military Analyst Outreach Activities (Alexandria, VA: Inspector General, Department of Defense, November 21, 2011), 16.
28. David Barstow, “Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand,” New York Times, April 20, 2008.
29. Ibid.
30. Determined upon reviewing more than one hundred LexisNexis transcripts of retired military analysts’ media appearances.
31. Center for Responsive Politics, “Huntington Ingalls Industries,” OpenSecrets.org, accessed May 15, 2017, www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000064813&cycle=2012.
32. Eric Lipton and Brooke Williams, “How Think Tanks Amplify Corporate America’s Influence,” New York Times, August 7, 2016.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Seth Cropsey, Bryan McGrath, and Timothy A. Walton, Sharpening the Spear: The Carrier, the Joint Force, and High-End Conflict (Washington, DC: Hudson Institute, October 8, 2015), 30, 3.
36. Lipton and Williams, “How Think Tanks Amplify.”
37. Ibid.
38. Bryan Clark and Jesse Sloman, Deploying beyond Their Means: America’s Navy and Marine Corps at a Tipping Point (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, November 2015), 20.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid., 27.
41. Lipton and Williams, “How Think Tanks Amplify.”
42. Thomas Donnelly and Roger Zakheim, “The Myth of the U.S. Military ‘Readiness Myth,’ ” National Review, August 15, 2016.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. “Why Aren’t We Safer? Failure to Reform,” Primetime Live, ABC, September 11, 2006.
46. “The Media on the Media,” New York Magazine, July 24, 2016.
47. Ibid.
48. The number of foreign bureaus for cable news stations is down from fifty-three in 2010 to forty-eight in 2015, including bureaus dropped by CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. Pew Research Center, State of the News Media 2016 (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, June 15, 2016).
49. In 2007, foreign stories accounted for 30 percent of CNN’s news, compared to 21 percent on Fox and 25 percent on MSNBC. In 2013, CNN still led with 23 percent foreign coverage compared to 15 percent on Fox and only 7 percent on MSNBC. Mark Jurkowitz, Paul Hitlin, Amy Mitchell, Laura Houston Santhanam, Steve Dams, Monica Anderson, and Nancy Vogt, The Changing TV News Landscape (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, March 17, 2013).
50. In the Republican undercard debates: 89; in Republican primary debates: 320; in Democratic primary debates: 135. American Presidency Project, “Presidential Debates 1960–2016,” accessed July 4, 2018, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/debates.php.
51. Jim Naureckas, “CNN’s Debate on ‘Terror’ Omitted the Kind That Kills the Most Americans,” FAIR, December 16, 2015.
52. Leslie Savan, “Right-Wing Fear-Mongering Is Far More Contagious than Ebola,” Nation, October 8, 2014; Joe Coscarelli, “Ebola Coverage Goes Extra Dumb on CNN, Fox News,” New York, October 6, 2014.
53. Gerard Flynn and Susan Scutti, “Smuggled Bushmeat Is Ebola’s Back Door to America,” Newsweek, August 21, 2014. As the medical anthropologist Theresa MacPhail commented, “That Newsweek story, in my opinion, is just really bad journalism. Where were their facts, statistics, evidence?” John Horgan, “Ebola ‘Fear Mongering’ Critiqued by Medical Anthropologist,” Scientific American, September 3, 2014.
54. Liz Hamel, Jamie Firth, and Mollyann Brodie, “Kaiser Health Policy News Index: Special Focus on Ebola,” Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, October 16, 2014.
55. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Cases of Ebola Diagnosed in the United States,” last updated December 16, 2014, www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/outbreaks/2014-west-africa/united-states-imported-case.html.
56. Saeed Ahmed and Dorrine Mendoze, “Ebola Hysteria: An Epic, Epidemic Overreaction,” CNN, October 20, 2014; Alan Yuhas, “Panic: The Dangerous Epidemic Sweeping an Ebola-Fearing US,” Guardian, October 20, 2014; Laura Wagner, “New Jersey Governor Facing Lawsuit from Nurse Quarantined during Ebola Scare,” National Public Radio, October 22, 2015.
57. World Health Organization, Ebola Situation Report (Geneva: World Health Organization, March 25, 2015).
58. Data Team, “Ebola in Africa: The End of a Tragedy?,” Economist, January 14, 2016; Rucker Reals, “This Morning from CBS News, Dec. 23, 2016,” CBS News, December 23, 2016; World Health Organization, “Final Trial Results Confirm Ebola Vaccine Provides High Protection against Disease,” news release, December 2016.
59. Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran, “General,” TV commercial, 2015.
60. Anti-Defamation League, “The Iranian Nuclear Threat: Why It Matters,” accessed May 15, 2017, www.adl.org/education/resources/fact-sheets/the-iranian-nuclear-threat-why-it-matters.
61. Department of Justice, “Foreign Agents Registration Act,” accessed March 15, 2018, www.fara.gov.
62. See, for example, Catherine Ho, “Trump Adviser and Former Rep. Jack Kingston Hired to Lobby for Syrian Opposition Group,” Washington Post, October 4, 2016.
63. The Center for Media and Democracy’s PR Watch, “How PR Sold the War in the Persian Gulf,” accessed May 15, 2017, www.prwatch.org/books/tsigfy10.html.
64. The Times did acknowledge that concurrent with its reporting based on Mandiant’s research, the newspaper had also hired Mandiant “to investigate a sophisticated Chinese-origin attack on its news operations.” David Sanger, David Barboza, and Nicole Perloth, “Chinese Army Unit Is Seen as Tied to Hacking against U.S.,” New York Times, February 18, 2013, A1. The same thing happened two months later, when the media reported Crowdstrike’s published claims of the hacker groups Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear hacking Ukrainian military servers. Shane Harris, “Cyber Experts Cite Link between DNC Hacks and Aggression against Ukraine,” Wall Street Journal, December 22, 2016.
65. Good Harbor Security Risk Management, home page, accessed May 6, 2018, www.goodharbor.net.
66. Richard A. Clarke and Robert Knake, Cyber War (New York: HarperCollins, 2010). In 1993, the RAND Corporation published a comparable hyperbolic warning with the report: John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, Cyberwar Is Coming! (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1993). It still has not arrived.
67. “Richard Clarke on the Growing ‘Cyberwar’ Threat,” Fresh Air, National Public Radio, April 19, 2010.
68. Ellen Nakashima, “The Latest Hot Job in the Washington Revolving Door? Cybersecurity,” Washington Post, March 17, 2015; Carter Dougherty and Jesse Hamilton, “Ex-NSA Chief Pitches Banks Costly Advice on Cyber-Attacks,” Bloomberg, June 20, 2104.
69. Sean Froelich, “Ex-NSA Chief Warns of Cyberspace Dangers,” U.S. News and World Report, November 2, 2015; Randy Komisar, “An Interview with General Keith Alexander on Cybersecurity, Snowden, and IronNet,” TechCrunch, March 1, 2016.
70. Cyber Squirrel 1, home page, accessed July 12, 2018, http://cybersquirrel1.com.
71. Martin Miller, “ ‘24’and “Lost” Get Symposium on Torture,” Los Angeles Times, February 14, 2007.
72. “Republican Presidential Debate in South Carolina,” New York Times, May 15, 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/us/politics/16repubs-text.html.
73. Tung Yin, “Jack Bauer Syndrome: Hollywood’s Depiction of National Security Law” (University of Iowa Legal Studies Research Paper Number 09-13, March 2009).
74. Dianne Feinstein, “Feinstein Releases Statement on ‘Zero Dark Thirty,’ ” press release, December 19, 2012.
75. Tricia Jenkins, The CIA in Hollywood: How the Agency Shapes Film and Television (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012).
76. “Hollywood a Longtime Friend of the CIA,” Los Angeles Times, May 26, 2012.
77. John A. Rizzo, Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA (New York: Scribner, 2014), 63–65.
78. David L. Robb, Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004), 38.
79. World Bank DataBank, “People Using at Least Basic Drinking Water Services (% of Population),” accessed July 4, 2018, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.H2O.BASW.ZS.
80. Carter Center, “Guinea Worm Case Totals,” last updated May 3, 2018, www.cartercenter.org/health/guinea_worm/case-totals.html.
81. Michael Lemonick, “It’s Doomsday Clock Time Again,” Observations (blog), Scientific American, January 26, 2016.
82. Rachel Becker, “The Doomsday Clock Is the Gimmick We Need to Think about Nuclear Tensions,” The Verge, January, 25, 2018. See also Michael A. Cohen, “Stop the (Doomsday) Clock,” Boston Globe, January 26, 2018.
83. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 282.
84. Quoted in William Safire, Before the Fall: An Inside View of the Pre-Watergate White House (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975), 8.
An Alternative Post-9/11 History
Epigraph: Lyndon B. Johnson, “The President’s Inaugural Address,” January 20, 1965.
1. “Philadelphia Fans Set Fire, Damage Property after Super Bowl Win,” Reuters, February 5, 2018.
2. Jason Diamos, “Hockey: Rangers’ Game Halted for President’s Speech,” New York Times, September 21, 2001.
3. George W. Bush, Decision Points (New York: Broadway Books, 2011), 191–192.
4. 9/11 Memorial, “Ground Zero Recovery Timeline,” accessed May 6, 2018, http://timeline.911memorial.org/#Timeline/3.
5. George W. Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People,” September 20, 2001.
6. Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003), 108–109.
7. Anthony DiMaggio, When Media Goes to War: Hegemonic Discourse, Public Opinion, and the Limits of Dissent (New York: Monthly Review, 2010), 14–15.
8. George W. Bush, “State of the Union Address,” January 29, 2002.
9. George W. Bush, “Graduation Speech at West Point, United States Military Academy, West Point, NY,” June 1, 2002.
10. Amy Zegart, Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
11. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2004); Visa Security and Overstays: How Secure Is America? Hearing before the Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security of the Committee on Homeland Security, House of Representatives, 113th Cong. (May 21, 2013); U.S. Department of Transportation, Office of Inspector General, “Letter to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel Regarding Alleged Aviation Security Violations,” March 18, 2003, www.oig.dot.gov/library-item/30374.
12. Bipartisan Policy Center, National Security Preparedness Group, Tenth Anniversary Report Card: The Status of the 9/11 Commission Recommendations (Washington, DC: Bipartisan Policy Center, September 2011).
13. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, 9/11 Commission Report, 5.
14. Federal Aviation Administration, “Airlines Meet FAA’s Hardened Cockpit Door Deadline,” press release, April 2003.
15. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, 9/11 Commission Report, 390.
16. Natalie Gontcharova, “Soon, You May Not Be Able to Use Your Driver’s License to Get on a Plane,” Huffington Post, May 18, 2017.
17. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, 9/11 Commission Report.
18. Lawrence Wright, “The Agent,” New Yorker, July 20, 2006.
19. According to the Office of Management and Budget, homeland security spending included intelligence and warning, border and transportation security, domestic counterterrorism, protection of critical infrastructure and key assets, defense against catastrophic threats, and emergency preparedness and response. Bart Hobijn and Erick Sager, “What Has Homeland Security Cost? An Assessment: 2001–2005,” Current Issues in Economics and Finance 13, no. 2 (2007): 1–7.
20. John Mueller and Mark Stewart, “Terror, Security, and Money: Balancing the Risks, Benefits, and Costs of Homeland Security,” paper presented at the annual convention of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, April 1, 2011.
21. Fifteen Years after 9/11: A Preliminary Balance Sheet: Testimony of Brian Michael Jenkins before the Committee on Armed Services, U.S. House of Representatives, 114th Cong. (September 21, 2016).
22. Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, Seamus Hughes, and Bennett Clifford, The Travelers: American Jihadists in Syria and Iraq (Washington, DC: George Washington University Program on Extremism, February 2018).
23. Samuel G. Freedman, “Six Days after 9/11, Another Anniversary Worth Honoring,” New York Times, September 7, 2012, A15. In 2015, the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation estimated that one hundred Americans had joined Sunni militant organizations in Syria and Iraq. In September 2016, FBI director James Comey testified before a Senate committee that the number of Americans who have tried to travel to the region is “in the dozens.” That is compared to almost four thousand who have traveled from western Europe, most of whom came from France (twelve hundred). There are 3.3 million Muslims in the United States and 4.7 million in France. See Peter R. Neumann, “Foreign Fighter Total in Syria/Iraq Now Exceeds 20,000: Surpasses Afghanistan Conflict in the 1980s,” International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, January 26, 2015; Besheer Mohamed, “A New Estimate of the U.S. Muslim Population,” Fact Tank, Pew Research Center, January 6, 2016; and Conrad Hackett, “5 Facts about the Muslim Population in Europe,” Fact Tank, Pew Research Center, July 19, 2016. For studies on the depiction of Muslims in American media and the effects on public perception, see Christopher Blair, Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); and Muniba Saleem, Sara Prot, Craig A. Anderson, and Anthony F. Lemieux, “Exposure to Muslims in Media and Support for Public Policies Harming Muslims,” Communication Research 44, no. 6 (2015): 841–869.
24. George Tenet, with Bill Harlow, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 230.
25. Peter Baker, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2013).
26. George W. Bush, “Remarks by the President to Employees at the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” September 25, 2001.
27. George W. Bush, “Remarks Announcing the Most Wanted Terrorist List,” October 10, 2001.
28. Baker, Days of Fire; George W. Bush, “State of the Union Address,” January 29, 2002.
29. Bush, “State of the Union Address.” At the time, East Timor, Kosovo, and South Sudan had yet to become countries, and Montenegro and Serbia had not yet split; there were therefore 192 countries on September 20, 2001.
30. While those who are detained at Guantanamo Bay are citizens of forty-nine different countries, the majority were arrested in Afghanistan and Pakistan. See “The Guantanamo Docket: The Detainees,” New York Times, October 20, 2016. In “Report on Guantanamo Detainees,” Mark Denbeaux and Joshua Denbeaux find that only 5 percent of the detainees were arrested by U.S. forces, while 86 percent were captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to U.S. custody. Mark Denbeaux and Joshua Denbeaux, Report on Guantanamo Detainees: A Profile of 517 Detainees through Analysis of Department of Defense Data, Seton Hall Public Law Research Paper No. 46 (Newark, NJ: Seton Hall University School of Law, 2006).
31. “Shackled Detainees Arrive in Guantanamo,” CNN, January 11, 2002. A 2006 study by Seton Hall University Law School found that over 80 percent of prisoners at Guantanamo, whom Donald Rumsfeld referred to as the “worst of the worst,” were not captured by U.S. troops on the battlefield but by Pakistanis and Afghans, often for bounty payments or personal vendettas. See Mark Denbeaux, Joshua W. Denbeaux, and John Gregorek, Second Report on the Guantanamo Detainees: Inter- and Intra-Departmental Disagreements about Who Is Our Enemy, Seton Hall Public Law Research Paper No. 893047 (Newark, NJ: Seton Hall University School of Law, 2006).
32. Andrei Scheinkman, Alan McLean, Jeremy Ashkenas, Archie Tse, and Jacob Harris, “The Guantanamo Docket: The Detainees,” New York Times, May 2018.
33. Executive Order No. 13823, 83 FR 4831, 4831–4832 (2018).
34. CIA director John Brennan famously said that the answer to this question was “unknowable.” CIA, “Remarks as Prepared for Delivery CIA Director John O. Brennan Response to SSCI Study on the Former Detention and Interrogation Program,” December 11, 2014.
35. Stephen Farrell, “Abu Ghraib,” New York Times, February 21, 2009.
36. Douglas A. Johnson, Alberto Mora, and Averell Schmidt, “The Strategic Costs of Torture,” Foreign Affairs, September–October 2016, 122.
37. For example, see “Letter from Retired Military Leaders Urging Obama to Declassify Senate Torture Report,” Human Rights First, May 1, 2014; “Letter from Retired Military Leaders Urging Presidential Candidates to Reject the Use of Torture,” Human Rights First, September 14, 2015; and “Letter from Retired Military Leaders to President Obama on Guantanamo and the Senate Torture Report,” Human Rights First, January 21, 2014.
38. Johnson, Mora, and Schmidt, “Strategic Costs of Torture.”
39. Ibid.
40. Direct Overt U.S. Aid Appropriations for and Military Reimbursements to Pakistan, FY2002–FY2018 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, November 28, 2017); Burcu Savun and Jude C. Hays, “Foreign Aid as a Counterterrorism Tool: Aid Delivery Channels, State Capacity, and NGOs” (APSA 2011 Annual Meeting Paper, 2011).
41. Thomas Carothers, U.S. Democracy Promotion during and after Bush (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2007).
42. Gideon Resnick, “Seven Times the Taliban Was Supposedly Defeated,” Daily Beast, September 29, 2015.
43. David Rohde and David Sanger, “How a ‘Good War’ in Afghanistan Went Bad,” New York Times, August 12, 2007.
44. Neta C. Crawford, Costs of War: Update on the Human Costs of War for Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001 to Mid-2016 (Providence, RI: Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, August 2016); United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, Afghanistan: Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict Annual Report 2017 (Kabul: United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, February 2018).
45. Physicians for Social Responsibility, Body Count: Casualty Figures after 10 Years of the “War on Terror” (Washington, DC: Physicians for Social Responsibility, March 2015).
46. Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, “Costs of War: Summary of Findings,” accessed May 7, 2018, http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/summary.
47. Department of Defense, “Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) U.S. Casualty Status: Fatalities as of: July 3, 2018,” accessed July 4, 2018, www.defense.gov/casualty.pdf.
48. U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Counterterrorism, Annex of Statistical Information: Country Reports on Terrorism 2016, July 2017.
49. Heidi M. Peters, Moshe Schwartz, and Lawrence Kapp, Department of Defense Contractor and Troop Levels in Iraq and Afghanistan: 2007–2017 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, April 28, 2017).
50. U.S. Department of Labor, “About the Defense Base Act Case Summary Reports,” accessed May 7, 2018, www.dol.gov/owcp/dlhwc/lsaboutdbareports.htm. This is only an estimate, because the Department of Labor does not provide comprehensive data for U.S. citizens killed supporting U.S. wars. See Micah Zenko, “Mercenaries Are the Silent Majority of Obama’s Military,” Foreign Policy, May 18, 2016.
51. Bob Davis, “Bush Economic Aide Says the Cost of the Iraq War May Top $100 Billion,” Wall Street Journal, September 16, 2002.
52. Miles O’Brien and Donald Rumsfeld, “Rumsfeld Briefs Press,” CNN, January 19, 2003; James Fallows, “Invading Iraq: What We Were Told at the Time,” Atlantic, March 19, 2013.
53. Neta C. Crawford, United States Budgetary Costs of Post-9/11 Wars through FY2018: A Summary of the $5.6 Trillion in Costs for the US Wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Post-9/11 Veterans Care and Homeland Security (Providence, RI: Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, November 2017), 8.
54. Watson Institute, “Costs of War: Summary of Findings”; Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Learning from Iraq (Washington, DC: Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, March 2013), 55; Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, Quarterly Report to the United States Congress (Washington, DC: Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, October 30, 2016), 85.
55. “Gulf War Fast Facts,” CNN, August 2, 2016.
56. Special Inspector for Iraq Reconstruction, Learning from Iraq.
57. Crawford, United States Budgetary Costs of Post-9/11 Wars through FY2018, 3. Note that we do not include Costs of War Project homeland security spending in our total figure.
58. Calculated based on the median average of American taxpayers in the seventeen years since 9/11: 190 million.
59. Stephen Daggett, Costs of Major U.S. Wars (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, June 29, 2010).
60. Neta Crawford, interview with the authors, October 20, 2016.
61. During the Korean War, President Truman raised the top marginal tax rate to 92 percent, while President Johnson raised it to 77 percent in 1967 during the height of the Vietnam War. Linda Bilmes, “The Credit Card Wars: Post-9/11 War Funding Policy in Historical Perspective” (statement in congressional briefing, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, November 8, 2017).
62. Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes, “Estimating the Costs of War: Methodological Issues, with Applications to Iraq and Afghanistan,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Peace and Conflict, ed. Michelle R. Garfinkel and Stergios Skaperdas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 275–317.
63. Ryan D. Edwards, Post-9/11 War Spending, Debt, and the Macroeconomy (Providence, RI: Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, June 22, 2011), 12–13.
64. Crawford, United States Budgetary Costs of Post-9/11 Wars through FY2018. Note again that we do not include Costs of War Project homeland security spending in our total figure.
65. Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, “Costs of War: U.S. Veterans and Military Families,” September 2016; and Peters, Schwartz, and Kapp, Department of Defense Contractor and Troop Levels.
66. Nese DeBruyne, American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, April 26, 2017).
67. Ibid.; Committee on the Assessment of the Readjustment Needs of Military Personnel, Veterans, and Their Families, Returning Home from Iraq and Afghanistan: Assessment of Readjustment Needs of Veterans, Service Members, and Their Families (Washington, DC: Institute of Medicine, March 12, 2013); Anna Kline, Maria Falca-Dodson, Bradley Sussner, Donald S. Ciccone, Helena Chandler, Lanora Callahan, and Miklos Losonczy, “Effects of Repeated Deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan on the Health of New Jersey Army National Guard Troops: Implications for Military Readiness,” American Journal of Public Health 100, no. 2 (2010): 276–283; and Melissa A. Polusny, Christopher R. Erbes, Paul A. Arbisi, Paul Thuras, Shannon M. Kehle, Michael Rath, Cora Courage, Madhavi K. Reddy, and Courtney Duffy, “Impact of Prior Operation Enduring Freedom/Operation Iraqi Freedom Combat Duty on Mental Health in a Predeployment Cohort of National Guard Soldiers,” Military Medicine 174, no. 4 (2009): 353–357.
68. Veterans Benefits Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs, Annual Benefits Report: Fiscal Year 2015 (Washington, DC: Veterans Benefits Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs, updated May 2016), 7.
69. Veterans Benefits Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs, Annual Benefits Report: Fiscal Year 2001 (Washington, DC: Veterans Benefits Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs, updated May 2002), 81; Veterans Benefits Administration, Annual Benefits Report: Fiscal Year 2015, 18.
70. U.S. Department of Defense, Defense Casualty Analysis System, “Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF),” accessed July 4, 2018, https://dcas.dmdc.osd.mil/dcas/pages/report_oef_type.xhtml; U.S. Department of Defense, Defense Casualty Analysis System, “Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF),” accessed July 4, 2018, https://dcas.dmdc.osd.mil/dcas/pages/report_oif_woundall.xhtml.
71. Veterans Benefits Administration, Annual Benefits Report: Fiscal Year 2015, 20.
72. Veterans Benefits Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs, “Compensation: Dependency and Indemnity Compensation—Effective 12/1/14,” December 1, 2014.
73. Irene Triplett’s father, Mose Triplett, actually served in the Confederacy for over two years, until joining a Union regiment in North Carolina in August 1864. As Triplett’s grandson told a reporter in 2014, “[Mose] served his time out with the Union so he would get a pension.” Michael M. Phillips, “Still Paying for the Civil War: Veterans’ Benefits Live on Long after Bullets Stop,” Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2014; Clint Davis, “Woman, 87, Still Gets Monthly $73 VA Pension from Father’s Civil War Service,” abc2news WMAR Baltimore, August 25, 2017; Office of Public Affairs, Department of Veterans Affairs, “America’s Wars,” fact sheet, May 2016.
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75. Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, “TBI & the Military,” last updated July 3, 2018, http://dvbic.dcoe.mil/tbi-military.
76. Ann C. McKee and Meghan E. Robinson, “Military-Related Traumatic Brain Injury and Neurodegeneration,” Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association 10, no. 3 (2014): S242–S253; National Center for PTSD, Department of Veterans Affairs, “How Common Is PTSD?,” last updated October 3, 2016.
77. Erin Bagalman, Health Care for Veterans: Traumatic Brain Injury (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, March 9, 2015).
78. Institute of Medicine, Treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Military and Veteran Populations: Final Assessment (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2014); Bagalman, Health Care for Veterans; “Only Half the Vets with PTSD Are Getting Treatment: Report,” CBS News, June 20, 2014.
79. Paul Heaton, David S. Loughran, and Amalia Miller, Compensating Wounded Warriors: An Analysis of Injury, Labor Market Earnings, and Disability Compensation Among Veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2012).
80. Tara Galovski and Judith A Lyons, “Psychological Sequelae of Combat Violence: A Review of the Impact of PTSD on the Veteran’s Family and Possible Interventions,” Aggression and Violent Behavior 9, no. 5 (2004): 477–501; Rachel Dekel and Hadass Goldblatt, “Is There Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma? The Case of Combat Veterans’ Children,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 78, no. 3 (2008): 281–289.
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95. Orazio Attanasio and Alice Mesnard, The Impact of a Conditional Cash Transfer Program on Consumption in Colombia (London: Center for the Evaluation of Development Policies, Institute for Fiscal Studies, April 2005), 1, 17.
96. U.S. Central Command and U.S. Special Operations Command: Hearing before the Committee on Armed Services, U.S. Senate, 113th Cong. (March 5, 2013). Mattis continued, “I think it’s a cost-benefit ratio, the more we put into the State Department’s diplomacy, hopefully the less we have to put into a military budget.”
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102. National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice, “Gun Violence Programs: Directed Police Patrols,” last updated June 5, 2013.
103. Joint Economic Committee, War at Any Price? The Total Economic Costs of the War beyond the Federal Budget (Washington, DC: Joint Economic Committee, U.S. Congress, February 2008).
104. American Society of Civil Engineers, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure: 2003 Progress Report (Reston, VA: American Society of Civil Engineers, 2003).
105. Ibid.
106. American Society of Civil Engineers, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure (Reston, VA: American Society of Civil Engineers, 2009).
107. Edward Alden and Rebecca Strauss, How America Stacks Up: Economic Competitiveness and U.S. Policy (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2016), 43.
108. Environmental Protection Agency, Drinking Water Infrastructure Needs Survey: Second Report to Congress (Washington, DC: Environmental Protection Agency, 2001).
109. Environmental Protection Agency, “Fact Sheet: EPA’s 2003 Drinking Water Infrastructure Needs Survey and Assessment,” 2005.
110. Environmental Protection Agency, “Fact Sheet: EPA’s 2007 Drinking Water Infrastructure Needs Survey and Assessment,” 2009.
111. Joint Economic Committee, War at Any Price?
112. Eliana Garces, Duncan Thomas, and Janet Currie, “Longer-Term Effects of Head Start,” American Economic Review 92, no. 4 (2004): 999–1012.
113. Heidi Garret-Peltier, The Job Opportunity Costs of War (Providence, RI: Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, August 19, 2014).
114. Daveed Gartsenstein-Ross, “Don’t Get Cocky, America,” Foreign Policy, May 2, 2011.
Conclusion
Epigraph: The quotation is also sometimes phrased, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking that was used when we created them.” See Alice Calaprice, The Ultimate Einstein Quotable (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 476–477.
1. Barack Obama, “Address to the Nation on the Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” December 1, 2009. All following quotations from the speech are from this source.
2. Barack Obama, National Security Strategy of the United States (Washington, DC: White House, May 2010).
3. Ibid.
4. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on the Way Forward in Afghanistan,” June 22, 2011.
5. Barack Obama, “State of the Union Address,” January 24, 2012.
6. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at a Campaign Event in Roanoke, Virginia,” July 13, 2012.
7. Meet the Press, NBC News, September 20, 2015.
8. Arnie Seipel and Sam Sanders, “Cruz: ‘Empower Law Enforcement to Patrol and Secure Muslim Neighborhoods,’ ” National Public Radio, March 22, 2016.
9. The Kelly File, Fox News, November 19, 2015.
10. Newt Gingrich, “Speech at the Republican National Convention,” July 21, 2016.
11. The Kelly File, Fox News, November 19, 2015.
12. Michael T. Flynn and Michael Ledeen, The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War against Radical Islam and Its Allies (New York: St. Martin’s, 2016).
13. Rudy Giuliani, “Speech at the Republican National Convention,” July 18, 2016.
14. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “Media Availability on Executive Order with Secretary Kelly and DHS Leadership,” January 31, 2017.
15. Alex Nowrasteh, “Terrorism and Immigration: A Risk Analysis” (Policy Analysis No. 798, CATO Institute, September 13, 2016); Chris Nichols, “Mostly True: Odds of Fatal Terror Attack in U.S. by a Refugee? 3.6 Billion to 1,” PolitiFact, February 1, 2017.
16. Lauren Leatherby, “Trump Clampdown: Four Charts on the US Refugee Programme,” Financial Times, January 27, 2017.
17. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), “If the ban were announced with a one week notice, the ‘bad’ would rush into our country during that week. A lot of bad ‘dudes’ out there!,” Twitter, January 30, 2017, 8:31 a.m.
18. “After Helping U.S. Military, Iraqi Refugee Is Detained at JFK,” Boston Globe, January 28, 2017.
19. Garrett Epps, “Papers, Please,” Atlantic, February 27, 2017.
20. Ben Popken, “Tourism to U.S. under Trump Is Down, Costing $4.6B and 40,000 Jobs,” NBC News, January 23, 2018.
21. “The Key Spending Cuts and Increases in Trump’s Budget,” New York Times, May 22, 2017.
22. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), “When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars good, and easy to win. Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don’t trade anymore-we win big. It’s easy!,” Twitter, March 2, 2018, 5:50 a.m.
23. CBS, “Transcript: Face the Nation,” July 15, 2018.
24. Congressional Budget Office, “H.R. 1528, Obamacare Repeal Reconciliation Act of 2017,” July 19, 2017.
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26. Joint Committee on Taxation, “Estimated Budget Effects of the Conference Agreement for H.R. 1, The ‘Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,’ ” U.S. Congress, December 18, 2017, 8; Niv Elis, “GOP Tax Law Will Add $1.9 Trillion to Debt: CBO,” The Hill, April 9, 2018.
27. Face the Nation, CBS News, May 11, 2014.
28. Barack Obama, “Now Is the Greatest Time to Be Alive,” Wired, October 12, 2016.
29. Erin M. Kearns, Allison Betus, and Anthony Lemieux, “Yes the Media Do Underreport Some Terrorist Attacks. Just Not the Ones Most People Think Of,” Washington Post, March 13, 2017.
30. Anti-Defamation League, Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2017 (New York: Anti-Defamation League, January 2018).
31. Brian Michael Jenkins, “Taking the ‘Terror’ Out of Terrorism Requires Outsmarting Fear,” The RAND Blog, RAND Corporation, March 16, 2017.
32. Peter W. Singer, “Writing about Defense, but at What Price? The Ethics of Thinktankers’ Public Commentary and Private Profit,” op-ed, Brookings Institution, December 13, 2010.
33. Stephen M. Walt, “Hacks and Hired Guns,” Foreign Policy, September 19, 2014; Stephen M. Walt, “A Modest Proposal,” Foreign Policy, November 20, 2009; Transparify, How Transparent Are Think Tanks about Who Funds Them 2016?, June 29, 2016, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52e1f399e4b06a94c0cdaa41/t/5773022de6f2e1ecf70b26d1/1467154992324/Transparify+2016+Think+Tanks+Report.pdf.
34. A greater percentage of Americans than ever before—an estimated 46 percent—now have valid passports, allowing them to travel abroad. “How Many Americans Have a Passport?,” Expeditioner, December 11, 2016, www.theexpeditioner.com/2010/02/17/how-many-americans-have-a-passport-2; U.S. Department of State, “Passport Statistics,” accessed May 10, 2018, http://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/passports/statistics.html.
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37. On average, sixty-two cents for every dollar of cigarette tax is assessed by states, and the remaining thirty-eight cents is assessed by the federal government. Jennifer Maloney and Saabira Chaudhuri, “Against All Odds, the U.S. Tobacco Industry Is Rolling in Money,” Wall Street Journal, April 23, 2017.
38. Cancer Action Network, American Cancer Society, Saving Lives, Saving Money: A State-by-State Report on the Health and Economic Impact of Tobacco Taxes (Washington, DC: Cancer Action Network, 2011).
39. Ibid.
40. Scott P. Novak, Sean F. Reardon, Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Stephen L. Buka, “Retail Tobacco Outlet Density and Youth Cigarette Smoking: A Propensity-Modeling Approach,” American Journal of Public Health 96 (2006): 670–676.
41. “Funding and Publication of Research on Gun Violence and Other Leading Causes of Death,” JAMA 317, no. 1 (2017): 84–85.
42. RAND Corporation, The Science of Gun Policy: A Critical Synthesis of Research Evidence on the Effects of Gun Policies in the United States (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2018).
43. American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, “Suicide Statistics,” accessed May 10, 2018, http://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics.
44. Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, “Waiting Periods,” accessed May 10, 2018, http://lawcenter.giffords.org/gun-laws/policy-areas/gun-sales/waiting-periods/.
45. Pew Research Center, Opinions on Gun Policy and the 2016 Campaign (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, August 26, 2016).
46. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, “Provision Drug Overdose Death Counts,” based on data available for analysis on September 5, 2018.
47. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse Prevention Dollars and Cents: A Cost-Benefit Analysis (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2008); and White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, “Fact Sheet: A 21st Century Drug Policy,” April 24, 2013.
48. Alex Hollingsworth, Christopher J. Ruhm, and Kosali Simon, “Macroeconomic Conditions and Opioid Abuse” (NBER Working Paper No. 23192, National Bureau of Economic Research, February 2017).
49. Heather Dunn, “10 Interesting Facts Comparing Community Colleges & 4-Year Institutions,” CampusLogic Blog, March 24, 2016, http://campuslogic.com/blog/interesting-facts-comparing-community-colleges-4-year-institutions.
50. Vivek Wadhwa and Edward Alden, “The Government Failed U.S. Workers on Global Trade. It Must Do Better on Technology,” Washington Post, November 3, 2016.
51. Micah Zenko and Michael A. Cohen, “Clear and Present Safety,” Foreign Affairs, March–April 2012.
52. Noam Unger and Margaret L. Taylor, with Frederick Barton, Capacity for Change: Reforming U.S. Assistance Efforts in Poor and Fragile Countries (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution and Center for Strategic and International Studies, April 2010).
53. In 2016, the United States disbursed $34.4 billion in official development assistance, just 0.19 percent of its gross national income that year. Curt Tarnoff and Marian L. Lawson, Foreign Aid: An Introduction to U.S. Programs and Policy (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, April 25, 2018); World Bank, “United States,” accessed May 10, 2018, http://data.worldbank.org/country/united-states.
54. “Exclusive Interview with CENTCOM’s Lt. Gen. John R. Allen,” FrontLines (USAID), April–May 2011.
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