As Peter Schweizer noted in a short report for the Hoover Institution on Christmas Day 2000, twenty-five years ago the United States was “spending less on defense as a percentage of GNP than anytime since the Great Depression.” That all changed nine months later when the so-called “peace dividend” from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War was reinvested in a “Global War on Terrorism.”
Eight trillion dollars later, and what do Americans have to show for their sacrifices in blood and treasure? The Taliban is in control of Afghanistan, al-Qaeda is in control of Syria, an apologist for Islamic jihad is about to become mayor of New York City, and a pro-Hamas contingent of lawmakers wields too much power in Congress.
In an article that resembles an obituary for U.S. foreign policy during the twenty-first century, writer Daniel McAdams dryly observes in the headline, “‘Global War on Terror’ Is Over. Terror Won.” That’s quite the gut punch for everyone who lived through 9/11 and its aftermath. Yet it’s hardly inaccurate.
A quarter-century after Islamic terrorists murdered three thousand Americans, politicians are more concerned about “Islamophobia” in the United States than providing adequate care for veterans who confronted Islamic barbarity head-on. The hurt feelings of those who risked nothing to defend the homeland matter more than the damaged bodies and minds of those who risked everything.
The significance of 9/11 has been so watered-down that Congresswoman Ilhan Omar remembers it only as a day when “some people did something.” For the victims we lost, their families, members of the military who fought and died on the global battlefield, and the families of those servicemembers who never saw their loved ones again, that “something” was — by far — the most consequential event in their lives. Now it’s just an opportunity for foreigners who become members of Congress to guilt-trip white people for their imaginary “privilege.”
After 9/11, everybody insisted that we left our guard down and somehow brought the tragedy upon ourselves. If we had only continued spending on defense at the same high levels that we had been spending since WWII, then we could have prevented the worst attack on American soil since the Japanese Empire bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. That was the supposed lesson. It didn’t matter that we were still spending more than every other country in the world; as soon as we cut back on Cold War military spending, we suffered another surprise attack. We were vulnerable, everyone agreed, unless we rededicated tax dollars toward huge military budgets.
Everybody in the defense sector got big buckets of money after that. Weapons manufacturers, research and development firms, intelligence think tanks, and foreign policy consultants made out like bandits. The FBI got new domestic surveillance powers. The Department of Homeland Security and Transportation Security Administration came into existence. The CIA positioned itself once again as the unofficial quarterback of the U.S. government. Unelected bureaucrats, in other words, became much more powerful than they were before 9/11, and the defense industry started cashing much bigger checks. All the institutions that experienced a diminishment of clout and prestige after the Cold War found their clout and prestige supercharged in the post-9/11 world. That’s a pretty sobering reminder that some people always benefit from tragedy.
How did the American people make out? Not so well. In return for a foreign attack on U.S. soil, American citizens lost any claims to their privacy. The Patriot Act (apparently already written and ready to be signed into law as soon as a sufficient emergency could justify its passage in Congress) birthed the modern national security surveillance State. Americans lost control over their bank records, phone calls, text messages, and emails. It became common to hear politicians justify this loss of personal privacy as a trifling matter for Americans with nothing to hide. On 9/11, foreign terrorists murdered U.S. citizens; after 9/11, the U.S. government murdered the Fourth Amendment.
Americans also saw the accelerated migration of foreign nationals into their local communities. Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama seemed to agree that American citizens were responsible not only for prosecuting a “Global War on Terrorism” but also for resettling “refugees” from newly occupied territories into the United States. The end result has been a confusing and disruptive injection of multiculturalism this century. Had Americans known that defending their way of life would involve importing millions of foreign nationals with a different way of life, many never would have supported post-9/11 wars in parts of Asia and Africa and across the Middle East.
Effectively, the U.S. government responded to the worst attack since WWII by going to war for two decades, tearing up parts of the Constitution, and undermining Americans’ shared culture. Those politicians and bureaucrats in D.C. who have seen their powers expand this century believe the enormous costs in lives and dollars are justified. Those industries that profit from endless war have had much to celebrate. For many Americans, however, the butcher’s bill from this century’s military conflicts has not been pretty.Right now the drumbeat of war is growing louder. U.S. and European interests see Ukraine as an expendable chess piece in a larger NATO-led war against Russia. As the death toll in Europe rises, Western war-hawks continue to demand that every last Ukrainian man be press-ganged into service. I have made no secret of my contempt for those who insist that Ukrainians die in this war when they are not permitted to vote for elected representatives or even to dissent publicly from the government currently hanging onto power through martial law. There is nothing “democratic” about this Ukrainian dictatorship.
I dislike the Council on Foreign Relations types who lick their chops over the possibility of defeating Russia and dismantling its enormous territory into more digestible parts. I dislike the BlackRock vultures that can’t wait to gobble up the region’s natural resources while making trillions of dollars from government-subsidized rebuilding projects across the war-torn terrain. I dislike the bloodthirsty loudmouths, such as Lindsey Graham, who speak of war as if it’s a playground game. I dislike the Machiavellian politicians (particularly in Europe) who see the War in Ukraine as a convenient distraction from the exorbitant energy costs of “climate change” communism presently destroying Western economies. I dislike those who would risk miscalculations between nuclear powers over former Soviet lands whose peoples largely identify as Russian. I dislike those who prefer that Russian and Ukrainian Christians kill each other rather than seek peace.
Before we ratchet up the slaughter in Europe and expand the Russia-NATO proxy war in Ukraine into something even more devastating than it already is, consider how much we’ve sacrificed this century. The “peace dividend” following the Cold War didn’t even last a decade. When the United States committed itself to a post-9/11 “Global War on Terrorism” for the next twenty years, we watched our Bill of Rights and culture slip away. Whether one thinks the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were worth their costs, those costs will look minuscule next to the butcher’s bill that will come due in a full-out war between Russia and U.S.-NATO. Those European and American parents who believe that their children will never be drafted into service should remember that Ukrainian parents once believed the same thing.
There is an abyss before us. If we fall into it, we will lose ourselves. The madness will be bloody and awful, and we will be lucky to see it through. War takes everything. It robs everyone. I pray that we can avoid it.
