It’s Time to Sober Up

By Noah Rothman

Monday, October 09, 2023

 

It’s worth reflecting on the issues that dominated the American political landscape just a few days ago if only to fully apprehend just how inconsequential they are.

 

For the better part of a month, House Republicans argued amongst themselves over whether it was necessary or even desirable to keep the U.S. government open if they failed to use leverage they did not have over Democrats to secure spending cuts. It was a conversation divorced from political reality, and it produced only one concession from the party in power — cutting off support for a U.S. partner that has been ruthlessly invaded by an overt American enemy. That concession proved unsatisfying because the debate in question was only ever a proxy fight over which Republicans had enough power to satisfy their ambitions. In the end, a handful of Republicans joined with Democrats to oust the speaker, paralyzing the House and calling into question the body’s legal authority to respond to world-altering events overseas.

 

The Biden administration had committed itself to frenetic gestures in its effort to convince its constituents that it wasn’t completely feckless. Last week, it was busily attacking Republicans for taking advantage of a law as it was written to make some obtuse case for ignoring the Constitution in the effort to cancel student loans. On a separate front, it assured its voters that it had done its best to avoid complying with the law that compelled it to okay the construction of a piddling 20 miles of border fencing amid a crisis that has seen nearly 3 million people pour over the border in a single fiscal year. The Biden administration seemed to regard the menace posed by America’s porous borders as subordinate to the undesirable political consequences associated with doing anything about it.

 

Our national political press was consumed with ephemera, the foremost purpose of which is to trigger dopamine receptors among America’s infotainment addicts. Hillary Clinton had said something stupid. So had Donald Trump. The former president’s business empire had become imperiled by a judge’s verdict. Can you believe it? Have you seen the curriculum that one school district — I forget which — was teaching children? Aren’t you outraged? Cassidy Hutchinson thinks Trump supporters are trying to poison her. Did you see that on Kimmel? America seems so divided and the political process so unresponsive to the demands of its most fatalistic partisans that perhaps it’s time to prepare for civil war.

 

It all seems so fatuous and trivial today. The slaughter of civilians in Gaza was not a “tragedy,” as some rote expressions of sympathy for the hundreds of dead Israelis suggest. It was an assault on civilization itself. And it was not a rogue act. Evidence indicates that this medieval barbarism was supported, operationally or otherwise, by America’s state-based enemies. Nor is that an accident: Hamas’s actions facilitate the goals of the West’s adversaries all over the globe. The U.S.-led geopolitical order we take for granted is under attack.

 

The United States is the sole global hegemon. It is the guarantor of the free navigation of the seas, through which global commerce is conducted and from which Americans derive unparalleled prosperity. It is the beacon to which the planet’s peace-loving peoples, who seek nothing more than to live freely within their own social covenants, look for inspiration. It is the arsenal of democracy. Its partners and allies, who similarly benefit from its prohibitive dominance, depend on the U.S. to keep the world’s wolves at bay.

 

Challenges to American hegemony anywhere are challenges to it everywhere. We might pretend otherwise, but our adversaries do not. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is supported by China, which hopes to weaken the West and inure it to the loss of its allies. Iran provides material support to Russia’s war just as it does to Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s efforts to murder Jews, and that assistance is reciprocal. Hamas takes high-level meetings in Moscow not to sample local fare and see the sights, but to further the same anti-American geostrategic project.

 

America’s enemies understand our vulnerabilities and they long for a world in which the U.S. retreats from the world stage under duress. They seek the restoration of a status quo defined by impenetrable spheres of influence in which they could have a free hand. They hope to gradually degrade the West so that prohibitive American might no longer deters the aggression they plan. Americans can pretend that the threats to our nation’s power are unique and disconnected, but the would-be executors of those threats are not operating under the same misapprehension.

 

These are serious times. They demand serious leadership. The United States is not a weak nation or a country in decline. It can meet these challenges. But the success of the West and its allies and the preservation of a world that is safe for liberty and democracy are not preordained. So long as Americans preoccupy themselves with petty domestic politics and delude themselves into believing that America’s foremost enemy is the other party, we will not meet the measure of this portentous moment.

 

If Americans agreed to an unspoken covenant to sober up and stop treating the political process as though it were a game with low stakes, we would be no doubt experience a profound display of teeth gnashing from those who benefit from our collective unseriousness. They would bemoan the world’s failure to cooperate with their theoretical version of it. They would deride and denigrate those who remember that the world beyond our borders is anarchic, illiberal, and full of violent dangers. They would insist that the biggest threats to Americans are other Americans. But so what?

 

Politics is not a sport; it is in fact often deadly serious business. We have drunk deeply from the intoxicating well of partisan political combat for so long that we’ve lost the plot. It’s time to sober up.