DRAFT National Security in the Years Before Covid, and After Donald

Posted On 2021-09-20

I have this egotistic conception of myself as a writer, offering up my voice to the National Conversation. Which is nutty but whatever. I read these ‘think’ pieces from knowledgeable people, and sometimes they make sense. Sometimes they draw upon a broad slice of reality, and present conclusions that seem reasonable and ring true to both world events and human nature as I understand them. And sometimes they’re printed in the Wall Street Journal and make me want to cry. It’s both that motivate me- first, the more voices there are drowning out the crap in the Wall Street Journal or on Fox News, the better. Second, because even the sensible ones aren’t leading me to surprising places. There’s nothing revolutionary in their conception, and precious few contributions to The Conversation they’re making that I haven’t thought of myself.

So at a functional level, I can look at the work of a pundit and think, ‘hell, I can do that’. Which is a good start, right? But it’s only a start. Because even the sensible writing raises questions that too often go overlooked, or will sometimes take weeks to reach painfully obvious conclusions. In terms of the quality of punditry produced, I’m sure I can do better than 90% of the crap that’s out there. Which isn’t saying much, and isn’t the noblest of goals anyway. But since I don’t know how to make a paycheck from bloviating, punditry is a side hustle at best, but still a skill worth developing. The idea of my second career being in communications is growing on me.

I had the idea for one of these bullshit ‘Politico’ or ‘HuffPo’ editorials almost a year ago, about Covid-related shifts in society and unchecked security vulnerabilities, and for the last year it’s been percolating on the back burner. But it’s stayed there because the thesis remained relevant. The news over the last year has only added emphasis to my thought; none of the concerns involved have been made irrelevant by the passage of time or reveal of new information.

So what the hell, right? I decided to give it a go, and started building it out here. This is entirely a work in progress! My process doesn’t outline, I just dive in and write wherever I feel inspired just then, and block things out around that. The thought of submitting a finished product for publication anywhere may only be silliness, but I’ve spent the last year constructing this in the back of my head as if that were the goal. :p

begin draft

…

The conduct of the Trump Administration and the onset of Covid have disrupted not only the status quo of context, but our perceptions of those institutions as well. The nightly news and the Sunday talk shows aren’t talking about the same things today as they were 10 years ago. China’s steps towards liberalism were being welcomed through trade overtures, and Russia’s movement towards authoritarianism was being welcomed with sanctions. Not only have those broad international trends completely turned about, but that turnabout has come at a time when our national attention is – very rightly – devoted to the conservative assault on women, voting, and life in general.

needs a first paragraph, that’s a second at best. make the need explicit.

To be sure, these statements are broad generalizations, and are only placeholders for multiple levels of behavioral or socioeconomic complexity that political science is only beginning to understand. The study of these relationships is predicated on their being maintained by rational actors; first through the behavior of “leaders” like Donald Trump and then through a worldwide resistance to health science, we are faced with the very influential presence of some pretty irrational actors. The shape of the world is changing, but to what? One can only guess, and nothing is as predictable as it was just a few years ago. For any number of reasons beyond the scope of this writing, our sense of what an Americans’ place in this world has become unmoored from consequence as our grasp of that context has slipped.

The popular conception of WW2-era America is one of unity and shared sacrifice. Again, this is a generalization- for every Rosie riveting away on an assembly line, there was a Japanese American cast away to a concentration camp. But it’s a generalization with a powerful grip on the imagination. Thoughts of kids rounding up salvage and of everyone doing their part for the troops is a much more pleasing memory than the thought of police rounding up Americans in the night, after all. That same “Unified America” made another appearance after 9/11, but its presence was only partly natural. The steering of that unity to indiscriminate violence was the through the imposition of an external force, that same conservatism that embraces violence today.

Covid on the other hand isn’t behaving by those rules. With the amount of Americans lost to Covid, we could have defeated the Axis and lost ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY Trade Center towers. And that’s just as of this writing, there will have been any number of additional 9/11’s absorbed between now and whenever you might be reading this. But we don’t have Boy Scout Troops rounding up spare toilet paper to cover the needy, and our own troops weren’t doing their part for everyone until the boss ordered them too. As of this writing, eighteen months in, we are divided along stark political or ideological lines. We face an existential challenge greater than any other in the past century, greater by far than that presented by the Reich or by two hundred al Quedas, but we face it divided and we’re dying by the thousands as a result.

What does any of this have to do with national security? Well, the “why” behind that reality of division is as complex as everything else, but the fact of it is what’s relevant here. Our division – on this scale – is an outcome that is different from previous examples, and it comes in defiance of existential consequence. To suppose that our adversaries wouldn’t be conscious of the significance would be unreasonably optimistic.

And to be sure, it may not even be hypothetical. We may be under assault as we speak!

come back, there’s a quick hit between rhetoric and reality?

This is probably not the case. I hope it’s not the case. But whether or not we’ve been attacked, the injury is present. Our adversaries, surely conscious of our divided conceptions, are just as surely watching how easily a virus – all but contained elsewhere – roams freely here. Surely our collective indifference to our collective loss has registered amongst those in positions of opposing power? And the worst part is, in some ways our libertarian skeptics are correct- as pandemics go, Covid is on the easy side. Our 674,000 (and counting) dead are a fraction of those lost to plague. What we are effectively doing is modeling vulnerabilities to our adversaries, at a pace and scale that we are frighteningly comfortable with. Whether Covid was conceived by man or Mother Nature, its spread has played out a worldwide wargame.

follow-up on the hypothetical, the rhetoric of a chinese vs a natural virus

the growing russian threat- crimea/afghanistan/tech

caveat, all politics are local and covid is worldwide

closing?

ww2 405399 / cov 674000 / 911 2996