Militarism Is a Choice

If the U.S. is already overstretched, doing even more everywhere would push U.S. capabilities past the breaking point.

Walter Russell Mead is getting more overwrought by the day:

Not since Jimmy Carter’s presidency has the U.S. faced a concatenation of crises and setbacks on this scale.

Contrary to Mead’s hyperventilating warnings, the U.S. has obviously faced some crises and setbacks in the last forty years that were much more serious than anything that has happened in the last year. The initial crisis with North Korea in 1994 and the crisis in the Taiwan Strait in 1996 were arguably as serious, if not more so, than anything we are seeing today. North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons on Bush’s watch certainly qualifies as a setback on Mead’s terms, as does the North Korea war scare of 2017 brought about by Trump’s recklessness. The war scare of early 2020 with Iran was arguably more dangerous for the United States than the current Ukraine crisis is so far, and it involved direct attacks on U.S. troops resulting in dozens of serious injuries. As for setbacks, suffering massive terrorist attacks on our own soil seems rather more significant than Iranian negotiators playing hardball in Vienna. Losing thousands of American lives in a pointless and illegal war in Iraq is worse than anything that has occurred since Biden took office.

It’s not just that Mead is wrong in what he says, but he also expects his audience to have the memories of goldfish when he makes his sweeping, evidence-free assertions.