In the first volume of his history of World War II, “The Gathering Storm,” Winston Churchill laid bare the root causes of the war.
The blame fell squarely on the Western powers’ failure to recognize the growing threat of war and to act to prevent it. Had the Allies’ prewar affairs “been conducted with the ordinary consistency and common sense usual in decent households,” war could have been averted.
Instead, they allowed “conditions to be built up which led to the very climax they dreaded most.” Churchill concluded with this warning for us today, “(The Western powers) have only to repeat the same well-meaning, short-sighted behavior towards the new problems which in singular resemblance confront us today to bring about a third convulsion from which none may live to tell the tale.”
Two existential threats of staggering potential gravity face the U.S. today, one foreign and one domestic. The sad, shocking reality is the indifference with which these threats are sloughed off by not only the American public but by the leadership of both political parties.
Not since the end of the Cold War have the opponents of the Pax Americana gathered with such cohesion, determination and aggression. The newly formalized alliance of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea threatens to drag the West into a global conflict for which it is ill-prepared. This threat was recently laid out by the bipartisan Commission on the National Defense Strategy: “The U.S. faces the most serious and most challenging threats since 1945, including the real risk of major near-term war.” The report concludes, “The nation was last prepared for such a fight during the Cold War, which ended 35 years ago. It is not prepared today.”
At the end of the Cold War, the U.S. was spending more than 5% of GNP on defense. In 2024, defense spending has fallen to approximately 3.5%. The cumulative result is a seriously depleted military capacity. The global nature of the opposing alliance has called into serious question whether the U.S. could respond to a multifront world war. Columnist Walter Russell Mead warned recently in the Wall Street Journal, “World War III is becoming more likely in the near term, and the U.S. is too weak either to prevent it or, should war come, to be confident of victory.”
National security is — or should be — a bipartisan issue. Neither party can escape blame for our current plight, but, sadly, neither party seems willing to call for the sacrifice and commitment needed to address the challenge.
The second existential threat is domestic, and it very much compounds the danger of the foreign threat.
The 35-year decline in defense spending has been accompanied by an explosion in nondefense welfare and entitlement spending, with a commensurate explosion in the national debt. These numbers tell the story: From 1990 to 2024, the national debt has risen from under $5 trillion to over $35 trillion.
The result of these compounding deficits has been that for the first time in our history, the annual cost of servicing the national debt in 2024 now surpasses the annual national defense budget. In 2024, gross interest payments on the national debt exceeded $1 trillion. Current projections estimate the national debt will exceed $54 trillion in 10 years. Congress and both political parties show no inclination to address this exploding problem.
The implications of the national debt threat are two-fold, and the consequences of both are dire. Deficit spending requires the ability annually to service (pay interest and rollover principal) national debt. No one knows the ultimate capacity of the financial markets to facilitate U.S. deficit spending, but at some point, if the deficits continue to accelerate, the markets will shut down and the U.S. will face the pain of bankruptcy.
In the meantime, even as the financial markets accommodate our profligacy, the rising cost of debt service is slowly choking our military budget and limiting our ability to meet foreign challenges.
The painful, common-sense solution to the debt problem is a systematic reduction in domestic spending coupled with a resetting of major entitlement programs (i.e., Social Security and Medicare) to ensure their economic viability. Politicians find such belt-tightening measures anathema. Neither party will campaign on the urgency of domestic spending cuts or the desperate need to restructure entitlement programs.
The confluence of these foreign and domestic threats demands a serious response. In the recent presidential debate, there was no serious discussion of either foreign threats or deficit spending.
The future of our country — and indeed the West — is at stake. Nothing less than Churchill’s “ordinary consistency and common sense usual in decent households” will enable the U.S. to avert the gathering storms of foreign adversaries and national bankruptcy. American voters intuitively know what common sense demands.
But where is the clear-eyed, hardheaded, common-sense leadership we need?
Garland S. Tucker III, retired chairman and CEO of Triangle Capital Corporation, is the author of “Conservative Heroes: Fourteen Leaders Who Shaped America — Jefferson to Reagan” (ISI Books) and “The High Tide of American Conservatism: Davis, Coolidge and the 1924 Election” (Emerald Books).