The deep chasm between the military ambitions of Washington elites and the American public’s refusal to pay the costs of war has undermined the foundation of U.S. global primacy.
According to Atlas Diplomacy, a research paper titled “The End of Cost-Free
Hegemony: Why the Domestic Foundations of U.S. Global Power Are Crumbling” by
Stephen Wertheim has been published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Comparing the historical consensus of the Cold War with the post–Cold War era, the paper demonstrates that while U.S. national security elites are calling for military mobilization against China, Russia, and Iran, the American public is unwilling to bear the costs of global dominance. A summary of the piece follows below.
United States foreign policy faces a structural domestic disjunction: on one side, national security elites in both the Democratic and Republican parties view threats from China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea as the gravest danger since 1945, calling for national mobilization and a massive military expansion to fight simultaneously across three theaters in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East—even if doing so requires hiking defense spending from 3 percent to Cold War levels of 5 to 17 percent of GDP, raising taxes, and cutting Social Security and Medicare. On the other side, American society strongly resists expensive foreign policies and rewards candidates who promise fewer foreign wars and greater focus on domestic affairs.
Throughout the four decades of the Cold War, high threat perception of communism and high cost acceptance were aligned among elites and ordinary Americans, enabling defense outlays of 7 to 10 percent of GDP in the 1950s and 1960s and an average of 5.6 percent in the 1980s. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, a new unspoken compact emerged in the 1990s under which the United States continued to dominate the world in the absence of a peer rival at minimal financial and human cost—a model of “primacy without pain” in which defense spending fell to 3 percent of GDP by 1999 and fewer than 8 percent of Americans cited foreign affairs as the nation’s most important problem.
That cut-rate hegemony allowed policymakers to expand U.S. security commitments and enlarge NATO without the informed consent of the public, operating on the assumption that Washington would never actually have to fight for new members. The September 11, 2001 attacks temporarily elevated threat perceptions and cost tolerance, but U.S. failures in Iraq and Afghanistan—which left more than 7,000 U.S. service members dead and $8 trillion in federal spending obligations—drove the public back to post–Cold War limits, with the share of Americans citing terrorism as the top national problem falling into single digits after 2007.
Today, in the late 2020s, the assumption among Washington elites that the American public can be rallied for a new twentieth-century-style Cold War does not match political reality. Unlike the Soviet Union, which combined superpower reach with a universalist ideology and domestic subversion inside the United States, Washington’s current rivals do not register to ordinary citizens as an existential threat to the American way of life.
As a result, the chasm between America’s accumulated global commitments and stagnant domestic will to supply the resources for them has produced severe instability and wild swings in foreign policy from one administration to the next. Continuing this strategic overstretch—rooted in a political rather than purely material shortfall—erodes the credibility of Washington’s security guarantees and will ultimately compel the United States either to scale back its foreign commitments or pay the heavy price of an avoidable conflict./ Source
