foreignpolicy--2020-05-29--How Tensions Between the U.S. and Iran Ended Up Strengthening ISIS

On a cold morning this past February , a 9-year-old resident of Iraq ’ s Khatuniya village took his family ’ s livestock to graze in nearby meadows .
When he didn ’ t return by late afternoon , two relatives went looking for him .
The next morning , the two men , Qasem Mohammed and Abd Mohammed Sabah , were found dead on a dirt road outside the village .
The killings bore the hallmarks of Islamic State attacks the villagers knew all too well—the men were found with their hands tied behind their backs and bullet wounds @ @ @ @ @ @ @ came as a surprise .
For nearly a year , the area had enjoyed a relative respite from violence , the result of a systematic campaign of raids conducted jointly by Iraqi and U.S. troops in late 2018 and early 2019 .
The raids , reported here for the first time , picked off one Islamic State member after another , gradually uprooting the militants from villages and forcing them to retreat to nearby mountain areas .
But the attack in Khatuniya in February marked the beginning of the Islamic State ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be tied to the ongoing escalation between the United States and neighboring Iran .
“ When the tensions between the U.S. and Iran increased , the frequency of the raids went down in this area , and ISIS activities went up.
” That friction peaked when the U.S. assassinated the Iranian military leader Qassem Suleimani on Iraqi soil in early January of this year .
In response , the Iraqi prime minister and parliament both called for the withdrawal of foreign troops from Iraq .
The U.S.-led coalition suspended its activities to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ When the tensions between the U.S. and Iran increased , the frequency of the raids went down in this area , and ISIS activities went up , ” said Hassan al-Soofy , a local intelligence officer who discovered the bodies of the shepherds in Khatuniya .
“ The situation became suitable for them [ Islamic State fighters ] and it helped them move.
” Since February ’ s Khatuniya killings and the disappearance of the boy , who was released after being held briefly , the Islamic State has claimed responsibility for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ coordinated ambushes against security forces .
The group has also capitalized on the coronavirus pandemic , which forced the coalition to evacuate most trainers .
Iraqi security forces redeployed some of their troops to urban areas to enforce lockdown measures .
“ We are terrified at night , ” said Hamid Muhsen , the mukhtar , or village chief , of Khatuniya , located in Riyadh district in the northern Kirkuk province .
“ I swear , the situation isn ’ t good .
ISIS is present in the village.
” Experts believe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ restored itself to the military capability that enabled the group to capture significant swaths of territory in 2014 .
But the U.S. coalition that helped defeat it and keep a lid on its insurgency is scaling down .
Although hostilities have slightly cooled off , the skirmishes between the United States and Iran earlier this year will likely pave the way for a permanent reduction of American troops in Iraq—further improving the Islamic State ’ s prospects .
Friction between the U.S.-led coalition and Iranian-backed armed groups , called the Popular Mobilization Forces @ @ @ @ @ @ @ anti-Islamic State operations in Iraq .
But the U.S. assassination Suleimani and the PMF ’ s deputy commander , Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis , in Baghdad earlier this year raised fear of a U.S.-Iran war on Iraqi soil .
By the time tensions cooled down and the coalition began ramping up support again , a second round of escalation in March resulted in the deaths of three coalition personnel , accelerating troop withdrawals from several bases in Iraq that had been used to stage joint operations against the Islamic State .
The U.S. and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of their military cooperation in June .
In the meantime , the disruption to operations has revealed just how deeply involved U.S. forces have been in the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq well after the group ’ s territorial defeat in 2017—the details of which are reported here for the first time .
Conversations with dozens of civilians and security forces suggest that the direct involvement of U.S. ground troops was a regular occurrence in 2019 , with several such raids conducted per month .
Iraqi commanders insist that “ on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Iraqi troops , ” in the words of Gen. Talib al-Kinani , until recently the top commander of the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service .
Maj. Gen. Eric Hill , the commander of special operations for the U.S.-led coalition , echoes this message , maintaining that the main role of the special forces was to train and advise Iraqi partners .
“ I would say largely these are Iraqi-driven and Iraqi-executed missions .
There ’ s on occasion times where we will go out into the field with them in an advisory capacity , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” he told Foreign Policy .
But conversations with dozens of civilians and security forces on the ground suggest that the direct involvement of U.S. ground troops in operations was a regular occurrence in 2019 , with several such raids conducted per month .
American ground troops coordinated airstrikes , processed intelligence , and—contrary to the coalition ’ s official position—engaged in combat .
Two Iraqi officers whose forces partner with U.S. special operations forces told Foreign Policy that during these joint missions , Iraqi and American soldiers moved together as “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have been allowed to join these special operations . )
Foreign Policy investigated several such missions—conducting interviews in rural areas of the Kirkuk and Nineveh provinces .
The raids were mostly carried out under cover of darkness , and at least two of them resulted in American casualties .
While many villagers suspected that Americans participated in the operations , their involvement became evident only when missions went awry , forcing the troops to remain on the ground into the daylight hours , when they could be seen by locals .
The convoy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ checkpoint , according to Muhannad Saleh , a soldier with the tribal PMF who manned the post that night .
( The PMF is Shiite-led , but it includes Sunni factions that draw fighters from local tribes . )
Nine were black Humvees belonging to Iraq ’ s Counter Terrorism Service , and six were sand-colored M-ATV vehicles used by U.S. special forces .
Part of the convoy remained near the checkpoint , while the rest moved north toward Kubaiba .
According to an Iraqi officer with knowledge of the raid , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a mile east of Kubaiba .
Both American and Iraqi soldiers filed out of the vehicles , moving in tandem as they searched house after house .
When they found no one , the ground force commander made the fateful decision to continue on foot toward Kubaiba , perched further uphill .
They walked for several hundred yards when a group of Islamic State members opened fire from a nearby house .
The soldiers had no immediate backup from the gunners atop the vehicles—which had been left behind .
Coalition aircraft were hovering @ @ @ @ @ @ @ formation had broken down , making it impossible to call in a precision airstrike without risking friendly fire .
For two hours , Saleh could hear heavy gunfire , and soon , reports of casualties : Two Counter Terrorism Service soldiers died , and four others were wounded .
Up to 12 members of the Islamic State were killed in the raid .
The forces remained in the area until 7 a.m. “ Usually , when the Americans do missions , they don ’ t let the sun rise , because they want @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Policy .
Shepherds woke up to the surprising sight of American and Iraqi troops driving past their houses .
The coalition , which usually shares updates on anti-Islamic State operations with media , published no details of the April 19 operation .
In an emailed response to a question about the raid , the coalition confirmed that two U.S. troops and a translator were injured as a result of enemy fire .
The U.S. forces incurred casualties in at least one other raid in 2019 .
On Aug. 10 , Iraq ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ American and Canadian special forces launched an operation to clear a forest-covered island in the middle of the Tigris River , near the village of Kanoos .
A member of the SWAT team described it as a difficult operation , with the Islamic State using its tunnel network to ambush the forces from behind .
The firefight lasted some two hours , killing Gunnery Sgt .
Scott Koppenhafer and a U.S. military contractor and wounding another U.S. service member and two members of the SWAT team .
The coalition faced growing restrictions on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ second half of 2019 , after several mysterious blasts hit weapons depots and bases belonging to the Iran-backed PMF .
No one claimed responsibility , but the PMF accused the United States and Israel of targeting its positions and pressured the Iraqi Joint Operations Command to impose greater restrictions on American surveillance drones and aircraft .
The United States denied any involvement .
“ When [ the joint operations ] were allowed , they were effective .
But there were so many times that they were not allowed .
Already in 2019 , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” said Michael Knights , a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy , who specializes in military affairs and who has advised the U.S. military in Iraq .
Throughout 2019 , the Iraqi government expanded so-called Restricted Operating Zones to areas where Iran-backed armed groups were based , including areas around Baghdad and Diyala provinces where the Islamic State was active .
Flying over these areas required special approval .
“ Sometimes they ’ d say yes , sometimes they ’ d say no , ” a senior @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the sensitive nature of the issue .
American ground forces faced similar movement restrictions .
An Iraqi officer who has partnered with U.S. special forces to conduct anti-Islamic State operations said that the so-called Islamic resistance—PMF groups particularly hostile toward the United States—repeatedly prevented convoys composed of both Iraqi and American troops from accessing targets in their areas of control , even though the missions had been approved by the Joint Operations Command .
In one such instance north of Baghdad , the Iraqi officer went to speak with a commander from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ negotiate the convoy ’ s passage .
“ He told me , ‘ This is our sector and we welcome you to conduct your operation .
You are Iraqi and we are Iraqi .
But honestly , we will not allow American forces to enter , even if you have the approval from the prime minister himself , ’ ” the Iraqi officer recalled the Badr commander saying .
In at least one instance in 2019 , the PMF fired at a convoy composed of American and Iraqi special forces .
To avoid @ @ @ @ @ @ @ times nixed operations with an American ground component near PMF areas .
Now , mounting threats by the so-called Islamic resistance to strike against American targets to avenge the deaths of Suleimani and Muhandis have further raised the risk of confrontation , making U.S. participation in such operations increasingly untenable .
“ The situation will be more difficult in terms of conducting our missions , ” said the Iraqi officer who regularly partners with American special forces .
Asked if he could do without them , he answered : “ We can achieve @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” “ In the long term , the whole purpose of this is that it ’ s only Iraqis securing their country against ISIS.
” Coalition officials , often frustrated at Iraq ’ s unwillingness to rein in the PMF , say that the pause in coalition activities may be a natural opportunity to wean Iraqi partners off of U.S. support .
“ In the near term , there is a reduction in the effectiveness of those operations , ” said a senior coalition official .
“ But in the long term , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it ’ s only Iraqis securing their country against ISIS.
” But civilians in rural areas have watched Iraqi security forces struggle to effectively fight the insurgency .
Since 2018 , the rural areas around Kirkuk have witnessed several large-scale military operations by the Iraqi Army and police to clear sleeper cells .
Military commanders declared these operations a success , but civilians say the militants would hide while operations were underway , only to reemerge days later and resume their campaign .
Then , intelligence-led raids conducted by U.S. and Iraqi special @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into rural areas , turned the tide .
But in March this year , American troops withdrew from the K1 Air Base in Kirkuk .
The joint operations have largely ceased , leaving the villagers once again vulnerable to the Islamic State .

On a cold morning this past February, a 9-year-old resident of Iraq’s Khatuniya village took his family’s livestock to graze in nearby meadows. When he didn’t return by late afternoon, two relatives went looking for him. The next morning, the two men, Qasem Mohammed and Abd Mohammed Sabah, were found dead on a dirt road outside the village.
On a cold morning this past February, a 9-year-old resident of Iraq’s Khatuniya village took his family’s livestock to graze in nearby meadows. When he didn’t return by late afternoon, two relatives went looking for him. The next morning, the two men, Qasem Mohammed and Abd Mohammed Sabah, were found dead on a dirt road outside the village.
The killings bore the hallmarks of Islamic State attacks the villagers knew all too well—the men were found with their hands tied behind their backs and bullet wounds in their heads. Still, they came as a surprise. For nearly a year, the area had enjoyed a relative respite from violence, the result of a systematic campaign of raids conducted jointly by Iraqi and U.S. troops in late 2018 and early 2019.
The raids, reported here for the first time, picked off one Islamic State member after another, gradually uprooting the militants from villages and forcing them to retreat to nearby mountain areas.
But the attack in Khatuniya in February marked the beginning of the Islamic State’s return to the area—a resurgence that seems to be tied to the ongoing escalation between the United States and neighboring Iran.
“When the tensions between the U.S. and Iran increased, the frequency of the raids went down in this area, and ISIS activities went up.”
That friction peaked when the U.S. assassinated the Iranian military leader Qassem Suleimani on Iraqi soil in early January of this year. In response, the Iraqi prime minister and parliament both called for the withdrawal of foreign troops from Iraq. The U.S.-led coalition suspended its activities to boost protection of its own forces.
“When the tensions between the U.S. and Iran increased, the frequency of the raids went down in this area, and ISIS activities went up,” said Hassan al-Soofy, a local intelligence officer who discovered the bodies of the shepherds in Khatuniya. “The situation became suitable for them [Islamic State fighters] and it helped them move.”
Since February’s Khatuniya killings and the disappearance of the boy, who was released after being held briefly, the Islamic State has claimed responsibility for hundreds of operations—from attacks on civilians to coordinated ambushes against security forces. The group has also capitalized on the coronavirus pandemic, which forced the coalition to evacuate most trainers. Iraqi security forces redeployed some of their troops to urban areas to enforce lockdown measures.
“We are terrified at night,” said Hamid Muhsen, the mukhtar, or village chief, of Khatuniya, located in Riyadh district in the northern Kirkuk province. “I swear, the situation isn’t good. ISIS is present in the village.”
Describing the U.S. Role in Raids on the Islamic State
Experts believe that the Islamic State has not yet restored itself to the military capability that enabled the group to capture significant swaths of territory in 2014. But the U.S. coalition that helped defeat it and keep a lid on its insurgency is scaling down. Although hostilities have slightly cooled off, the skirmishes between the United States and Iran earlier this year will likely pave the way for a permanent reduction of American troops in Iraq—further improving the Islamic State’s prospects.
Friction between the U.S.-led coalition and Iranian-backed armed groups, called the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), have long complicated anti-Islamic State operations in Iraq. But the U.S. assassination Suleimani and the PMF’s deputy commander, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, in Baghdad earlier this year raised fear of a U.S.-Iran war on Iraqi soil.
By the time tensions cooled down and the coalition began ramping up support again, a second round of escalation in March resulted in the deaths of three coalition personnel, accelerating troop withdrawals from several bases in Iraq that had been used to stage joint operations against the Islamic State. The U.S. and Iraq are set to renegotiate the terms of their military cooperation in June.
U.S. soldiers board a Lockheed C-130 Hercules at K1 Air Base in northern Iraq on March 24 preparing for the transfer of power to Iraqi forces.
In the meantime, the disruption to operations has revealed just how deeply involved U.S. forces have been in the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq well after the group’s territorial defeat in 2017—the details of which are reported here for the first time.
Conversations with dozens of civilians and security forces suggest that the direct involvement of U.S. ground troops was a regular occurrence in 2019, with several such raids conducted per month.
Iraqi commanders insist that “on the battlefield, it’s only Iraqi troops,” in the words of Gen. Talib al-Kinani, until recently the top commander of the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service. Maj. Gen. Eric Hill, the commander of special operations for the U.S.-led coalition, echoes this message, maintaining that the main role of the special forces was to train and advise Iraqi partners. “I would say largely these are Iraqi-driven and Iraqi-executed missions. There’s on occasion times where we will go out into the field with them in an advisory capacity, but the Iraqis are executing the mission,” he told Foreign Policy.
But conversations with dozens of civilians and security forces on the ground suggest that the direct involvement of U.S. ground troops in operations was a regular occurrence in 2019, with several such raids conducted per month. American ground troops coordinated airstrikes, processed intelligence, and—contrary to the coalition’s official position—engaged in combat. Two Iraqi officers whose forces partner with U.S. special operations forces told Foreign Policy that during these joint missions, Iraqi and American soldiers moved together as “brothers in arms.” (No media have been allowed to join these special operations.)
Foreign Policy investigated several such missions—conducting interviews in rural areas of the Kirkuk and Nineveh provinces. The raids were mostly carried out under cover of darkness, and at least two of them resulted in American casualties. While many villagers suspected that Americans participated in the operations, their involvement became evident only when missions went awry, forcing the troops to remain on the ground into the daylight hours, when they could be seen by locals.
One such operation took place in April of last year, on the seam between the Arab and Kurdish areas of Iraq. A convoy composed of American and Iraqi special forces left the K1 Air Base in Kirkuk that evening, driving along unlit country roads, until it reached a checkpoint southeast of Kubaiba. The village had been a front line in the battle between Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and the Islamic State. Its civilians fled during the fighting and never returned. Even after the militants were officially cleared from the area in 2017, sleeper cells remained behind, using the abandoned village as a launchpad for attacks on nearby checkpoints and villages. They also dug tunnels that allowed them to retreat to the mountains when necessary.
The convoy of some 15 vehicles stopped at the checkpoint, according to Muhannad Saleh, a soldier with the tribal PMF who manned the post that night. (The PMF is Shiite-led, but it includes Sunni factions that draw fighters from local tribes.) Nine were black Humvees belonging to Iraq’s Counter Terrorism Service, and six were sand-colored M-ATV vehicles used by U.S. special forces. Part of the convoy remained near the checkpoint, while the rest moved north toward Kubaiba. According to an Iraqi officer with knowledge of the raid, the cars first stopped near Muzerir village, a mile east of Kubaiba. Both American and Iraqi soldiers filed out of the vehicles, moving in tandem as they searched house after house. When they found no one, the ground force commander made the fateful decision to continue on foot toward Kubaiba, perched further uphill. They walked for several hundred yards when a group of Islamic State members opened fire from a nearby house. The soldiers had no immediate backup from the gunners atop the vehicles—which had been left behind. Coalition aircraft were hovering above, but the ground troops’ formation had broken down, making it impossible to call in a precision airstrike without risking friendly fire.
For two hours, Saleh could hear heavy gunfire, and soon, reports of casualties: Two Counter Terrorism Service soldiers died, and four others were wounded. Up to 12 members of the Islamic State were killed in the raid. The forces remained in the area until 7 a.m. “Usually, when the Americans do missions, they don’t let the sun rise, because they want to withdraw,” Saleh told Foreign Policy. Shepherds woke up to the surprising sight of American and Iraqi troops driving past their houses.
The coalition, which usually shares updates on anti-Islamic State operations with media, published no details of the April 19 operation. In an emailed response to a question about the raid, the coalition confirmed that two U.S. troops and a translator were injured as a result of enemy fire.
Grenade casings, shown on Sept. 19, 2019, were found on the shores of the Tigris River facing Kanoos Island, where an American armored vehicle reportedly fired rounds toward the island. A weapons expert identified the casing as 40 mm grenades, fired from an auto grenade launcher like an MK-19.
A map left behind by coalition forces at a military base in Kanoos on Sept. 19, 2019. The handwriting appears to indicate a total of seven casualties incurred during the mission.
The U.S. forces incurred casualties in at least one other raid in 2019. On Aug. 10, Iraq’s SWAT teams from Nineveh province together with American and Canadian special forces launched an operation to clear a forest-covered island in the middle of the Tigris River, near the village of Kanoos.
A member of the SWAT team described it as a difficult operation, with the Islamic State using its tunnel network to ambush the forces from behind. The firefight lasted some two hours, killing Gunnery Sgt. Scott Koppenhafer and a U.S. military contractor and wounding another U.S. service member and two members of the SWAT team.
Kanoos Island, surrounded by the Tigris River, is seen from the base staffed by local security forces on Sept. 19, 2019. During an Aug. 10 raid, militants took advantage of forests and tunnels to ambush soldiers as they attempted to clear the island.
The secrecy surrounding these raids is to some extent inherent in special operations. But the Americans’ low profile also points to the increasingly tenuous position of U.S. troops in Iraq—a country now caught in the tug-of-war between the United States and Iran.
The coalition faced growing restrictions on the use of Iraqi airspace in the second half of 2019, after several mysterious blasts hit weapons depots and bases belonging to the Iran-backed PMF. No one claimed responsibility, but the PMF accused the United States and Israel of targeting its positions and pressured the Iraqi Joint Operations Command to impose greater restrictions on American surveillance drones and aircraft. The United States denied any involvement.
“When [the joint operations] were allowed, they were effective. But there were so many times that they were not allowed. Already in 2019, we were facing significant reduction of access,” said Michael Knights, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who specializes in military affairs and who has advised the U.S. military in Iraq.
[fp-related]
Throughout 2019, the Iraqi government expanded so-called Restricted Operating Zones to areas where Iran-backed armed groups were based, including areas around Baghdad and Diyala provinces where the Islamic State was active. Flying over these areas required special approval. “Sometimes they’d say yes, sometimes they’d say no,” a senior coalition official said, requesting anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the issue.
American ground forces faced similar movement restrictions. An Iraqi officer who has partnered with U.S. special forces to conduct anti-Islamic State operations said that the so-called Islamic resistance—PMF groups particularly hostile toward the United States—repeatedly prevented convoys composed of both Iraqi and American troops from accessing targets in their areas of control, even though the missions had been approved by the Joint Operations Command.
In one such instance north of Baghdad, the Iraqi officer went to speak with a commander from the PMF’s Badr Organization to negotiate the convoy’s passage. “He told me, ‘This is our sector and we welcome you to conduct your operation. You are Iraqi and we are Iraqi. But honestly, we will not allow American forces to enter, even if you have the approval from the prime minister himself,’” the Iraqi officer recalled the Badr commander saying. In at least one instance in 2019, the PMF fired at a convoy composed of American and Iraqi special forces.
A U.S. soldier stands behind Iraqi soldiers wearing face masks during the handover ceremony of the K1 Air Base near Kirkuk on March 29.
To avoid hostilities, Joint Operations Command has at times nixed operations with an American ground component near PMF areas. Now, mounting threats by the so-called Islamic resistance to strike against American targets to avenge the deaths of Suleimani and Muhandis have further raised the risk of confrontation, making U.S. participation in such operations increasingly untenable.
“The situation will be more difficult in terms of conducting our missions,” said the Iraqi officer who regularly partners with American special forces. Asked if he could do without them, he answered: “We can achieve victory, but we will bleed more.”
“In the long term, the whole purpose of this is that it’s only Iraqis securing their country against ISIS.”
Coalition officials, often frustrated at Iraq’s unwillingness to rein in the PMF, say that the pause in coalition activities may be a natural opportunity to wean Iraqi partners off of U.S. support. “In the near term, there is a reduction in the effectiveness of those operations,” said a senior coalition official. “But in the long term, the whole purpose of this is that it’s only Iraqis securing their country against ISIS.”
But civilians in rural areas have watched Iraqi security forces struggle to effectively fight the insurgency.
Since 2018, the rural areas around Kirkuk have witnessed several large-scale military operations by the Iraqi Army and police to clear sleeper cells. Military commanders declared these operations a success, but civilians say the militants would hide while operations were underway, only to reemerge days later and resume their campaign.
Then, intelligence-led raids conducted by U.S. and Iraqi special forces, coupled with police deployment deeper into rural areas, turned the tide.
But in March this year, American troops withdrew from the K1 Air Base in Kirkuk. The joint operations have largely ceased, leaving the villagers once again vulnerable to the Islamic State.


foreignpolicy--2020-05-28--Want to Fix the Deficit? Bring Home the Troops.

Want to Fix the Deficit ?
Bring Home the Troops .
An active foreign policy is costly .
Intervention requires aid programs , trade initiatives , and diplomatic personnel .
Reliance on the military is especially expensive .
What are described as “ endless ” wars post-9/11 are expected to eventually cost , including veterans ’ care , more than $ 6 trillion .
And combat is not over : Approximately 12,000 service members are posted in Afghanistan , though the number is dropping under the peace accord with the Taliban , and some 6,000 troops remain in Iraq .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ while special operations forces have been deployed in Yemen .
Peacetime deployments , some permanent , some temporary , also create a significant , ongoing burden .
For instance , the United States currently stations some 78,000 troops in East Asia , as many as 65,000 in the Persian Gulf , about 35,000 in Europe , and 6,000 to 7,000 in Africa .
Additional units in the United States back up these commitments .
Every military alliance and relationship requires additional force structure , wherever the troops are deployed at any given time @ @ @ @ @ @ @ military policy had been growing difficult to bear long before the economic crisis created by the coronavirus pandemic .
In June 2019 , the Congressional Budget Office forecast trillion-dollar annual deficits as far as the eye can see .
The agency warned : “ Large budget deficits over the next 30 years are projected to drive federal debt held by the public to unprecedented levels—from 78 percent of gross domestic product ( GDP ) in 2019 to 144 percent by 2049.
” For comparison : Greece was at a similar deficit level when @ @ @ @ @ @ @ crisis in the wake of the global financial crisis .
If interest rates in the United States grow by just 1 percent , in three decades the federal government ’ s debt will run 199 percent of GDP .
However , well before that level is reached , Washington would risk what the Congressional Budget Office terms “ a fiscal crisis—that is , a situation in which the interest rate on federal debt rises abruptly because investors have lost confidence in the U.S. government ’ s fiscal position.
” This would greatly intensify @ @ @ @ @ @ @ economic collapse and massive federal bailouts , the federal financial situation has dramatically worsened .
At the end of April , the budget office projected a 12 percent drop in real GDP this quarter , an unemployment rate of 14 percent , a likely annual deficit of $ 3.7 trillion in 2020 and $ 2.1 trillion next year , and debt at 101 percent of GDP by the end of the fiscal year .
Those numbers may well rise .
The Manhattan Institute ’ s Brian Riedl believes the red ink might even @ @ @ @ @ @ @ If so , Washington will borrow more this year than during 2014 to 2019 combined .
States also face enormous economic pressures .
Most are forced to at least nominally balance their budgets , as only Uncle Sam has a printing press , but their pension funds , which collectively faced a $ 1 trillion funding hole at the start of the year , are likely to have $ 1.5 trillion to $ 2 trillion in unfunded liabilities by December .
Some states , most notably Illinois , Kentucky , and New Jersey @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Democratic House has proposed including a state bailout in its proposal for another $ 3 trillion in aid .
The debt tsunami can not continue indefinitely .
Last year , Washington spent $ 4.4 trillion , of which nearly a quarter was borrowed .
There are no simple solutions .
Congress is unlikely to raise taxes .
In 2017 the federal budget was awash in red ink , but Congress passed a large tax cut .
Making ends meet was pushed even further into the future , when government programs presumably would be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ alternative is to scale back spending programs—but there isn ’ t much to cut .
Domestic discretionary outlays , which Congress normally targets when intent on reducing expenditures , ran only $ 661 billion in 2019 .
These expenditures , at 6.3 percent of GDP , already were below their historical average , 8.4 percent over the last half-century , and wiping out everything would still leave a deficit .
A trillion dollars went for Social Security and $ 644 billion for Medicare last year—both of which make up the traditional , untouchable @ @ @ @ @ @ @ proposals for reform abound , President Donald Trump has refused to trim either , and progressive activists continue to push for benefit increases .
Other mandatory entitlement programs , with benefits set by law , constituted $ 642 billion .
Medicaid ran $ 409 billion ; it already provides the lowest reimbursement rates of any government program or private health insurance .
Net interest payments came to $ 375 billion .
Interest rates have nowhere to go but up , and these outlays can not be cut without repudiating the debt .
Meanwhile @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was $ 676 billion .
Today most of that is “ defense ” only in the sense of protecting allies , many of which can defend themselves and little of which can be considered essential for this nation ’ s security .
( Of course , the United States has other less-than-vital interests , in stability , for instance , and thus the defeat of a group like the Islamic State .
Yet Washington , too , has proved to be a major force for instability—as in the cases of Iraq and Libya @ @ @ @ @ @ @ government turning military alliances into welfare programs when the United States dominates the global economy .
But the calculations change when the federal government is racing toward insolvency .
In another decade or two , when entitlements are competing with the national debt in spiraling upward , priorities will finally have to be set .
And missions that are not essential , such as engaging in nation-building and protecting prosperous , populous allies , are likely to lose out .
Some right-leaning hawks acknowledge the imminent fiscal crunch but blame social programs .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ simple : entitlements , not the Pentagon , should be slashed .
Alas , they have yet to find a credible presidential candidate willing to make that case .
Liberal interventionists have an even bigger problem , as most leading progressives want to spend more , much more , on domestic priorities .
Creating “ Medicare for All ” and wiping out student debt would cost trillions of dollars .
Despite the veneer of moderation retained by former Vice President Joe Biden , the presidential candidate has shifted leftward to bolster his support @ @ @ @ @ @ @ promiscuous intervention are likely to resist any military cutbacks .
However , once a fiscal crisis hits , dramatic and rapid if not instant reductions will be required .
That risks creating a dangerous mismatch with international objectives .
Policymakers should begin , today , by scaling back their interventionist strategies that require such a large and expensive military , with hundreds of bases and hundreds of thousands of troops around the globe .
The military budget is the price of America ’ s foreign policy .
A new approach should exercise restraint @ @ @ @ @ @ @ then construct the force structure necessary to achieve more limited goals .
For instance , Washington could do a real pivot to Asia .
That would mean turning Europe ’ s defense over to Europe , which vastly outranges Russia on economic strength , population size , and technological advance .
Despite the president ’ s criticism of NATO , his administration added 4,500 troops to Europe last year .
An extra $ 5.9 billion is being spent this fiscal year on the European Deterrence Initiative .
Personnel should be demobilized and outlays @ @ @ @ @ @ @ European-led NATO or separate organization tied to the European Union would be up to the Europeans .
Trans-Atlantic cooperation among equals to advance shared interests would replace continental dependence on the United States .
Afghanistan should be the United States ’ last attempt at gratuitous nation-building .
The United States should de-emphasize the Middle East , which no longer possesses a global energy stranglehold .
Washington should accept instability in the region , bring home U.S. troops , and encourage local powers to ratchet down tensions between Shiites and Sunnis and cooperate against @ @ @ @ @ @ @ State .
Afghanistan should be the United States ’ last attempt at gratuitous nation-building .
In Asia , Washington could shift to a strategy of offshore balancing , relying on allied states to ensure freedom of navigation and the independence of important Pacific states , most notably Japan , Australia , and the Philippines .
Ground troops should be withdrawn from South Korea and Japan .
With more than 50 times the GDP and twice the population of the North , the South Korea could take over its own defense .
As with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ come from reducing force structure after reducing commitments .
Such an approach would be nothing like “ isolationism , ” the term of opprobrium routinely tossed at anyone who opposes today ’ s policy of promiscuous war-making .
Rather , this strategy would be the “ humble foreign policy ” that George W. Bush initially advocated , with fewer wars and lesser requirements for manpower and materiel—and , hence , lower Pentagon outlays .
That wouldn ’ t be enough to balance the federal budget , but it would help .
And it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ military outlays on a far more responsible and sustainable path .

An active foreign policy is costly. Intervention requires aid programs, trade initiatives, and diplomatic personnel. Reliance on the military is especially expensive. What are described as “endless” wars post-9/11 are expected to eventually cost, including veterans’ care, more than $6 trillion . And combat is not over: Approximately 12,000 service members are posted in Afghanistan, though the number is dropping under the peace accord with the Taliban, and some 6,000 troops remain in Iraq. A few hundred work in Syria, while special operations forces have been deployed in Yemen. Peacetime deployments , some permanent, some temporary, also create a significant, ongoing burden. For instance, the United States currently stations some 78,000 troops in East Asia, as many as 65,000 in the Persian Gulf, about 35,000 in Europe, and 6,000 to 7,000 in Africa. Additional units in the United States back up these commitments. Every military alliance and relationship requires additional force structure, wherever the troops are deployed at any given time.
An active foreign policy is costly. Intervention requires aid programs, trade initiatives, and diplomatic personnel. Reliance on the military is especially expensive. What are described as “endless” wars post-9/11 are expected to eventually cost, including veterans’ care, more than $6 trillion. And combat is not over: Approximately 12,000 service members are posted in Afghanistan, though the number is dropping under the peace accord with the Taliban, and some 6,000 troops remain in Iraq. A few hundred work in Syria, while special operations forces have been deployed in Yemen. Peacetime deployments, some permanent, some temporary, also create a significant, ongoing burden. For instance, the United States currently stations some 78,000 troops in East Asia, as many as 65,000 in the Persian Gulf, about 35,000 in Europe, and 6,000 to 7,000 in Africa. Additional units in the United States back up these commitments. Every military alliance and relationship requires additional force structure, wherever the troops are deployed at any given time.
The financial burdens of this activist military policy had been growing difficult to bear long before the economic crisis created by the coronavirus pandemic. In June 2019, the Congressional Budget Office forecast trillion-dollar annual deficits as far as the eye can see. The agency warned: “Large budget deficits over the next 30 years are projected to drive federal debt held by the public to unprecedented levels—from 78 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2019 to 144 percent by 2049.” For comparison: Greece was at a similar deficit level when it was battered by its own debt crisis in the wake of the global financial crisis. If interest rates in the United States grow by just 1 percent, in three decades the federal government’s debt will run 199 percent of GDP. However, well before that level is reached, Washington would risk what the Congressional Budget Office terms “a fiscal crisis—that is, a situation in which the interest rate on federal debt rises abruptly because investors have lost confidence in the U.S. government’s fiscal position.” This would greatly intensify the fiscal crunch.
With the ongoing economic collapse and massive federal bailouts, the federal financial situation has dramatically worsened. At the end of April, the budget office projected a 12 percent drop in real GDP this quarter, an unemployment rate of 14 percent, a likely annual deficit of $3.7 trillion in 2020 and $2.1 trillion next year, and debt at 101 percent of GDP by the end of the fiscal year. Those numbers may well rise. The Manhattan Institute’s Brian Riedl believes the red ink might even hit $4.2 trillion this year. If so, Washington will borrow more this year than during 2014 to 2019 combined.
States also face enormous economic pressures. Most are forced to at least nominally balance their budgets, as only Uncle Sam has a printing press, but their pension funds, which collectively faced a $1 trillion funding hole at the start of the year, are likely to have $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion in unfunded liabilities by December. Some states, most notably Illinois, Kentucky, and New Jersey, already are at risk. The Democratic House has proposed including a state bailout in its proposal for another $3 trillion in aid.
The debt tsunami cannot continue indefinitely. Last year, Washington spent $4.4 trillion, of which nearly a quarter was borrowed.
There are no simple solutions. Congress is unlikely to raise taxes. In 2017 the federal budget was awash in red ink, but Congress passed a large tax cut. Making ends meet was pushed even further into the future, when government programs presumably would be paid by someone somehow sometime. The alternative is to scale back spending programs—but there isn’t much to cut. Domestic discretionary outlays, which Congress normally targets when intent on reducing expenditures, ran only $661 billion in 2019. These expenditures, at 6.3 percent of GDP, already were below their historical average, 8.4 percent over the last half-century, and wiping out everything would still leave a deficit. A trillion dollars went for Social Security and $644 billion for Medicare last year—both of which make up the traditional, untouchable third rail of U.S. politics. Although proposals for reform abound, President Donald Trump has refused to trim either, and progressive activists continue to push for benefit increases. Other mandatory entitlement programs, with benefits set by law, constituted $642 billion. Medicaid ran $409 billion; it already provides the lowest reimbursement rates of any government program or private health insurance. Net interest payments came to $375 billion. Interest rates have nowhere to go but up, and these outlays cannot be cut without repudiating the debt.
Meanwhile, last year’s military budget was $676 billion. Today most of that is “defense” only in the sense of protecting allies, many of which can defend themselves and little of which can be considered essential for this nation’s security. (Of course, the United States has other less-than-vital interests, in stability, for instance, and thus the defeat of a group like the Islamic State. Yet Washington, too, has proved to be a major force for instability—as in the cases of Iraq and Libya.) Americans may not mind their government turning military alliances into welfare programs when the United States dominates the global economy. But the calculations change when the federal government is racing toward insolvency. In another decade or two, when entitlements are competing with the national debt in spiraling upward, priorities will finally have to be set. And missions that are not essential, such as engaging in nation-building and protecting prosperous, populous allies, are likely to lose out.
Some right-leaning hawks acknowledge the imminent fiscal crunch but blame social programs. The answer, they argue, is simple: entitlements, not the Pentagon, should be slashed. Alas, they have yet to find a credible presidential candidate willing to make that case. Liberal interventionists have an even bigger problem, as most leading progressives want to spend more, much more, on domestic priorities. Creating “Medicare for All” and wiping out student debt would cost trillions of dollars. Despite the veneer of moderation retained by former Vice President Joe Biden, the presidential candidate has shifted leftward to bolster his support among activists.
The bipartisan advocates of promiscuous intervention are likely to resist any military cutbacks. However, once a fiscal crisis hits, dramatic and rapid if not instant reductions will be required. That risks creating a dangerous mismatch with international objectives.
Policymakers should begin, today, by scaling back their interventionist strategies that require such a large and expensive military, with hundreds of bases and hundreds of thousands of troops around the globe. The military budget is the price of America’s foreign policy. A new approach should exercise restraint, scale back national ambitions, and then construct the force structure necessary to achieve more limited goals.
For instance, Washington could do a real pivot to Asia. That would mean turning Europe’s defense over to Europe, which vastly outranges Russia on economic strength, population size, and technological advance. Despite the president’s criticism of NATO, his administration added 4,500 troops to Europe last year. An extra $5.9 billion is being spent this fiscal year on the European Deterrence Initiative. Personnel should be demobilized and outlays cut. Whether the vehicle is a European-led NATO or separate organization tied to the European Union would be up to the Europeans. Trans-Atlantic cooperation among equals to advance shared interests would replace continental dependence on the United States.
Afghanistan should be the United States’ last attempt at gratuitous nation-building. The United States should de-emphasize the Middle East, which no longer possesses a global energy stranglehold. Washington should accept instability in the region, bring home U.S. troops, and encourage local powers to ratchet down tensions between Shiites and Sunnis and cooperate against common threats, such as the Islamic State. Afghanistan should be the United States’ last attempt at gratuitous nation-building.
In Asia, Washington could shift to a strategy of offshore balancing, relying on allied states to ensure freedom of navigation and the independence of important Pacific states, most notably Japan, Australia, and the Philippines. Ground troops should be withdrawn from South Korea and Japan. With more than 50 times the GDP and twice the population of the North, the South Korea could take over its own defense. As with Europe, the most important savings would come from reducing force structure after reducing commitments.
Such an approach would be nothing like “isolationism,” the term of opprobrium routinely tossed at anyone who opposes today’s policy of promiscuous war-making. Rather, this strategy would be the “humble foreign policy” that George W. Bush initially advocated, with fewer wars and lesser requirements for manpower and materiel—and, hence, lower Pentagon outlays. That wouldn’t be enough to balance the federal budget, but it would help. And it would, at long last, put military outlays on a far more responsible and sustainable path.


foreignpolicy--2020-05-30--Our Top Weekend Reads

Our Top Weekend Reads

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The crux of U.S. President Donald Trump ’ s “ America First ” philosophy is bringing jobs back to the United States .
His administration thinks the coronavirus pandemic opens an opportunity for this , but the evidence suggests otherwise .
Meanwhile , the United States is undergoing a severe economic crisis sparked by the pandemic , but the stock market is soaring .
And the U.S. financial commitment to its military presence abroad is straining the domestic economy .
Bringing the troops home @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Are Stocks Soaring in the Middle of a Pandemic ?
We asked six leading global thinkers to help us understand why the stock market is performing so well despite the economic crisis caused by the pandemic .
2 .
No , the Pandemic Will Not Bring Jobs Back From China The Trump administration believes the pandemic will spur a return of manufacturing jobs to the United States , but there is no evidence of any coronavirus-induced rush by companies to return , Foreign Policy ’ s Edward Alden writes .
3 .
African @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Condemn Police Killing in Minneapolis African leaders reacted to the killing of a black man by Minneapolis police with a mixture of outrage and dismay , reflecting the diplomatic fallout of U.S. police violence and racial injustices , Foreign Policy ’ s Robbie Gramer reports .
A South Korean organization that helps women who were forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese military during World War II has come under scrutiny over its financial dealings , Morten Soendergaard Larsen reports from Seoul .
5 .
Want to Fix the Deficit ?
Bring Home @ @ @ @ @ @ @ abroad could inject much-needed cash into the U.S. economy , Doug Bandow writes .

The crux of U.S. President Donald Trump’s “America First” philosophy is bringing jobs back to the United States. His administration thinks the coronavirus pandemic opens an opportunity for this, but the evidence suggests otherwise.
The crux of U.S. President Donald Trump’s “America First” philosophy is bringing jobs back to the United States. His administration thinks the coronavirus pandemic opens an opportunity for this, but the evidence suggests otherwise.
Meanwhile, the United States is undergoing a severe economic crisis sparked by the pandemic, but the stock market is soaring.
And the U.S. financial commitment to its military presence abroad is straining the domestic economy. Bringing the troops home could change that.
Here are Foreign Policy’s top weekend reads.
The charging bull on Wall Street is decked out with a facemask in New York City on May 19.
We asked six leading global thinkers to help us understand why the stock market is performing so well despite the economic crisis caused by the pandemic.
A worker assembles a car at the newly renovated Ford Assembly Plant in Chicago, on June 24, 2019.
The Trump administration believes the pandemic will spur a return of manufacturing jobs to the United States, but there is no evidence of any coronavirus-induced rush by companies to return, Foreign Policy’s Edward Alden writes.
Protesters face police in Minneapolis.
African leaders reacted to the killing of a black man by Minneapolis police with a mixture of outrage and dismay, reflecting the diplomatic fallout of U.S. police violence and racial injustices, Foreign Policy’s Robbie Gramer reports.
Lee Yong-soo, a South Korean victim of Japanese wartime sexual slavery, looks at her supporters during a demonstration in front of the national parliament in Tokyo on Aug. 10, 2005.
A South Korean organization that helps women who were forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese military during World War II has come under scrutiny over its financial dealings, Morten Soendergaard Larsen reports from Seoul.
South Korean warplanes at at U.S. Osan Air Base in Pyeongtaek
Ending costly military interventions abroad could inject much-needed cash into the U.S. economy, Doug Bandow writes.


foreignpolicy--2020-05-30--Rethinking American History in Trump’s Shadow

The world is at one such inflection point now .
As recently as January , very few people even guessed at the possibility that a pandemic would redefine every aspect of our lives in 2020 , disrupting everything from mundane daily routines to financial markets to geopolitics .
Surely in hindsight , the failure of the United States to build an infrastructure capable of weathering the deadly new viruses epidemiologists warned us were coming will loom large in our evaluation of the past several administrations .
And many of our recent assumptions—that densely populated cities such as New York would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for instance—have been abruptly cast in doubt .
But while meaningful histories inflected by the coronavirus will take a while to be produced , Americans are only a few years past another unexpected major inflection point : the election of Donald Trump as president .
On Election Day morning 2016 , most informed observers believed that America ’ s growing diversity demographically ensured that President Barack Obama ’ s young , multiracial coalition would continue to dominate national elections , while the Republican Party would have to expand its appeal beyond white revanchism @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hours later , that conclusion would seem laughable , as indeed it does now regardless of who wins this year ’ s election .
The post-Trump reevaluations were instantaneous .
The centrist liberal writer Jonathan Chait had a book scheduled for release in early 2017 , to be titled Audacity : How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Transformed America .
Written with close access to the Obama administration , Audacity was supposed to tell the triumphal story of Obama ’ s policy successes , which the near-universally expected Hillary Clinton administration would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s victory over Clinton and what must have been some frantic rewriting , the book was released with an altered and far more defensive subtitle : How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail .
A number of books written in less haste have followed .
If journalism is the first draft of history , these books are the second drafts : The history they look back on is still fresh enough that the authors themselves lived through it , and the crucial event that caused the rethink @ @ @ @ @ @ @ upheavals now being caused by the coronavirus , and by accelerating climate change and other future crises that will only seem inevitable in retrospect , will surely cause the post-Trump histories to seem dated in turn .
But in the meantime , they offer insight into how history is constantly being reinterpreted with the present in mind .
Lepore has a thesis : America needs a history lesson .
From their country ’ s messy , chaotic , paradoxical history , Americans must forge a usable and unified narrative , one that speaks @ @ @ @ @ @ @ resilience .
She makes this mission explicit in her brief 2019 follow-up , This America : The Case for the Nation , but it is stamped on every page of These Truths .
“ In deciding what to leave in and what to leave out , ” she writes in her introduction , “ I ’ ve confined myself to what , in my view , a people constituted as a nation in the early twenty-first century need to know about their own past , mainly because this book is meant to double @ @ @ @ @ @ @ focus is on politics , media , and legal institutions , and on how shifts in technology have affected all of them .
Though Trump ’ s name appears nowhere in the introduction , his influence is palpable in Lepore ’ s focus on differentiating truth from falsehood , on the persistence of demagoguery and xenophobia , and on the need to reassert bedrock national ideals .
Figures from throughout U.S. history , from Andrew Jackson to Joseph McCarthy , are evoked , with Trump clearly in Lepore ’ s mind as the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
But Trump ’ s presence is particularly felt in the book ’ s final quarter , which covers the United States from 1946 ( perhaps not coincidentally , the year of the president ’ s birth ) to 2016 .
Lepore ’ s boldest choice , and the one that feels most directly rooted in post-2016 trauma , is to project the role of polling-driven media coverage back into history .
Lepore introduces ENIAC , the first general-purpose computer , at the very beginning of her post-World War II section , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ computing in every subsequent election , giving a long prehistory to the social media dynamics of 2016 .
A few pages later , she introduces a relatively obscure duo as major figures in postwar history : Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter , the co-founders of a campaign consulting firm that played a key role in defeating Harry S. Truman ’ s proposed national health care plan in 1945 .
They later managed Dwight D. Eisenhower ’ s 1952 presidential campaign , driven heavily by TV advertising , with the outcome successfully predicted by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ prominence of pollsters , advertising , and computers in shaping election outcomes , none of which I recall reading about in my own high school history textbooks , is something Lepore carries forward to 2016 , where she blames polls to a significant extent for Trump .
“ Polls admitted Trump into the GOP debates , polls placed him at center stage , and polls declared him the winner , ” Lepore writes , although it ’ s unclear what mechanism she thinks would have been preferable .
As best as one can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the electorate has distorted civic virtues and enabled manipulation of the public , with the damage now visible to all in the form of Trump .
But it ’ s odd to place so much onus on polling—whatever valid criticisms one might have of the industry—after spending hundreds of pages demonstrating that the xenophobic , racist , and reactionary forces that propelled Trump ’ s campaign have all been integral to the United States from the very beginning .
“ Abandoning the search for common ground in political and economic life , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ even conflict , ” the authors write in their introduction .
“ From the 1970s on , the United States would seem less and less unified with each passing decade.
” They root this insight in Obama ’ s farewell address in January 2017 , in which he identified three threats to U.S. democracy : economic inequality , racial division , and partisan polarization .
Trump ’ s victory , which seems to have occasioned the writing of Fault Lines , is rooted in these divisions .
The sudden swing from Obama ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s reflects a nation split in two .
This is an uncontroversial-sounding point as far as it goes , one that also seems to be the operating principle behind much mainstream media coverage of politics : the principle of “ bothsidesism.
” There is no question that Kruse and Zelizer prefer Obama to Trump , and that they are aware that the roots of America ’ s divisions go back much further than the 1970s—Kruse , for instance , is the author of a 2007 history of desegregation in the 1960s , White @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Modern Conservatism—which makes their focus on national unity seem almost purposefully naive .
They fall prone to a common and regrettable impulse among liberals to give conservative arguments more credit than they deserve , compensating for the right ’ s efforts to divide Americans by affirming a mythical unity .
“ The first year of the Trump presidency revealed the enormous wear and tear that forty years of bitter division has inflicted on the republic , ” they write in their conclusion .
“ Yet a divided nation did not mean a broken @ @ @ @ @ @ @ United States of America now faces as a divided country is whether we can harness the intense energy that now drives us apart and channel it once again toward creating new and stronger bridges that can bring us closer together.
” The answer , I ’ m pretty sure , is no , and I suspect Kruse and Zelizer would agree .
Nothing about the current pandemic suggests that a new age of national unity awaits .
Economic inequality has been hypercharged by the coronavirus , with poor communities of color bearing the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a disproportionately large share of those labeled essential workers , compelled to risk their lives to keep society functioning .
The divisions even within the Democratic Party remain bitter and painful , while over 40 percent of Americans continue to support Trump despite his manifest cruelty and incompetence .
New regional divisions are also emerging , or at least being clarified , as the Trump administration favors distributing emergency aid to governors it considers its allies , such as Republican Ron deSantis in Florida , over those it considers hostile , such as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The collective action that Americans might in theory mount to resist Trump ’ s misgovernance has been rendered nearly impossible by the requirements of social distancing and self-isolation .
Even if Trump loses in November and goes willingly , everything that enabled him will remain .
Fault Lines is not a bad book ; it ’ s certainly lucid and in command of a wide range of facts , and when it emphasizes the role of new forms of media in exacerbating culture wars and polarization , it verges on making a structural @ @ @ @ @ @ @ many eminent historians to give it a nice blurb , and Kruse and Zelizer are on to something with their choice of timeline .
Something about the United States did change in the mid-1970s , even if “ division ” is the wrong culprit .
The history of the present really does begin around then , as another recent history by another enthusiastic blurber of Fault Lines persuasively argues .
The focus of Fear City , however , is on New York City ’ s 1975 budgetary crisis , immortalized in the New @ @ @ @ @ @ @ City : Drop Dead.
” Between the end of World War II and 1975 , New York had been the unquestioned leading metropolis of the free world , home not only to Wall Street and the United Nations but also to heavy industry , small manufacturers , and a thriving laboratory of New Deal and Great Society reforms—including America ’ s largest systems of public transportation , public housing , public hospitals , public libraries , and public higher education .
But for a variety of reasons , by the 1970s the city @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Mayor Abe Beame , a New Deal liberal , appealed to the federal government for assistance , but President Gerald Ford—who was never elected , and who owed his presidency to Richard Nixon ’ s resignation over Watergate—refused to help .
Ford , known as a moderate Republican , was fending off a primary challenge from Ronald Reagan , the ideologically conservative governor of California .
Guided by advisors such as Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney , Ford allowed America ’ s greatest city to go bankrupt in order to force budget @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s generous social contract and pave the way for the finance and real estate industries ( the latter represented in microcosm by Trump ) to take over Manhattan .
An Emergency Financial Control Board , staffed with Wall Street bankers , would wrest control of municipal governance from New York ’ s elected leaders , and once the city became solvent it would continue to be run by mayors beholden to a wealthy and globalized elite .
Meanwhile , much of the city descended into anarchy and violence , captured in the many @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this may seem like the narrow story of one city over the course of a few years , Phillips-Fein sees much more profound national and international implications .
“ [ T ] he spectacular failure of the New York City government crystallized the antigovernment ethos that was gaining momentum nationally during the 1970s , ” she writes .
In New York ’ s crisis , she sees the blueprint for the austerity crises of the past decade , from Detroit to Greece to Puerto Rico .
“ The politics of inevitability that defined @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at work in all these cases as well .
… Modern politicians and economists employ a moralistic rhetoric of responsibility and belt-tightening just as they did in 1975 , but they do so with far more confidence than at that earlier moment , thanks to the intervening forty years of antigovernment politics.
” Still , she adds , “ austerity remains a political choice.
” The 1970s represent a break not because Americans became divided—Americans have always been divided—but because a social contract that had more or less functioned for a generation was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into a new political movement .
Donald Trump was an early beneficiary of this financial disruption , as the tax code shifted from incentivizing the middle class ( and , to be clear , segregated ) outer-borough housing empire built by his father to the gleaming Midtown luxury towers on which he emblazoned his name .
His eventual presidency represents the culmination of the same project : the selling off of public goods to private interests .
Meanwhile , New York City has become the global epicenter of the pandemic on Trump ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ heir to a political dynasty that has also been active since the 1970s .
My apartment in Brooklyn is mere blocks from one of the public hospitals that survived the budget cuts detailed by Phillips-Fein ; it is now one of the most overloaded COVID-19 wards on earth , in spite of its crumbling and long-neglected infrastructure .
A few miles to the southeast , a truck outside a funeral home was recently discovered to be holding dozens of decomposing corpses .
My own quarantine has been mercifully comfortable , but sirens have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and casualty rates in the neighboring working-class West Indian communities are far higher than in the wealthiest precincts of Manhattan .
Many wealthy New Yorkers have fled the city for their second homes , and whether they will ever return is now an open question .
If 1975 represented the beginning of the neoliberal era in New York , and perhaps in the United States as a whole , 2020 could represent the end—the end of gentrification , the end of cities being marketed as luxury items , and the end , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ passive governance that allows urban poverty to entrench itself .
Then again , the pandemic might just extend and exacerbate the status quo , and a decade from now it may be as forgotten as the 1918 Spanish flu , eclipsed by larger forces and crises barely imaginable now .
Either way , the interpretation of the past remains as in flux as the possibilities of the future .

History is a moving target, and recent history an almost unhittable one. The past is visible only through the lens of the present, and as the present shifts, understanding of the past shifts with it. When an unexpected event dramatically reshapes the present, it calls into question everything the recent past once seemed to mean.
History is a moving target, and recent history an almost unhittable one. The past is visible only through the lens of the present, and as the present shifts, understanding of the past shifts with it. When an unexpected event dramatically reshapes the present, it calls into question everything the recent past once seemed to mean.
The world is at one such inflection point now. As recently as January, very few people even guessed at the possibility that a pandemic would redefine every aspect of our lives in 2020, disrupting everything from mundane daily routines to financial markets to geopolitics. Surely in hindsight, the failure of the United States to build an infrastructure capable of weathering the deadly new viruses epidemiologists warned us were coming will loom large in our evaluation of the past several administrations. And many of our recent assumptions—that densely populated cities such as New York would continue to grow and prosper indefinitely, for instance—have been abruptly cast in doubt.
But while meaningful histories inflected by the coronavirus will take a while to be produced, Americans are only a few years past another unexpected major inflection point: the election of Donald Trump as president. On Election Day morning 2016, most informed observers believed that America’s growing diversity demographically ensured that President Barack Obama’s young, multiracial coalition would continue to dominate national elections, while the Republican Party would have to expand its appeal beyond white revanchism in order to remain competitive. Twenty-four hours later, that conclusion would seem laughable, as indeed it does now regardless of who wins this year’s election.
The post-Trump reevaluations were instantaneous. The centrist liberal writer Jonathan Chait had a book scheduled for release in early 2017, to be titled Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Transformed America. Written with close access to the Obama administration, Audacity was supposed to tell the triumphal story of Obama’s policy successes, which the near-universally expected Hillary Clinton administration would then build on. Following Trump’s victory over Clinton and what must have been some frantic rewriting, the book was released with an altered and far more defensive subtitle: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail.
A number of books written in less haste have followed. If journalism is the first draft of history, these books are the second drafts: The history they look back on is still fresh enough that the authors themselves lived through it, and the crucial event that caused the rethink is painfully fresh in memory. The upheavals now being caused by the coronavirus, and by accelerating climate change and other future crises that will only seem inevitable in retrospect, will surely cause the post-Trump histories to seem dated in turn. But in the meantime, they offer insight into how history is constantly being reinterpreted with the present in mind.
Inventor Presper Eckert (top left) and CBS anchor Walter Cronkite (top right) are pictured in 1952 with a UNIVAC computer, which the TV station used for its presidential election night coverage. The computer successfully predicted Dwight D. Eisenhower’s win. The book “These Truths” plays up the importance of primitive computing in every post-World War II election, giving a long prehistory to the social media dynamics of 2016.
The defining work of general history produced in the Trump years will very likely be These Truths: A History of the United States, by the Harvard University historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore. Clocking in at 800 pages, Lepore’s book accomplishes the admirably ambitious task of surveying the entirety of U.S. history, from Christopher Columbus’s voyages to Trump’s election, in a single readable volume. These Truths was released in 2018 to critical and commercial success, and it will probably be a standard textbook for many years to come. The prose is lovely, if occasionally over the top; Lepore is fond of similes, describing the U.S. Constitution as being “as finely wrought as an iron gate” and the nation after Robert F. Kennedy’s murder as mourning “as Job in the desert, fallen to his knees.” But these indulgences can be forgiven; it’s no small feat to tell a nation’s story from beginning to end in a tonally and ideologically coherent voice.
Lepore has a thesis: America needs a history lesson. From their country’s messy, chaotic, paradoxical history, Americans must forge a usable and unified narrative, one that speaks to everyone and that calls for national resilience. She makes this mission explicit in her brief 2019 follow-up, This America: The Case for the Nation, but it is stamped on every page of These Truths. “In deciding what to leave in and what to leave out,” she writes in her introduction, “I’ve confined myself to what, in my view, a people constituted as a nation in the early twenty-first century need to know about their own past, mainly because this book is meant to double as an old-fashioned civics book.” Her focus is on politics, media, and legal institutions, and on how shifts in technology have affected all of them.
Though Trump’s name appears nowhere in the introduction, his influence is palpable in Lepore’s focus on differentiating truth from falsehood, on the persistence of demagoguery and xenophobia, and on the need to reassert bedrock national ideals. Figures from throughout U.S. history, from Andrew Jackson to Joseph McCarthy, are evoked, with Trump clearly in Lepore’s mind as the culmination of their particular brand of politics. But Trump’s presence is particularly felt in the book’s final quarter, which covers the United States from 1946 (perhaps not coincidentally, the year of the president’s birth) to 2016.
Lepore’s boldest choice, and the one that feels most directly rooted in post-2016 trauma, is to project the role of polling-driven media coverage back into history. Lepore introduces ENIAC, the first general-purpose computer, at the very beginning of her post-World War II section, and she plays up the importance of primitive computing in every subsequent election, giving a long prehistory to the social media dynamics of 2016. A few pages later, she introduces a relatively obscure duo as major figures in postwar history: Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter, the co-founders of a campaign consulting firm that played a key role in defeating Harry S. Truman’s proposed national health care plan in 1945. They later managed Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1952 presidential campaign, driven heavily by TV advertising, with the outcome successfully predicted by a computer called Univac.
The early prominence of pollsters, advertising, and computers in shaping election outcomes, none of which I recall reading about in my own high school history textbooks, is something Lepore carries forward to 2016, where she blames polls to a significant extent for Trump. “Polls admitted Trump into the GOP debates, polls placed him at center stage, and polls declared him the winner,” Lepore writes, although it’s unclear what mechanism she thinks would have been preferable. As best as one can tell, she believes that the rationalization of the electorate has distorted civic virtues and enabled manipulation of the public, with the damage now visible to all in the form of Trump. But it’s odd to place so much onus on polling—whatever valid criticisms one might have of the industry—after spending hundreds of pages demonstrating that the xenophobic, racist, and reactionary forces that propelled Trump’s campaign have all been integral to the United States from the very beginning.
Counterprotesters argue with far-right protesters at the Unite the Right 2 Rally in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 12, 2018. The book “Fault Lines” is shaped around the central thesis that America has become divided, with mutually opposed camps refusing to acknowledge one another’s basic perception of reality.
Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974, a 2019 collaboration between the Princeton University historians Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, is decidedly more modest in scope. While Lepore covers five centuries chronologically, Kruse and Zelizer limit themselves to the past 40 years and change, which they cover thematically as well as chronologically, with long stretches on such themes as race and identity, gender and sexuality, growing economic inequality, and U.S. military adventures abroad. Fault Lines is an able summary of the major news events of recent decades—one that’s fair-minded to a fault. While the authors are both outspoken liberals, they have attempted to shape their book around the central thesis that the United States has become divided, with mutually opposed camps refusing to acknowledge one another’s basic perception of reality.
“Abandoning the search for common ground in political and economic life, [Americans] increasingly valued competition and even conflict,” the authors write in their introduction. “From the 1970s on, the United States would seem less and less unified with each passing decade.” They root this insight in Obama’s farewell address in January 2017, in which he identified three threats to U.S. democracy: economic inequality, racial division, and partisan polarization. Trump’s victory, which seems to have occasioned the writing of Fault Lines, is rooted in these divisions. The sudden swing from Obama’s vision of America to Trump’s reflects a nation split in two.
This is an uncontroversial-sounding point as far as it goes, one that also seems to be the operating principle behind much mainstream media coverage of politics: the principle of “bothsidesism.” There is no question that Kruse and Zelizer prefer Obama to Trump, and that they are aware that the roots of America’s divisions go back much further than the 1970s—Kruse, for instance, is the author of a 2007 history of desegregation in the 1960s, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism—which makes their focus on national unity seem almost purposefully naive. They fall prone to a common and regrettable impulse among liberals to give conservative arguments more credit than they deserve, compensating for the right’s efforts to divide Americans by affirming a mythical unity.
“The first year of the Trump presidency revealed the enormous wear and tear that forty years of bitter division has inflicted on the republic,” they write in their conclusion. “Yet a divided nation did not mean a broken nation. … The question that the United States of America now faces as a divided country is whether we can harness the intense energy that now drives us apart and channel it once again toward creating new and stronger bridges that can bring us closer together.”
The answer, I’m pretty sure, is no, and I suspect Kruse and Zelizer would agree. Nothing about the current pandemic suggests that a new age of national unity awaits. Economic inequality has been hypercharged by the coronavirus, with poor communities of color bearing the brunt of the casualties and making up a disproportionately large share of those labeled essential workers, compelled to risk their lives to keep society functioning. The divisions even within the Democratic Party remain bitter and painful, while over 40 percent of Americans continue to support Trump despite his manifest cruelty and incompetence. New regional divisions are also emerging, or at least being clarified, as the Trump administration favors distributing emergency aid to governors it considers its allies, such as Republican Ron deSantis in Florida, over those it considers hostile, such as Democrat Andrew Cuomo in New York. The collective action that Americans might in theory mount to resist Trump’s misgovernance has been rendered nearly impossible by the requirements of social distancing and self-isolation. Even if Trump loses in November and goes willingly, everything that enabled him will remain.
Fault Lines is not a bad book; it’s certainly lucid and in command of a wide range of facts, and when it emphasizes the role of new forms of media in exacerbating culture wars and polarization, it verges on making a structural argument. Jill Lepore is one of many eminent historians to give it a nice blurb, and Kruse and Zelizer are on to something with their choice of timeline. Something about the United States did change in the mid-1970s, even if “division” is the wrong culprit. The history of the present really does begin around then, as another recent history by another enthusiastic blurber of Fault Lines persuasively argues.
Hundreds of New Yorkers protest near Times Square on Nov. 1, 1975, in the wake of President Gerald Ford’s speech denying federal assistance to spare New York City from bankruptcy. “[T]he spectacular failure of the New York City government crystallized the antigovernment ethos that was gaining nationally during the 1970s,” Kim Phillips-Fein writes in “Fear City.”
Kim Phillips-Fein’s Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics came out in 2017, which means it only barely makes the cut as a work of post-Trump history. Unlike These Truths and Fault Lines, it wasn’t necessarily written with a Trump victory in mind, although the future president does take center stage for a four-page episode late in the book concerning his early success in Manhattan real estate. At the very least, Phillips-Fein was aware that Trump had become a major figure in U.S. politics by around 2015, and that his business activities in the 1970s might therefore help illuminate some aspects of the present.
The focus of Fear City, however, is on New York City’s 1975 budgetary crisis, immortalized in the New York Daily News headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” Between the end of World War II and 1975, New York had been the unquestioned leading metropolis of the free world, home not only to Wall Street and the United Nations but also to heavy industry, small manufacturers, and a thriving laboratory of New Deal and Great Society reforms—including America’s largest systems of public transportation, public housing, public hospitals, public libraries, and public higher education. But for a variety of reasons, by the 1970s the city was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Mayor Abe Beame, a New Deal liberal, appealed to the federal government for assistance, but President Gerald Ford—who was never elected, and who owed his presidency to Richard Nixon’s resignation over Watergate—refused to help.
Ford, known as a moderate Republican, was fending off a primary challenge from Ronald Reagan, the ideologically conservative governor of California. Guided by advisors such as Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, Ford allowed America’s greatest city to go bankrupt in order to force budget cuts that would destroy the city’s generous social contract and pave the way for the finance and real estate industries (the latter represented in microcosm by Trump) to take over Manhattan. An Emergency Financial Control Board, staffed with Wall Street bankers, would wrest control of municipal governance from New York’s elected leaders, and once the city became solvent it would continue to be run by mayors beholden to a wealthy and globalized elite. Meanwhile, much of the city descended into anarchy and violence, captured in the many gritty films of the era.
While this may seem like the narrow story of one city over the course of a few years, Phillips-Fein sees much more profound national and international implications. “[T]he spectacular failure of the New York City government crystallized the antigovernment ethos that was gaining momentum nationally during the 1970s,” she writes. In New York’s crisis, she sees the blueprint for the austerity crises of the past decade, from Detroit to Greece to Puerto Rico. “The politics of inevitability that defined New York in the 1970s have been at work in all these cases as well. … Modern politicians and economists employ a moralistic rhetoric of responsibility and belt-tightening just as they did in 1975, but they do so with far more confidence than at that earlier moment, thanks to the intervening forty years of antigovernment politics.” Still, she adds, “austerity remains a political choice.”
Donald Trump is pictured in his apartment in May 1976 after receiving the news that New York City’s Board of Estimate unanimously approved a 40-year tax break for his hotel construction project. Trump was an early beneficiary of the financial disruptions of the 1970s as the tax code shifted.
The crucial difference between Phillips-Fein’s approach and those of Lepore, Kruse, and Zelizer is the foregrounding of material concerns. All of these historians are interested in changing social and cultural mores, in the ways race and gender intersect with politics, and in political divisions, and all of them clearly saw that Americans were living through a crisis even before the more acute catastrophe of the pandemic. But Phillips-Fein also understands that politics is not just a battle over identity or values or civics, but also over resources: who society’s wealth is for, and what kind of life government can provide for the majority of its citizens.
The 1970s represent a break not because Americans became divided—Americans have always been divided—but because a social contract that had more or less functioned for a generation was deliberately torn apart by financial interests organized into a new political movement. Donald Trump was an early beneficiary of this financial disruption, as the tax code shifted from incentivizing the middle class (and, to be clear, segregated) outer-borough housing empire built by his father to the gleaming Midtown luxury towers on which he emblazoned his name. His eventual presidency represents the culmination of the same project: the selling off of public goods to private interests.
Meanwhile, New York City has become the global epicenter of the pandemic on Trump’s watch—with an assist from Cuomo, heir to a political dynasty that has also been active since the 1970s. My apartment in Brooklyn is mere blocks from one of the public hospitals that survived the budget cuts detailed by Phillips-Fein; it is now one of the most overloaded COVID-19 wards on earth, in spite of its crumbling and long-neglected infrastructure. A few miles to the southeast, a truck outside a funeral home was recently discovered to be holding dozens of decomposing corpses. My own quarantine has been mercifully comfortable, but sirens have been a constant feature day and night, and casualty rates in the neighboring working-class West Indian communities are far higher than in the wealthiest precincts of Manhattan. Many wealthy New Yorkers have fled the city for their second homes, and whether they will ever return is now an open question.
If 1975 represented the beginning of the neoliberal era in New York, and perhaps in the United States as a whole, 2020 could represent the end—the end of gentrification, the end of cities being marketed as luxury items, and the end, if we’re lucky, of passive governance that allows urban poverty to entrench itself. Then again, the pandemic might just extend and exacerbate the status quo, and a decade from now it may be as forgotten as the 1918 Spanish flu, eclipsed by larger forces and crises barely imaginable now. Either way, the interpretation of the past remains as in flux as the possibilities of the future.