The mood in America is bitter.
Hyper-partisanship has sabotaged governance and government. Extremes of left and right have infected politics and turned citizens against each other on virtually every issue. Anger and resentment now inform what passes for political dialogue.
How did the U.S. arrive at a condition where more than 70 percent of the public does not want either of the two likely presidential candidates on the ballot? About the same number are dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with the state of the nation.
The answer rests in two wars that broke America.
The first was Vietnam. Sixty years ago this August, Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution with only two dissenting votes that committed the nation to war. At that point, a large majority of Americans believed and trusted in the government and largely supported it.
That figure has reversed since the Vietnam War. Both Democratic and Republican administrations lied about the war beginning with the Tonkin Gulf crisis, in which North Vietnamese boats did not attack two U.S. Navy destroyers operating in international waters, as had been alleged.
The fall of Saigon in April 1975 marked the ignominious defeat of the world’s most powerful and technologically advanced military by a peasant and guerrilla army that won through perseverance, ingenuity and willpower. The assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Watergate, a weak Carter presidency and violence over racial issues were contributors to the government’s decline in legitimacy and credibility.
But what formed the trigger for the political nuclear ingredients that would ultimately explode to endanger the nation’s future was the second Iraq War, launched in March 2003 and rationalized on another set of falsehoods and lies.
Not long after Sept. 11, 2001, the George W. Bush administration began planning for an invasion of Iraq. The focus shifted from the failed assault on Afghanistan to capturing or killing Osama bin Laden and destroying al Qaeda to ending the regime of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.
The argument was to alter the geostrategic landscape of the greater Middle East by imposing democracy on Iraq that would expand to other non-democratic states. In the process, Israel’s security would be guaranteed permanently as Arab/Islamic autocracies and monarchies would be replaced by democratic governments.
The casus belli would be Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction that Bush’s national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, predicted could lead to a “mushroom cloud” bursting over American cities. Except, just as North Vietnam never attacked the U.S. destroyers, Iraq did not have any weapons of mass destruction. But the damage would be irreversible.
Bush’s doctrine profoundly changed the geostrategic landscape of the Middle East and the rest of the world — for the worse. The failed Iraq occupation tainted the Obama administration and the unsuccessful nation-building effort in Afghanistan provided new life to the Taliban. These tensions contributed to the drastic decline in U.S.-Russian relations. As a consequence, American credibility and competence dissolved at home and internationally.
Concurrently, anger over growing inequality between rich and poor, the failure to govern, the rise of populism and the emergence of extremism on both ends of the political spectrum helped Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016. As president and after, Trump turned the Republican Party into the party of Trump. Conspiracy theories abounded from pizza parlors becoming fronts for child pornography to Trump winning the 2020 election.
The upshot is that today, driven by two lost wars, the political divisions in America have become practically irreversible. Congress’s inability to pass sensible laws and even a budget is unconscionable. One presidential candidate has been charged with 91 indictments and the other is seen as too old and feeble to govern. These are symptoms of why America has become broken. And the $34 trillion debt brings adds new meaning to being broke.
What to do? Unless the political center takes hold in both parties and restrains the excesses of the left and the right, the nation’s course is tragically predictable. What is needed is for a few good men and women to come to the aid of their country. Until then, worry.
Harlan Ullman Ph.D. is a senior advisor at the Atlantic Council and the prime author of the “shock and awe” military doctrine. He spent 12 years on the advisory board of a series of supreme allied commanders, Europe. His 12th book, “The Fifth Horseman and the New MAD: How Massive Attacks of Disruption Became the Looming Existential Danger to a Divided Nation and the World at Large,” is available on Amazon. He can be reached on Twitter @harlankullman.