The New York Times has recently published a series of editorials on the weaknesses of the U.S. military (here and here). Their critique centers on the deep-seated pathologies of the military–industrial complex: the production of over-engineered weapons systems that are fragile, exorbitantly expensive, and perpetually scarce. This complex is the swamp that is never drained — indeed, never named. Its pulse is sustained by the convergent interests of defense contractors, members of Congress, and senior military officers. The F-35 is the paradigmatic expression of this dysfunction. So too is the Navy’s determination to build yet another fleet of aircraft carriers despite their growing vulnerability to hypersonic missiles. A recurring theme in the Times pieces is that U.S. military power is increasingly exposed to cheaper, lower-tech systems — especially drones — that can disable or destroy its most expensive platforms. These vulnerabilities extend beyond the battlefield to cyberwarfare, including the capacity to disrupt power grids and command-and-control systems: capabilities that may already be embedded in Chinese information infrastructures such as 5G networks. Despite its immense military expenditures, the United States now confronts a future — perhaps even a present — in which it is overmatched by Chinese military power in a conflict over Taiwan.
This is the central finding of the Pentagon’s classified “Overmatch” brief, reviewed by both the Trump and Biden administrations. China possesses sufficient missile capabilities to push the U.S. Navy out of the Western Pacific, as well as space-war assets capable of disrupting satellite-based intelligence, surveillance, and command systems. The Trump administration’s response has been to pour more money into defense spending. As the Times itself notes, this approach risks intensifying rather than correcting existing weaknesses, funneling additional resources into the same costly and ineffective systems. Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense initiative epitomizes this tendency: expensive, spectacular, and strategically dubious. According to the Times, the alternative is to reinvent the U.S. military around the technologies of the present. Silicon Valley defense firms such as Palantir and Anduril are positioned as the platforms for Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS)—a genuinely new revolution in military affairs, and one in which the United States is now lagging rather than leading.
Such a transformation would require massive, politically difficult investments, particularly given the inertia of the military–industrial complex. The United States currently spends roughly 3.4 percent of GDP on defense. The Times argues that it must spend more or accept the end of U.S. global primacy as Eurasian competitors — China and Russia — consolidate power. Yet the consistently negative outcomes of Taiwan war-gaming scenarios suggest that primacy in this domain has already been lost. Nonetheless, the apparent utility of military spending as an all-purpose tool still lingers. It is medicine that can cure many ailments – generating patriotic unity through a war economy, providing the wherewithal to deter geopolitical adversaries, fomenting reindustrialization of deindustrialized regions in the U.S. What’s not to like?
To answer this question, compare Europe’s dilemmas with America’s. European states face acute external threats from Russia and growing uncertainty about the durability of U.S. security guarantees, yet their capacity to respond is hemmed in by fiscal austerity, demographic stagnation, and the rise of nationalist movements hostile to both redistribution and supranational coordination. Remilitarization is thus presented not only as a security necessity but as a potential engine of industrial renewal and political cohesion—a bid to restore capacity through arms production rather than through social reconstruction. The limits of this strategy are already apparent. Defense spending can stimulate certain sectors, but it cannot substitute for the broader forms of legitimacy that once underwrote European social democracy. Nor can it resolve the tensions between austerity, monetary discipline, and the demands of sustained military mobilization. Europe’s emerging “metal age” underscores a more general problem: in societies where social contracts have been thinned and political trust eroded, military expansion is increasingly asked to bear burdens it cannot carry.
Still, the siren call of militarization resonates. An example of this is MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough’s call for another “Truman moment” – a decisive assertion of U.S. leadership against a systemic rival, legitimated by the defense of freedom against totalitarianism. The Times gestures toward this logic in its call for renewed Western unity against China and Russia. When in doubt, replay the Cold War. But the conditions that made such a moment possible no longer exist. The United States now operates as a coercive, extractive petro-state. The hegemonic glow of victory in World War II and the Cold War has long since faded. Its petroleum-based development model is ecologically catastrophic. Its consumer market—once the engine of global export-led growth—is now partially shuttered by tariffs, constrained by extreme inequality, and exhausted by debt-financed consumption.
What, then, can the United States offer the world?
The Times remains largely silent on climate change and economic inequality, focusing instead on emerging geopolitical vulnerability and the erosion of deterrence. Deterrence, in this framing, is justified because the United States is the guardian of order. Restoring it may require reuniting the West—yet another Truman moment.
Politically, this is a losing argument, as the experience of the Biden administration already demonstrated. A new round of military Keynesianism—militarized reindustrialization promoted by Biden—does nothing to address the crisis of affordability that structures everyday life for most Americans. More fundamentally, it is unclear who would be willing to sacrifice anything to restore American primacy. After World War II, U.S. elites could offer a version of “people’s capitalism”: rising living standards, progressive taxation, and the belief – captured in Charles Wilson’s dictum – what’s good for America is good for GM and vice versa) – that corporate interests and the national interest were interchangeable. That political economy has been replaced by a plutocratic ruling class that extracts wealth from ordinary people while abandoning responsibility for their welfare. Republicans seek to entrench this order; Democrats appear unable to reverse it.
Who would sacrifice for this? In what sense could American primacy matter to anyone — let alone American security?
Security itself has been reduced to the hallucination of migrant invasion: a racialized anxiety about the fate of white Americans in an irreversibly non-white world. This is the only security narrative that now generates mass affect. One alternative to this dead-end deterrence framework is a strategy of strategic restraint. Rather than presuming that U.S. power must order the world, strategic restraint takes seriously the territorial defense of the United States while providing more limited and conditional support to allies: support premised on their assuming greater responsibility for their own defense. This posture rejects the conceit that global order depends on American military dominance and instead embraces the realist insight that the international state system can, and must, do more to order itself.
Strategic restraint would break with the inflationary logic of deterrence, which converts perceptions of insecurity into ever-higher military spending. By narrowing U.S. commitments and reducing the risk of catastrophic great-power war, restraint would also make possible a peace dividend—one that could be redirected toward long-delayed domestic investments in social provision, infrastructure, and democratic renewal. In this sense, restraint is not retreat but reprioritization: a recognition that American security ultimately depends less on the global projection of force than on internal legitimacy and social cohesion. This brings us back to Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 call to defend democratic values. That appeal carried force not because it was rhetorically stirring, but because it was anchored in the lived experience of the New Deal. Democracy, at that moment, meant rising living standards, expanded social rights, and a state visibly committed to the welfare of its citizens. The call to sacrifice was intelligible because democratic values had been materially enriched.
Today, invocations of democracy function very differently. Stripped of their social content, they no longer promise collective advancement but merely gesture toward the abstract capacity of the demos to reassert itself against forces that have systematically hollowed it out. Appeals to defend democracy abroad ring hollow when democratic life at home is defined by precarity, inequality, and political disempowerment. A distinction must therefore be drawn between American primacy and American security. Yet in classic defense-hawk fashion, the Times refuses to recognize this distinction, much less to treat it as a problem. Even a reconstructed notion of security, however, would require a prior transformation: the United States would need to become a society worth securing in the first place.
Roosevelt understood this. The defense of democracy abroad was inseparable from its renewal at home. Strategic restraint, paired with domestic reconstruction, recovers this insight — not as nostalgia for a lost moment of hegemony, but as a recognition that democratic legitimacy, not military dominance, is the true foundation of security in a post-hegemonic world.
Further Reading on E-International Relations
