- Military
- History
- Revitalizing History
When you strike a king, strike to kill. President Trump bloodied the nose of the fanatical Iranian regime, then stopped swinging. He will eventually proclaim victory via a “deal” that permits Iran to revive its economy. While the Islamist zealots have been deprived of nuclear weapons for a decade, America’s mystique of overwhelming power has been gravely diminished. By surviving and blocking the Strait of Hormuz for months, on balance the terrorist regime won the war.
It would be a profound misreading, however, to attribute our geostrategic defeat solely to Trump’s impetuous solipsism. The root cause was America’s Jupiter Complex. The Roman god Jupiter carelessly hurled thunderbolts, knowing no lesser god could challenge him. In its recent wars, America has acted similarly. President Truman deployed our forces to Korea in 1950, refusing to seek Congressional approval. When General Van Fleet had the exhausted Chinese and North Koreans trapped, Truman heeded advice not to destroy them, but instead to accept “negotiations.” As a result, the war continued for two more casualty-filled years. In 1964, President Johnson slyly coaxed Congress to approve his dribbling our forces into Vietnam, while privately bemoaning that the war could not be won. In 2001 and 2002, President Bush gained Congressional approval to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. He then vastly enlarged the mission from regime overthrow to democratic nation-building, without deploying the requisite forces. Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden disagreed with Bush’s goal, but veered seesawlike, until in 2021 an addled commander-in-chief ordered a disgraceful, chaotic, and total bug-out.
This litany of half measures and handwringing is infuriating to those who fought on the front lines. When a president orders our soldiers to unsheathe their swords, he and his policymakers—generals, advisers, and Congress alike—must be equally committed. Never, ever fight as an exercise in demonstrating to the enemy that you are stronger. Once committed, a president must wield a bloody axe with all his might—as he expects of his soldiers, his sons and daughters. A president must go to war with an implacable determination to win by achieving a specific end state.
Instead, a succession of presidents and their advisers suffered from the Jupiter Complex. That is, an intuitive, unspoken belief among generations of policymakers that America was too powerful to be genuinely defeated. The triumphs of North Korea, North Vietnam, the Shiite militia in Iraq, the Taliban, and the rabid Iranian regime were pinpricks, without lasting consequences. As the prestige of our military decreased, Congress decreased its funding. Defense spending has fallen from roughly 7 percent of GDP under Reagan to about 3 percent today.
In its place came an explosion of domestic transfer spending aimed at winning votes. Non-defense federal spending has more than doubled as a share of GDP since Eisenhower, while more than 200 million Americans now receive federal benefits through Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, and dozens of antipoverty programs. Acting like Jupiter, our politicians ladled out benefits to a vast domestic voting bloc, believing the dollar was too powerful ever to be devalued by the bond market.
Beware. As I explained in Cat 5: The 2033 War, under the next president our national debt will devour 25 percent of all federal revenues in payments for the $45 trillion we will have borrowed by then, and Congress will demand to borrow another $2 to $3 trillion each succeeding year. Historically, 25 percent is the tipping point for companies and nations alike, when lenders demand yields above 6 percent, requiring an increase in the money supply that causes higher inflation. This results in stagflation and a sagging standard of living. By 2033, a divided Congress will be deadlocked in a furious debate about raising taxes or cutting entitlements. Our unsustainable debt has fueled a domestic hurricane.
The next president will be focused on domestic tranquility and solvency. Our adversaries will challenge us, because entitlements and debt have combined to gravely underfund our military. In particular, the Iran War provides precedent for China. When Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz by threats alone, America did not risk casualties by employing the U.S. fleet. A determined and aging Chairman Xi has the incentive to blockade Taiwan, daring a distracted president to respond. If our president backs down, China dominates the Pacific. Never before has America been convulsed by a financial crash before the first shot is fired.
This hurricane has been decades in the making, gathering force from the Jupiter Complex: the post-World War II conviction that America’s power was embedded in our national DNA and therefore unshakeable. Like the hubris warned against in Greek myths, that Jupiter-like arrogance has blinded us to our extreme debt, and to the extreme decline in our military might. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran are preludes to the fifth war: a global test of whether a debt-burdened America can stabilize its own economy and still deter great-power aggression.
