IN 1838, Abraham Lincoln observed that any truly existential danger to the United States of America would not come from military threats abroad. Pointing to America’s enviable geographic position, he asked, “Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow?” He answered himself with a resounding “Never!” Lincoln’s certainty was rooted in the enormous potential of antebellum America: “the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined,” with all the world’s riches and “a Bonaparte for a commander,” could not in one thousand years “take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge.” The real danger came not from abroad but from within. The greatest threats were those, he said, that “spring up amongst us.”

Lincoln’s prescient remarks arrived in the context of the urgent question of slavery in the Republic, but they have echoed down to us with renewed force. When Lincoln spoke nearly two hundred years ago, America could not be considered a great military power. Still, in grasping the implications of America’s vast resources and enviable geographic position, Lincoln foresaw that America’s potential for a foreign military defeat on its own soil was nonexistent. The real potential for America’s undoing came from domestic sources: unchecked vigilantism, mobocracy, and widespread disrespect for American institutions and the rule of law. Unfortunately, Lincoln’s personal wisdom was forgotten not just by the Party of Lincoln, but across the American political establishment.

America’s focus on real and perceived threats overseas has led to an unconscious oversight of domestic, inherently American threats. This strategic distraction has favored addressing foreign threats and those domestically with a foreign aspect, leaving a wide space for domestic extremism to go unchecked. The fringe ideologies, disinformation, and sundry grievances simmering in our political climate were harnessed by Donald J. Trump and his allies, reaching its apotheosis in the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021. How did American conceptions of national security develop over the last century in which such domestic threats could flourish in a country that is otherwise obsessed with national defense?

DURING THE twentieth century, there were serious threats to American stability such as labor unrest, economic depression, and racist violence. But there were parallel internal threats to American national security, such as spies and saboteurs, who represented a fifth column force allied with an external enemy or ideology. None were cloaked in the flag or rooted in traditional conceptions of American patriotism. For instance, in 1916 German saboteurs set off munitions on Black Tom island to support the German effort during the First World War. While America was at peace, global ideologies such as anarchism posed internal threats, such as the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901 by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz, and the deadly 1920 Wall Street bombing, likely also at the hands of anarchists.

If the New Deal could secure economic security for most Americans, national security was a different matter. During the Second World War and the subsequent Cold War, America’s domestic security threats mostly stemmed from Soviet spies and their agents who damaged America by stealing the blueprints for atomic weapons and betraying America’s overseas intelligence and military operations. If anything, these domestic threats were akin to scouts of Lincoln’s foreign armies and were properly dealt with. By the end of the twentieth century, there were, however, harbingers of real anti-government dangers lurking within the domestic fabric of American civil society, but social media connecting and amplifying these disparate fringes—and politicians legitimating their untrammeled urges—was still a generation away.

After the Second World War, America found itself in a new and unfamiliar strategic context on the world stage, with perceived security responsibilities for the global commonweal. Having been an architect of the postwar international security order, and picking up the hegemonic reins from Great Britain along the way, America declared itself primus inter pares. During the Cold War, the antagonistic and nuclear-armed Soviet Union gave America a useful foil to direct its military energies. The internationally-focused U.S. government occasionally looked inward to consider security threats, but primarily those with a foreign nexus. For instance, during the McCarthy era, the fight against communism overseas was matched by the Red Scare at home. But after the end of the conflict, America retained its ring of bases in allied countries and found itself policing a far-flung empire in all but name. There was some significant slashing of the defense budget. In 1992, the Congressional Budget Office expected to cut military spending by 28 percent in five years. Although the accompanying cuts to the smaller intelligence budget were ill-advised, the peace dividend was short-lived. American national security was here too defined by the intent and capabilities of external actors—or lack thereof after the Soviet Union disintegrated. Resources rose and fell on America’s threat assessment of foreign actors.

While the Cold War was resolved without apocalyptic violence between the superpowers, domestic extremism without a foreign connection was on the rise. Several self-identified patriots—Americans without foreign allegiance—began to act violently at home. Most notably, 1995 saw the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh, a former U.S. soldier, and his coconspirators, which took the lives of 168 Americans, including children at daycare. McVeigh claimed he sought retribution against the federal government for its heavy-handed actions against the white supremacist anti-government resisters in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, led by Randy Weaver, another Army veteran, in 1992, and the federal government’s storming of the Waco, Texas, Branch Davidian cult compound the following year. These events were lumped in with other fringe movements led by unhinged people. Law enforcement and the judicial system handled such cases without further analysis of these omens auguring the deep-seated fraying of the American fabric from within. For the time being, these were lone actors, not mass movements. They had neither digital connective tissue nor a focal point to rally behind. That no one foresaw collective violence as the zenith of such localized individual action was less a failure of imagination than a symptom of America’s sustained focus on foreign-emanating threats. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 seemed to justify this perspective.

The 9/11 attacks caused American politicians and military leaders to chastise themselves for cutting military budgets after the fall of the USSR and, reversing course, prompted a rapid expansion of the empire further in search of national security—starting some ill-considered wars along the way. Much of the ability to monitor domestic extremism by law enforcement was instead pulled into the counterterrorism vortex that preoccupied so much of the American government’s attention for nearly two decades. No sooner than the terrorist threat subsided—or was at least put into appropriate rational perspective—that the new animating idea became “Great Power Competition” to justify continued military basing abroad to counter America’s perpetual nemesis: foreign threats. Russia is back, we are told, ready to resume the superpower standoff, and China’s rise must be checked or else America will be displaced as the global hegemon. Arguing that this future should be avoided at any price, this is why the American foreign policy “blob,” along with most politicians and military officials, have been pushing military assets ever closer to Russian and Chinese borders. America’s forever wars, perpetuated by the lavish appropriations euphemistically entitled “Overseas Contingency Operations,” implicitly argue, as the name implies, that security contingencies happen overseas. Even America’s cybersecurity strategy of “defend forward” mirrors the strategic logic that America is safer the farther away its military operatives can keep a toehold. Through it all, domestic threats were placed on the back burner, but were a tinderbox in search of a spark.

Meanwhile, this emphasis on protecting the castle from foreign invaders—even while going abroad to find dragons to slay—has let the erstwhile domestic fringe groups become ever more coordinated and mainstream under our noses. The FBI lacked the resources to monitor burgeoning domestic extremist groups, and America’s intelligence and law enforcement divide—including constitutional limitations and significant dilemmas surrounding legal authorities—meant that some of America’s most capable agencies were barred from assisting. The likes of white supremacists, the Boogaloo Boys, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, and QAnon movements on the alt-Right and Antifa on the far Left, fertilized by the manure of disinformation and connected by root networks of social media, have sprouted like mushrooms in the shade provided by America’s focus on shining its light on dark corners of the Middle East and beyond.

A critic may reasonably ask why America cannot simultaneously maintain both the Pax Americana abroad and at home. Aside from the obvious contradiction that the Pax Americana has seen much bloodshed, post-Cold War America is easily distracted in a strategic sense and has not displayed the bandwidth to grapple with foreign threats and also pay sufficient attention to domestic threats which don’t have a corresponding foreign ideology. Such threats are not merely “domestic” in the sense that they are physically located in America, but they are inherently American, and Lincoln was right to fear them. America’s vision of itself as both consistently in grave danger—justifying preventative wars—yet meanwhile also presenting itself as the indispensable nation for global stability has distorted its capacity for domestic reflection and internal self-care. In constitutional terms, the expansive understanding of providing for “the common defense” has overshadowed promoting the “general welfare” and insuring “domestic tranquility.”

The story is not merely one of resources; it is the tale of how America’s conception of itself, its purpose, and its history shapes its choices and priorities. Beyond the defense and foreign nation-building budget dollar amounts spent in real terms, it is the attention and focus that those budget dollars represent. That America spends more on defense than the next ten countries combined reveals the overemphasis on combating even minor foreign threats that is emblematic of this critique. As President George W. Bush’s rationale for preemptive war in Iraq explained, “America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” Of course, Saddam did not have a weapons of mass destruction program, but even if there were “a one percent chance” that a threat was real “we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response,” declared Vice President Dick Cheney.

While the Bush administration is guilty of starting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, subsequent administrations spun them out further to Syria, Libya, Somalia, West Africa, Southeast Asia, and beyond. Perennially chasing foreign security threats has unfurled American resources like a kite in a strong wind. As sociologist David Vine has found, America has nearly eight hundred military bases in more than seventy countries and territories abroad. It is no small feat maintaining this network, but as Vine has argued, they cost a fortune and actually make us less safe by undertaking unrealistic defense obligations, upsetting regional power balances, provoking local resentments, and compromising democratic ideals to defend autocratic and repressive regimes.

THE WORLD is getting smaller and more complex. More than ever before, Americans need to be better prepared to think about the world and to act within it, not just asked to pay an all-volunteer military force to garrison it. Given America’s preferential treatment to overseas adventures while ignoring domestic threats, it is possible to link the destructive and bloody actions of the Capitol insurrectionists to the hubris of modern American exceptionalism. This fixation has badly ordered American priorities in light of the opportunity costs to America’s neglected education system and its ill-prepared citizenry for the dramatic economic shifts ushered in by globalization and the digital era.

Many Americans haven’t enjoyed improved economic conditions resulting from the American-led neoliberal world order. America’s wealth and economic mobility disparities were already increasing between 2007 and 2011. The Occupy Wall Street movement was a harbinger of the disgruntled civil disobedience to come. Beyond purely economic troubles, as the summer of 2020 racial justice protests and violence indicated, there is pent-up rage in America. Complaints about not being “seen” or “heard” have stemmed both from the Left and the Right, suggesting that government policies are not resounding with citizens. American grievances and resentment, stoked by faithless politicians and their own media echo chambers, boiled over, and the dismaying events of January 6 were the result.

Instead of a peace dividend, the vandalism of the Capitol is the real dividend of an unfocused and undisciplined empire with a blind spot only appearing in the mirror. The relatively small number of rioters was the climax of a building sense of fear and social grievance. But these deluded and disillusioned rioters are the thin edge of a much larger wedge of society that endorsed the lawlessness, with polls reporting that over 20 percent of Americans approved.

Like other fringe right-wing groups of the 1990s, the insurrectionists were mostly white, but a mix of middle-class, working-class, and rural people. It is worth pondering why these citizens from a relatively broad cross-section of America, draped in flags, some of them law enforcement officers and military veterans still wearing their unit patches, felt like they were in fact doing their patriotic duty in storming the Capitol with flexicuffs at the ready. After all, they were not there, in their view, to subvert American democracy; they were there to save the will of the people from subversion by the powerful. They were encouraged, in a sad irony, by a powerful individual who himself wanted to subvert the democratic process. Representative of Americans’ dismal knowledge of civics and government, from their perspective, they were righting a wrong, stopping certification of an election that was “stolen” from their fellow Americans. To hear them tell it, they raised their hands against their government in just cause.

This state of affairs compels concerned citizens to investigate and reflect upon the drivers of the insurrection. Trump’s record here is mixed. It is clear that Trump and his allies’ misinformation campaign and rhetoric about a “rigged” and “stolen” election impelled the mob and he was impeached for his role. On the other hand, his instincts for redirecting attention away from foreign adventures were on the right track. For all of the chaos, ineptitude, and harmful norm-shattering of the Trump administration, he was right about the unfair burden placed on American taxpayers and military members to disproportionately shoulder the costs of America’s alliance structure and the sacrifice of combat deployments for questionable security returns. America has spent trillions of dollars in senseless wars while assuming the defense burdens of rich allies. The amount of money that could have been instead invested in American schools and infrastructure is dizzying. These are not theoretical opportunity costs. Recent Pew research shows that U.S. students continue to rank around the middle of the (global) pack, and behind many other advanced industrial nations. Of course, there is no guarantee that a decrease in defense spending would have led to an increase in civic education programs at home, but again, the focus on foreign imperatives as more urgent than domestic considerations is illustrative of the political equation. 

It is often repeated with biblical certainty that a globally deployed military is the lynchpin of American economic success, but there are many problems with that outlook. Plenty of countries are wealthy and do not spend what America does on defense—even as a percentage of GDP, much less in real terms—and these highly developed and educated countries start far fewer wars with ruinous second- and third-order effects. These countries bandwagon with America and, therefore, ride for free under America’s security umbrella while giving their citizens free health care and access to inexpensive university education. But here is where America seems trapped. American foreign policy mandarins have linked domestic material enjoyment to policing the world. In this view, policing the empire is simply the cost of the apparently worthwhile status quo. American primacists and defense hawks argue that a massive navy is needed to keep trade routes open and an army and an air force to deter challengers to the U.S.-led world order. Even internationalist doves are eager to underwrite expensive and dubious alliances requiring a continued forward presence in Germany, Italy, Japan, and Korea, to name but a few.

After nearly two decades of unproductive “forever wars,” Trump said he was going to bring home the troops from the gluttonous Central Command troop vacuum, but also from places like Niger, where American politicians claimed they didn’t even know U.S. soldiers were fighting and dying. That Trump’s Pentagon fought him on global restraint every step of the way indicates how deeply entrenched the foreign policy “blob” is and how dedicated it is to this massive overseas footprint. And while Congress rightly invites the intelligence community to testify annually on the “Worldwide Threat Assessment” focused on legitimate foreign threats, many fewer hearings were held regarding the looming threat of domestic left- or right-wing violence. This profound lack of attention culminated in the increasingly radical swath of American society who became insurrectionists convinced that the end of democracy was nigh and some suggested returning to the Capitol in advance of the inauguration to finish the job. Belatedly, the FBI warned all fifty states about the potential for political violence surrounding the transition of power and Congress authorized over twenty thousand National Guard troops to provide security for the inauguration of President Joe Biden; Washington, DC, was locked down more dramatically than after 9/11. Clearly, such measures underscore that a Lincolnian rebalancing of America’s threat perceptions is in order.

Even before John Winthrop’s Puritans sailed for Massachusetts Bay in 1630, he told them that their new colony would be an example to the world. “As a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us,” he preached. Nearly four centuries later, Americans too often perceive their own greatness externally by overbearing leadership and military presence on the world stage instead of domestically by the example of our values in practice. This understanding of greatness measured and observed by military prowess, gross domestic product, or even counting of Olympic medals has obfuscated what Joseph S. Nye, Jr. identified as the “soft power” of attraction to American ideals. An overemphasis on projecting hard power externally has deranged American domestic national security and overlooked trouble heretofore lurking below in subterranean chat rooms.

IT IS true and a great point of national pride that the United States was the first modern experiment in democracy and that her founding documents inspired dozens of other countries’ forms of representative government. But that sense of exceptionalism has become interpreted as indispensable and exceptional in the world instead of exceptional at home. It is not merely the money lavished on overseas adventures, but that disproportionate amount of money represents America’s priorities. The United States is now paying that price by neglecting the educational and economic prospects of the people who feel forgotten, ignored, and they are unprepared to function effectively in twenty-first-century America. Their lack of basic civics knowledge, lack of media literacy, lack of critical thinking in a contested information environment, and mistrust of government institutions combined to threaten American national security from within.

For the shameful display in the Capitol, America found itself uncomfortably on the wrong side of the sort of canned foreign government press statements that it is only ever accustomed to dishing out from the State Department briefing room. “We are following with concern the internal developments happening in the U.S.” stated the Turkish Foreign Ministry. Taking a page from the well-worn playbook of American moral authority, the Turks added: “We call on all parties in the U.S. to maintain restraint and prudence.” Such thinly veiled trolling suggests that autocrats around the world must have enjoyed how the tables of smug righteousness have turned. Even the developing world pulled no punches in their commentary upon the shambles. “Who’s the banana republic now?” asked Kenya’s largest daily newspaper.

While autocratic, corrupt, and repressive regimes are not comparable to America, it will fall to other Western democracies to hold the megaphone of accountability. Surely, American officials can no longer comment on other countries’ elections no matter the scale of the farce—because, at least in the short term, they lost the moral authority to monitor or criticize other elections. Eight members of the Senate—supposedly the “world’s greatest deliberative body”—joined 139 members of the House of Representatives who objected to certifying the electoral college vote prior to a special commission report investigating allegations of election irregularities, apparently mirroring millions of Americans in falsely claiming that the election was “rigged” and riddled with “irregularities,” therefore producing an “illegitimate” outcome. So illegitimate, in fact, that some rioters shed the blood of fellow Americans, and were prepared to shed much more. Indeed, America’s moral authority and example are badly tarnished, and simply closing the chapter on the Trump administration does not relegate the damage to dusty history books chronicling a mere aberration in U.S. history.

Given the self-inflicted wounds of the Trump administration’s dying days, the beginning of the Biden administration seems an opportune time to link a period of national healing to a national strategic reset. Instead of another reset button with Vladimir Putin, the United States needs to renew itself. America’s strength, built in part on the ideas of John Locke, requires the consent of the governed. Likewise, it requires a government that has earned its citizens’ consent through good governance and trust. In his view of republicanism, Thomas Jefferson argued that part of civic virtue was uplifting the common people and preparing them to take part in the great experiment in self-governance. For it to function properly, America needs an educated society that understands—at a factual level—how their country works, knows what their civic duties are, and respects the rule of law—America’s “political religion” according to Lincoln. That will take a massive investment in American education, but not the tendentious weaponization of American history as represented both by the highly-flawed 1619 Project or the flag-waving “patriotic education” offered by the 1776 Commission. 

This period of crisis is an opportunity for national introspection and should not be squandered or quickly forgotten. We need to drink it in, to appreciate its severity, and to be humbled by it. Americans have looked at the brink, and thankfully most have recoiled. The Capitol insurrection may be recorded by future historians as another “crisis of confidence” in America, to borrow President Jimmy Carter’s phrase. A stunning number of Americans and a dismaying number of their cynical elected officials lost confidence in America’s electoral processes, institutions, judges, and the rule of law. This must be regained for America to endure and once again shine as an example to the world. If we do not, we will have no foreign enemy to blame. Lincoln had it right: “If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide.”

David V. Gioe is Associate Professor of History at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he also serves as History Fellow for the Army Cyber Institute. He is a former Central Intelligence Agency operations officer and a veteran of the U.S. Navy. This analysis is his alone and does not represent the position of West Point, the Department of Defense, or the United States government.

Image: Reuters