The War We’re Not Fighting

There is a fight that would make us safer and more secure. But we refuse to wage it.

This president and too many in the Democratic Party just decided to go to war with Iran. They decided it was worth the risk of a regional war and American deaths because they cannot imagine any other way to remain relevant on the global stage. They can’t picture an America that competes through what it builds. They can only picture one that competes through what it destroys.

We didn’t go to war because we had to. We went to war because it’s the only thing we know how to do anymore.

And it’s not just me saying that. The Washington Times reported that China experts are calling the Iran strikes “an operational component of a grand strategy to contain China.” The Atlantic Council said any analysis of this war that ignores the great-power competition underlying it “is either incomplete or a deliberate red herring.” First Venezuela, now Iran. Both countries that sell oil to China. Both countries whose leaders we removed in the span of two months. The pattern is not subtle.

The Carnegie Endowment pointed out that China’s entire strategy for competing with the United States has been to lean into economics, technology, construction, and training. Not military alliances. Not bombs. They build roads, ports, rail networks, energy systems. They invest in other countries’ infrastructure. They compete by making things. We compete by breaking things. And we’ve spent decades proving it.

We can’t build a subway line in under twenty years. We can’t make insulin affordable. We can’t keep a hospital open in a rural county. We can’t build housing fast enough to keep families off the street. But we can flatten a city on the other side of the world in a weekend. We’re really good at that part. We’ve had a lot of practice.

The United States of America in 2026 is a country that has completely lost the ability to build, to produce, to create, to maintain the systems that keep a society alive. And because we can’t do any of that, because we’ve emptied ourselves out so completely that the only functional institution left is the military, war is the only card we have to play. We can’t compete economically so we compete with bombs. We can’t build our way to relevance so we bomb our competition or their allies. We can’t imagine a future where American power comes from what we make and what we offer the world so instead we make sure the world is afraid of us.

That’s what the Iran war is. It’s not about nuclear weapons. It’s not about defending Israel. It’s not about democracy or human rights or any of the words they use to dress it up. It’s about a country that has nothing left to offer except force. A country that has strip-mined its own middle class, gutted its own infrastructure, sold off its own public goods, and has only war left as a way to continued relevance. There are alternatives but thry require doing the hard work of actually rebuilding. And nobody in charge, in either party, can imagine doing that work.

I wrote Tuesday about why Democrats can’t oppose this war. The short version is they agree with it. But the deeper version is this. They can’t oppose the war because they can’t articulate what we’d do instead. They have no vision for an America that doesn’t need to project military force everywhere all the time to remain a global power. They have no plan for rebuilding the domestic economy in a way that would make the war machine unnecessary. They’re stuck in the same trap as the Republicans. The only difference is they feel bad about it.

For fifty years, both parties have agreed on the big things. Hand economic power to Wall Street. Let corporations run the show. Shrink the government until it can’t do anything except write checks to defense contractors and bail out banks. They told us markets would solve everything. That prosperity would trickle down. That if we just got out of the way, corporations would build the future for us.

That experiment failed. And we’re living in the wreckage.

Since 1970, median income has gone up about 911 percent. Sounds great until you look at what happened to everything you need to buy with it. Housing prices jumped nearly 1,700 percent. Rent went up more than 1,200 percent. A public college degree that used to cost around $1,500 now runs nearly $40,000. That’s a 2,400 percent increase. And healthcare exploded by more than 4,000 percent.

People aren’t mad about eggs. They’re mad because the entire economy has been reengineered to make them work harder and get less. A society that once promised stability and upward mobility now demands more and gives back less. And when people look around for someone to blame, the only answer they’re offered is immigrants, or China, or Iran. Never the people who actually did this to them. Never the system itself.

This is why Trump won twice. Not because he had better ideas. Not because of trans people or immigrants. Because he was willing to say the system is broken. Democrats still won’t say that. They still think the system is basically fine, it just needs better management. A few more guardrails. A tax credit here, a job training program there. They cannot bring themselves to admit that the thing they’ve been building for half a century doesn’t work. That it was never going to work. That handing the entire economy to the private sector was always going to end with a country that can’t do anything except make war.

Because that’s where we are. We can’t build. We’ve forgotten how.

We built the Hoover Dam in five years. The Interstate Highway System, 41,000 miles, in thirty five years. The TVA electrified an entire region of the country that the private sector had written off. We created public universities that cost a few weeks of wages. We built Medicare in eleven months. We sent people to the moon in less than a decade.

Now it takes fourteen years to rebuild a single rail tunnel under the Hudson River, at a cost of $16 billion. California’s been working on high speed rail for over fifteen years, it’s billions over budget, and it’s still not done. China built 22,000 miles of high speed rail in fifteen years. We can’t build a system because we no longer believe we should have one. And while we pour resources into flattening Iran, Chatham House reports that Beijing sees our overextension in the Gulf as serving their interests. Every dollar we spend managing a war in the Middle East is a dollar we don’t spend competing with China where it actually matters. They know this. They’re counting on it.

And that’s not an accident. That’s the result of decades of deliberate sabotage. We replaced civil servants with contractors. We cut training. We inserted layers of consultants who bill by the hour and have no incentive to ever finish anything. We deliberately broke the machine and then pointed at the wreckage and said: see, government doesn’t work. It was a setup. And both parties were in on it.

The fear of being called a communist for simply wanting government to compete with corporations has paralyzed the Democratic Party since McCarthy. They’d rather be ineffective than risk sounding like they’re challenging capitalism. But this fear cost them the very ideology that made them dominant for decades under FDR. The belief that government should be a builder. Not a regulator. Not a banker. A builder.

Corporations exist to maximize profit. That’s what they do. That’s all they do. They are not designed to address national challenges or secure a prosperous future for citizens. That’s what government is for. When we delegated those responsibilities to the private sector in the seventies and eighties, we guaranteed the decline we’re living through right now. And we guaranteed that when the decline got bad enough, the only response we’d have left is the one we’re watching play out in Iran.

Bombs instead of bridges. Missiles instead of medicine. A nearly $1 trillion defense budget and a country that can’t keep its own people alive.

The right is selling nostalgia. Make America Great Again. But they don’t want to build anything either. They want to strip what’s left and hand it to their friends. The left, or what passes for it, is selling fear. Save democracy. But if the democracy you’re saving doesn’t build housing, doesn’t provide healthcare, doesn’t educate kids without bankrupting their parents, doesn’t keep the lights on, then what are you actually saving?

I grew up in Appalachia. My grandfather went from sharecropping to owning a forty acre farm in a single generation. That wasn’t grit. That was an America that built things. That created systems that let working people rise. That believed the government had a role in making sure the economy worked for everyone, not just the people at the top. That America is gone. And it didn’t die of natural causes. It was killed. Exposed to a very slow acting poison administered by both parties over fifty years until the patient was too weak to do anything except reach for a gun.

That’s the war we’re not fighting. Not the one in Iran. The one here. The fight to rebuild the capacity of this country to actually do things. To build housing. To make medicine. To educate people. To maintain roads and bridges and rail and broadband. To compete on the global stage through what we create instead of what we destroy.

Every dollar we spend bombing Iran is a dollar we don’t spend rebuilding Ohio or West Virginia or the Bronx. Every young person we send to the Middle East is someone who could be building high speed rail or manufacturing solar panels or staffing a public hospital. Every year we spend managing a war is a year we don’t spend fixing the thing that made the war inevitable in the first place.

But we won’t get it from the people currently in charge. Not from Trump, who wants to own the wreckage. Not from Democratic leadership, who want to manage it.

There is no law of man or God that says we have to bomb our way to a better world. That death and destruction are the best paths to comfort and security. We can marshal our resources just as easily for peace as we can for war. We can build comfort and safety without missiles. And in fact I think the two paths are not compatible. Our search for security through destruction is misguided and it ends poorly, not just for us but for the billions of other humans with whom we share this planet. Every bomb we drop is a confession that we’ve run out of ideas.

But some people haven’t run out of ideas. Saikat Chakrabarti, who co-founded Justice Democrats and helped launch the Green New Deal, is running for Congress right now on exactly this vision. His organization New Consensus built something called the Mission for America, a detailed plan to put this country back into building mode. Not a slogan. Not a talking point. An actual blueprint for how government rebuilds industries, creates jobs, and competes on the global stage through what we make instead of what we destroy. It’s modeled on what FDR did, not just during the New Deal but during the war mobilization that built the most productive economy the world had ever seen. Chakrabarti’s argument is simple. FDR didn’t defeat authoritarianism with slogans. He built a society that worked so well it made authoritarianism unnecessary. That’s the kind of leadership the Democratic Party needs. Yesterday. The sooner people like him are in power, the sooner we stop reaching for bombs when we should be reaching for blueprints.

That’s a fight worth having.

Corbin Trent