We Forgot How to Be Useful

Being useful is a superpower we need to revive.

USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) Mission Accomplished

This is the second time in my lifetime a president has declared “mission accomplished” in a Middle Eastern war. And it’s no more true today with Iran than it was then with Iraq. The war isn’t over. And we’re losing it.

But we’re not just losing a war. We’re revealing something about ourselves. The most powerful nation in the history of the world has decided that its only remaining utility to the rest of humanity is its ability to blow things up. We project power through bombs and sanctions because we’ve lost the ability to project power through production. We used to be the country that made the things the world needed. Now we’re the country that threatens the countries that make the things the world needs.

And we wonder why it isn’t working.

CNN just confirmed that we’ve been lying about the damage to our military assets across the Middle East. Iran damaged at least 16 American military sites across eight countries, the majority of US military positions in the region. Tens of billions of dollars in military assets have evaporated. The Pentagon’s comptroller told Congress the war has cost $25 billion so far, but internal estimates place the real figure closer to $40 to $50 billion, and that’s before reconstruction. A Boeing E-3 Sentry, our primary surveillance aircraft in the Gulf, was destroyed on the ground in Saudi Arabia. Our radar systems, the most expensive and limited assets we have in the region, were specifically targeted and hit. And our oldest Arab ally, Saudi Arabia, is now telling reporters out loud that the American alliance is no longer impregnable.

And for what?

This is a war we chose. We were not under threat. Our allies were not under threat. The American public was not under threat. The State Department’s own April legal opinion describes the operation as having been undertaken “at the request of” Israel. That’s their own paperwork. Rubio admitted on camera that the US “knew that there was going to be an Israeli action” and went in alongside them. Netanyahu pitched Trump on a joint attack in the White House Situation Room. He hoodwinked the shit out of Donald Trump and got him to do it. There were people in this country who wanted it too. There always are. But this did not have to happen.

And to what end? To squeeze Iran, sure. But really to squeeze China. To try to slow them down, because slowing them down is something our elite class can imagine doing. Speeding ourselves up is not. Building more ourselves is not. So we settle for trying to hobble the people who are actually building. And we tell ourselves that’s strategy.

This is not what America has been good at anyway. We don’t fight wars we’re not all in on very well. From Vietnam to Korea to Syria to Iraq, once and then twice, to Iran now, we are not great at fighting wars where American citizens aren’t fully vested in fighting them. And nor should we be.

I don’t even like calling these wars endless, because they do end. They just end after we destroy populations, after we kill hundreds of thousands of civilians, after we starve people and destroy entire ecosystems, after we kill and maim scores of Americans and maim many more civilians in those countries. They end in disaster and massive amounts of loss. Human loss. Economic loss. Moral loss. For what? For nothing. For trying to prop up something that could have been propped up better through production and through beauty.

What is endless is our desire to be at war. What is endless is our desire to have a boogeyman, somebody we have to destroy and kill, somebody other than the ruling elite in this country who are actually responsible for our decline.

What we used to be great at was building things. We were also getting good at fixing the problems in our own society, at repairing centuries of distrust. We were working toward that. And we pivoted away.

Meanwhile, in the middle of losing this war, Iranian lawmakers just rolled out a 12-point plan that bars Israeli vessels from the Strait of Hormuz permanently and demands the US and its allies pay war reparations before any of their ships are allowed through. And China just did something it has never done before. China’s Ministry of Commerce activated its 2021 blocking statute for the first time, telling all Chinese firms it is illegal to comply with US sanctions targeting five of their independent oil refineries over Iranian oil. They are forcing people to choose. Deal with America, or deal with China. And a lot of people are not going to choose us.

What is the American answer to all of this? More military. More pressure. More sanctions. More war.

We’ve gotten to the point in this country where war and violence and pressure are the only answers we can see. Because we’ve let the rest of it die. And what we’re left with is everything looking like a nail, because all we have is a hammer.

Instead of competing with China by being good at what we do, by providing the world with an alternative to Chinese products and Chinese infrastructure and Chinese energy systems, we want to destroy them. Choke them out. Cut off their access to Iranian oil, Venezuelan oil, whatever else we can squeeze. We think we can starve them into respecting us, because we still think we’re indispensable to them.

We are not.

The US accounts for about 13 to 14 percent of China’s exports, and that share is falling. Their exports are roughly 20 percent of their GDP. So the US is maybe 2 or 3 percent of China’s economy as an export market. They produce the things their society needs. They import some stuff, sure, but a lot of what they need they already make. And they’re the CCP. If they decide to redirect production to keep their society running, they’ll do it. They have done it before.

Meanwhile, we no longer have an industrial base. The Nazis made this mistake. They thought their stuff was better. They thought their precision and their engineering and their reputation would carry them. And then America cranked up its industrial base and pumped out tanks and airplanes and bombs and boats that overwhelmed them just by sheer volume. We outproduced them by an order of magnitude. That’s how we won. Not with better stuff. With more stuff, made faster, by more people, in more factories.

We are now the Nazis in that story. We have the better-stuff swagger and none of the industrial base. And we are picking a fight with the country that has what we used to have.

And this is just the war part. We have way bigger problems as a nation than whether we can win one more conflict in the Middle East. We can’t make the things we need for our own supply chains. We can’t afford our housing. Healthcare is on track to bankrupt us. We have a massive debt. And unlike the 1940s, when our debt was equal to our GDP and we built the country we’re still living off of, we haven’t built much of anything with the debt we’ve taken on since. Financial services. Bubbles in stocks and crypto and other shit that doesn’t actually feed anybody, clothe anyone, cure a disease, fix a broken bone, or house anyone. Trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars and nothing sustainable to show for it.

The utility we provide the world right now is weaponry. Not culture. Not democracy. Not renewable energy. Not machine tools. Not the things people need to consume daily. That’s largely done by China.

The American elite cannot wrap their heads around any of this. They cannot wrap their heads around the fact that the neoliberal turn we’ve taken over the last fifty years has been a failure. That we need to get back to the American system that’s being employed right now by the Chinese. The one where we build the things we need.

The only thing the New York Times and the rest of the elite, Democratic and Republican, can wrap their heads around is that we need to improve our military. Not a better society. A better military. The New York Times editorial board, theoretically the most forceful opinion page in one of the nation’s leading journals, spent eight days last December writing one piece a day about how we need a stronger military. “A Free World Needs a Strong America.” “America Can’t Make What the Military Needs.” And then they came back this April with another one. “The U.S. Military Was Losing Its Edge. After Iran, Everyone Knows It.”

How about a better manufacturing base? How about we figure out why we can’t produce infrastructure? We don’t have enough engineers. We don’t have enough scientists. We can’t provide healthcare because we don’t have enough doctors, dentists, mental health professionals. The reason we can sue the shit out of everybody is that we have lawyers coming out of the wazoo. That’s the part of the economy that works. We can litigate. We can financialize. We can extract. The actual building of things, the actual healing of people, the actual teaching of children, that part we can’t do anymore.

The military is no different. Obviously it’s corrupted. Obviously it’s dysfunctional. That’s the way our entire economy is. Healthcare. Education. Childcare. None of them are functioning properly. None of the cornerstones of our society are producing anywhere near what they should be producing for the kind of money that goes into them. And we think we can buy our way out of this shit. We can’t. We are going to have to work for what we have.

This is the symbiotic relationship between the media elite, the economic elite, and the elite in our government, all tied directly to the military-industrial complex. Not just as a source of spending and jobs. As the whole theory of how America continues to exist as a superpower. They literally cannot see that there are other ways to be powerful than bombs and military.

We can maintain superpower status by being super useful. By being super productive. By being super good at what we do. That is a superpower. Being the country the world cannot do without because we make the medicines, the machines, the energy, the things that move civilization forward.

Here is the part that should really get our attention. China is doing this with our system. Not the system we have now. The system we used to have. The Hamiltonian system. The Report on Manufactures, 1791. Tariffs on finished goods. Public investment in industry. Government supporting the building of a manufacturing base from scratch. Infrastructure investment. The system that, over a hundred years, took the United States from a colonial backwater to the world’s leading industrial power. We adopted nearly all of Hamilton’s recommendations. Industrial output grew at five percent a year for a century. We built this country with that system. And then we walked away from it.

China studied it. China adopted it. China is using our own ideas, our own playbook, against us. And our response is to whine about cheap labor and currency manipulation and stolen IP, like a kid who got a bad grade and doesn’t want to do the homework. The truth is they didn’t steal anything important. They picked up what we left on the floor.

We don’t need to copy China. We need to remember who we were.

All the money we keep pouring into bombs could be building schools. Here and in the countries we keep blowing up. We don’t have to spend the next five years watching the headlines and wondering when the shooting starts with China. We could be competing with them to see who builds a better life for their people. That’s a competition worth having. Dropping bombs and blowing up children is not a foreign policy. It’s a moral failure we keep funding and calling strategy.

We can build housing. We can build a grid. We can train doctors and nurses. We can manufacture our own pharmaceuticals. We can compete with private corporations and beat them, in every sector where we put public power in the field, the way we have always beaten them when we have bothered to try.

The market did not build this country. We built this country. And we can build it again.

If you want to see what the building plan actually looks like, my friend Zack Exley and the team at New Consensus have been working on exactly that. It's called Mission for America. It's worth your time.

Corbin Trent