America won't be invaded by tanks crossing the border from Canada.

Americans are getting a wake-up call to the real threats to our economy, our culture, our government.

It isn't bombs from Germany, Japan, the USSR, China, or Iran.

Mutt and Jeff comic strip, 1942

Our traditional way of thinking of defense of the homeland is our military. That is the wrong place.

Our enemies have changed. Warfare has changed. The biggest threats are from within.

American investment in defense

Critics of Liz Cheney call her a war monger, too quick to find an enemy in Russia, Afghanistan, Iraq, China. They say she is doing it again, seeing a mortal threat in Trump's effort to undermine the peaceful transfer of power following the 2020 election. Trump attempted something that the Japanese and Germans in the 1940s could not come close to doing, nor the USSR in the Cold War, nor the Saudi suicide bombers on 9-11: Stop American democracy. She is doing the GOP and our country a favor. She is pointing out a vulnerability. We are spending billions on defense, but are protecting ourselves from a mental image of an enemy that made sense in 1942, but not now.

American democracy, economy, and culture face perils. Americans did not agree that Germany nor Japan were perils worth fighting until the Pearl Harbor attack and the German declaration of war. Then we knew.  America today is analogous to that period in 1940 and 1941 when Americans knew there was trouble afoot, but disagreed on exactly who the enemy was and whether we needed to do anything. And we are looking the wrong direction.

Government: Democrats and a few Republicans, most visibly Liz Cheney, see the effort to void the election as a grave threat to the republic, made worse by the fact that rather than being offended by this, a majority of Republican officeholders back Trump's effort. 

Technological:  We just saw a major energy pipeline hacked. Gasoline prices are spiking. Consumers rushed to "fill up" causing shortages. Somebody somewhere, typing on a laptop, carried out a successful attack on our economy. Colonial Pipeline had locked fences, but they were vulnerable in an entirely different direction. The enemy did not need to set foot on American soil. 

Medical: A virus kills almost 600,000 Americans in a year--more deaths than those of American soldiers in every theater in World War Two. The virus disrupted the economy, closed schools, filled hospitals, cost millions of jobs. Our tanks and fighter jets were worthless. The defense would have been a robust global effort to identify and isolate communicable diseases. Under that threat, an aircraft carrier is not a defense; it is a virus hotspot. 

Environmental: Sea levels are rising. The largest navy facility in the world at Norfolk, Virginia faces slow inundation. The Western U.S. is getting hotter and drier and the best cropland in the world is laying fallow for lack of irrigation. Alaskan permafrost is melting. Rainfall did to Houston and tides do to Miami as much or more damage than would be done by bombs dropped from enemy aircraft. Some people say it is "just nature doing its thing." Others say we humans are doing this to ourselves. Something is going on. 

Houston, Texas freeway

Economy: In a poll of Oregon residents, 66% said the economy was "only fair" or "poor," and only 22% thought conditions were getting better. Click: Oregon Values and Beliefs Center  The rich are getting richer and it is harder for people to get into the middle class and stay there. Social mobility is less for this generation of graduates than it was for the prior generation. The "American Dream" of hard work growing to security for oneself and one's family feels out of reach for more people. That creates discontent, showing up as populist revolts on both left and right. 

Demographic: The pro-Confederate-statue demonstrators in Charlottesville chanted "Jews will not replace us." Trump expressed a version of this replacement theory, saying immigrants from Latin America and Asia will not replace "us," i.e. White native-born Americans because those immigrants are criminals or job-stealers. The most popular Fox News hosts have picked up the theme. Democrats should not be surprised to see nativist rhetoric and policies. The impulse has been an intermittent presence in America, rising from time to time in response to political events and immigration surges from one place or another.: Anti-Irish, anti-Italian, anti-Jewish, anti-German, anti-Chinese, anti-Japanese, and now anti-Muslim, Asian, and Latin American. Trump addressed a fear that there were too many of the wrong kinds of people entering the country and changing the culture, language, religion, values, and gene pool.

Cultural: The January 6 insurrectionists were motivated in large numbers by people who feared traditional values being overwhelmed by unwelcome ideas on homosexuality and transgenders, unwelcome ideas on abortion, secularism, critical race theory, socialism, "cosmopolitanism," and "globalism."  They think there is a war, that the stakes are life and death, and they are losing it to the liberals. 

All these are threats to "Americanism," that mix of governance, an economic system, and culture that create our country. All of these pit American vs. American in one way or another. There is no consensus on whether there is a climate crisis, whether immigration is a positive or negative, or whether COVID is a grave threat or nuisance. The left sees Trump-authoritarianism as the threat; the right sees demographic and cultural change as the threat. Left and right understand there to be an economic distribution problem, but they have different policy solutions. All of these threats engage some significant number of Americans. None of them are suitable to solution by our current military strategies of uniformed personnel, ships, airplanes, missiles.

There is some consensus that we should defend against foreign soldiers, so we do that. But our enemies are not foreign soldiers. The problem is that we don't agree on who the real enemies are. In fact, that is what we fight over.