How is it that a country that shares northern and southern borders with two militarily insignificant peaceful democracies; a country whose east and west coasts border wide oceans; a country with military spending that exceeds that of the next ten largest spenders combined; a country with 19 aircraft carriers to one each for Russia and China; a country with vast reserves of nuclear warheads buried in deep silos or hidden on submarines at sea–is filled with people afraid of their own shadows, who feel they must go about armed like secret service agents on presidential protection detail, and who apparently believe that someone in a tent 8000 miles away has the power to destroy the country with a cell phone.
The operative term here is asymmetry. Unfortunately, this is one of those words that has become nearly desaturated from meaning through over use and misuse. So we will have to take some time to lay out the issues.
With the demise of the Soviet Union in 1989, the United States no longer had anyone their own size to pick on. As nettlesome as the Soviets were, they had assets like cities, military bases, and factories that they wished to protect and preserve. Since we also have cities, military bases, and factories we wish to protect and preserve, a state of symmetrical equilibrium existed where each side realized that an attack on one of the other side’s assets would likely result in a retaliatory strike against one of their own assets.
We now face an array of adversaries where no such symmetry exists. To put it bluntly our assets are vastly more valuable than theirs. We are like a Lexus parked between two Yugos. One terrorist with a bomb in his shoe has ended up costing the civilized world untold billions of dollars in lost productivity as every airline passenger since had had their shoes x-rayed before each flight.
Our government likes to boast that no meaningful domestic terrorist attack has occurred in more than a decade. While this is true, we have no way of knowing whether any big attacks have actually been thwarted. From the standpoint of our adversaries feints and threats are every bit as valuable as actual attacks.
This is because we react aggressively to every fizzled shoe bomb, underwear bomb, or envelope sprinkled with talcum powder. We have exhibited zero tolerance for loss which is a clear signal that we can be induced to spend vast amounts at the merest hint or intimation of attack.
In the 1974 film The Conversation, Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul a security surveillance specialist. At one point in the story Caul begins to suspect that someone has placed a listening bug in his apartment. He begins to search, but finds nothing. Because of the sensitive nature of his work, the thought of being listened to is intolerable, so his search intensifies. As the film ends we see Caul sitting on the floor, bleakly staring into space. He has removed the flooring, walls, and ceilings from every room. He has gutted his apartment to rubble, but is apparently still searching for the elusive bug.
This may well be the hoped for future of America in the dreams of terrorists. Will we spend our last dollar, obliterate all assets, surrender every civil right and constitutional protection in the fool’s errand of trying to prevent an attack that no one may be planning?
In an asymmetrical world it is impossible to escape all loss. When you are the only Lexus in a parking lot full of Yugos you cannot park without getting dinged. We don’t want to face it, but we make similar accommodations to reality every day.
Presumably we could lower highway fatalities to near zero by drastically lowering speed limits and insisting upon Nascar-like safety equipment in automobiles. We don’t do that. Neither do we remove all safety gear and speed limits.
We don’t want to say it out loud, but we have as a society hit upon what we regard as a tolerable level of highway deaths each year. It is a conscious and intentional choice to accept this annual death toll. We have chosen to not pay what it would cost to lower that number.
Eventually we will have to come to a similar modus vivendi regarding terrorist attacks or we will find ourselves staring at the wall studs wondering what happened to our country.
