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As a physician-scientist who has spent nearly 40 years studying viruses and immunity, I can speak to the scientific advances that made rapid Covid-19 vaccine development possible. I oversaw the work at the National Institutes of Health’s Vaccine Research Center that provided the basis for designing and evaluating the initial Covid-19 vaccines and antibodies. If anything about the pandemic is remembered as positive, it will be how science ‌was applied to rapidly produce medical countermeasures‌. But despite the scientific successes, I have doubts about our ability to deal with the next pandemic threat as readily as we dealt with Covid-19 — even if it is a better-known virus like influenza. Case in point, we had a monkeypox vaccine and antiviral drug before that recent outbreak, but by the time they were deployed, thousands of people were infected. We have entered a new era of ‌‌vaccine science, but can we ‌apply our extraordinary technical capabilities toward the goal of improving public health? My time as a researcher has encompassed both the long history of vaccine research and the race to develop a vaccine for Covid-19. Some people expressed concern that the Covid-19 vaccine development process was too fast, but the story can be told as either a one-year sprint or a 40‌-year story of scientific advances. The scientific process is, after all, incremental, and new advances build on many prior discoveries. Ultimately, the process is intended to achieve a better approximation of the truth. In biology, I think of it as looking through a dark glass and peeling back layer after layer, gradually revealing the underlying reality. In that sense, science is a faith exercise because it is searching for evidence of things unseen. Scientists imagine what could be true and then invent approaches to show whether what we envisioned is right. Over the past 15 years, technologies have emerged that have taken us through several more of these layers of understanding in biology, vaccines and immunity. The precision with which we can see structures of proteins — the building blocks that allow cells and viruses to function — and measure immune responses is stunning. The time from when the SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences were available to when the first vaccines were authorized and injected into humans was about 11 months. Typically, vaccine development is measured in decades. ‌‌Forty years of research ‌‌into how to make an H.I.V. vaccine ‌‌helped make rapid Covid-19 vaccine development feasible. These tools and others led to breakthroughs ‌that directly informed Covid-19 vaccine development in 2020. Editors’ Picks Meatballs in Tomato Sauce Get a Little Lighter Malta, Land of Knights, Sailors and Rainbow Flags Pride at Work Is Priceless, but It’s Nice to Be Paid ‌Still, I am concerned that our social order and national and global governance systems are not keeping pace. Having next-generation vaccine technology without adequate systems for implementation and distribution to all people is a waste. We can be much more prepared to predict or avoid future pandemics, but we must be more intentional. This includes building better systems for local and global pandemic response coordination and making long-term investment in basic research to generate the information ‌needed to develop ‌‌vaccines, antivirals and diagnostics. There should be a much more comprehensive global surveillance program in areas with high biodiversity to identify emerging threats earlier. And ‌‌leaders of high-income countries ‌‌must understand that it’s in their best interest to facilitate and build the capacity for vaccine research and manufacturing in low- and middle-income countries. There is an opportunity, with the advent of mRNA, to establish the capability for local ‌‌scientists to find solutions for regional diseases before they become global threats‌‌. This would also provide much-needed surge capacity during public health emergencies of international concern. The global community needs to build the capacity to immunize everyone around the world in six months during a pandemic. Failure to do so in the Covid pandemic is part of the reason we suffered through successive waves of new variants. This will require cooperative effort on the part of governments, philanthropists, academic institutions, nonprofit organizations and privately held companies. I retired from the federal government in 2021 after more than two decades of service. While my career has been focused on the biology of viruses and immunity, the pandemic revealed disabling problems related to vaccine access and trust. Therefore, I decided to join the faculty at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta to be a senior adviser for global health equity. I chose Morehouse School of Medicine, one of the United States’ historically Black medical colleges, because health equity is an integral part of its mission. It’s well positioned to influence vaccine access through advocacy, policy reform and the creation of a new generation of global health experts. It’s also an ideal place to work on building trust in science by involving more diverse investigators in discovery and achieving a deeper public understanding of biology. We just lived through the deadliest pandemic in a century. It’s prudent to consider what has happened, learn from it and ‌‌decide how the world — and our part in it — should operate. Millions of lives and trillions of dollars were lost. Health and wealth disparities widened. Biology became politicized. We are left with ‌the burdens of long Covid and a mental health crisis. I was inspired by the effort and sacrifices made by health care providers and essential workers to keep us going, and I am hopeful because amid the despair and uncertainty I saw many acts of caring and generosity. In 1896, William Osler, a founder of Johns Hopkins Hospital, wrote, “Humanity has but three great enemies: fever, famine and war; of these by far the greatest, by far the most terrible, is fever.” We now have tecnologies that give us a chance to better prepare, manage‌ and possibly avoid future pandemic threats. In today’s world, infectious diseases can spread around the globe in a matter of hours. A problem anywhere is a potential problem everywhere, and it is in everyone’s best interest ‌to recognize and solve regional problems ‌‌before they become global ones. It will take all of us, using all the talent and resources we have, working together to avert the tragedy of other pandemics.

We fear it is only a matter of time before we face a deadlier and more contagious pathogen, yet the threat of a deadly pandemic remains dangerously overlooked. Pandemics now occur with greater frequency, due to factors such as climate change, urbanization, and international travel. Other factors, such as a weak World Health Organization and potentially massive cuts to funding for U.S. scientific research and foreign aid, including funding for the United Nations, stand to deepen our vulnerability. We also face the specter of novel and mutated pathogens that could spread and kill faster than diseases we have seen before. With the advent of genome-editing technologies, bioterrorists could artificially engineer new plagues, a threat that Ashton Carter, the former U.S. secretary of defense, thinks could rival nuclear weapons in deadliness. The two of us have advised the president of Guinea on stopping Ebola. In addition, we have worked on ways to contain the spread of Zika and have informally advised U.S. and international organizations on the matter. Our experiences tell us that the world is unprepared for these threats. We urgently need to change this trajectory. We can start by learning four lessons from the gaps exposed by the Ebola and Zika pandemics. Faster Vaccine Development The most effective way to stop pandemics is with vaccines. However, with Ebola there was no vaccine, and only now, years later, has one proven effective. This has been the case with Zika, too. Though there has been rapid progress in developing and getting a vaccine to market, it is not fast enough, and Zika has already spread worldwide. Many other diseases do not have vaccines, and developing them takes too long when a pandemic is already under way. We need faster pipelines, such as the one that the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations is trying to create, to preemptively develop vaccines for diseases predicted to cause outbreaks in the near future. Poinkt-of-Care Diagnostics Even with such efforts, vaccines will not be ready for many diseases and would not even be an option for novel or artificially engineered pathogens. With no vaccine for Ebola, our next best strategy was to identify who was infected as quickly as possible and isolate them before they infected others. Because Ebola’s symptoms were identical to common illnesses like malaria, diagnosis required laboratory testing that could not be easily scaled. As a result, many patients were only tested after several days of being contagious and infecting others. Some were never tested at all, and about 40% of patients in Ebola treatment centers did not actually have Ebola. Many dangerous pathogens similarly require laboratory testing that is difficult to scale. Florida, for example, has not been able to expand testing for Zika, so pregnant women wait weeks to know if their babies might be affected. What’s needed are point-of-care diagnostics that, like pregnancy tests, can be used by frontline responders or patients themselves to detect infection right away, where they live. These tests already exist for many diseases, and the technology behind them is well-established. However, the process for their validation is slow and messy. Point-of-care diagnostics for Ebola, for example, were available but never used because of such bottlenecks. Greater Global Coordination We need stronger global coordination. The responsibility for controlling pandemics is fragmented, spread across too many players with no unifying authority. In Guinea we forged a response out of an amalgam of over 30 organizations, each of which had its own priorities. In Ebola’s aftermath, there have been calls for a mechanism for responding to pandemics similar to the advance planning and training that NATO has in place for its numerous members to respond to military threats in a quick, coordinated fashion. This is the right thinking, but we are far from seeing it happen. The errors that allowed Ebola to become a crisis replayed with Zika, and the WHO, which should anchor global action, continues to suffer from a lack of credibility. Stronger Local Health Systems International actors are essential but cannot parachute into countries and navigate local dynamics quickly enough to contain outbreaks. In Guinea it took months to establish the ground game needed to stop the pandemic, with Ebola continuing to spread in the meantime. We need to help developing countries establish health systems that can provide routine care and, when needed, coordinate with international responders to contain new outbreaks. Local health systems could be established for about half of the $3.6 billion ultimately spent on creating an Ebola response from scratch. Access to routine care is also essential for knowing when an outbreak is taking root and establishing trust. For months, Ebola spread before anyone knew it was happening, and then lingered because communities who had never had basic health care doubted the intentions of foreigners flooding into their villages. The turning point in the pandemic came when they began to trust what they were hearing about Ebola and understood what they needed to do to halt its spread: identify those exposed and safely bury the dead. With Ebola and Zika, we lacked these four things — vaccines, diagnostics, global coordination, and local health systems — which are still urgently needed. However, prevailing political headwinds in the United States, which has played a key role in combatting pandemics around the world, threaten to make things worse. The Trump administration is seeking drastic budget cuts in funding for foreign aid and scientific research. The U.S. State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development may lose over one-third of their budgets, including half of the funding the U.S. usually provides to the UN. The National Institutes of Health, which has been on the vanguard of vaccines and diagnostics research, may also face cuts. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has been at the forefront of responding to outbreaks, remains without a director, and, if the Affordable Care Act is repealed, would lose $891 million, 12% of its overall budget, provided to it for immunization programs, monitoring and responding to outbreaks, and other public health initiatives. Investing in our ability to prevent and contain pandemics through revitalized national and international institutions should be our shared goal. However, if U.S. agencies become less able to respond to pandemics, leading institutions from other nations, such as Institut Pasteur and the National Institute of Health and Medical Research in France, the Wellcome Trust and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the UK, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs have done instrumental research and response work in previous pandemics), would need to step in to fill the void. There is no border wall against disease. Pandemics are an existential threat on par with climate change and nuclear conflict. We are at a critical crossroads, where we must either take the steps needed to prepare for this threat or become even more vulnerable. It is only a matter of time before we are hit by a deadlier, more contagious pandemic. Will we be ready?

In 2020, the United States won the global race to develop a Covid-19 vaccine. But that historic victory could become a historical footnote if the United States loses the race to deliver its vaccines to the rest of the globe.

Vaccine diplomacy has never been more important. Every nation on earth will be watching to see who will rise to the challenge and reap the rewards of global leadership. The United States now has an opportunity to deploy its scientific and economic preeminence in the service of all humanity. The United States has the ability to shield developing nations not only from the virus, but from the designs of competing powers. Yet, to date, the United States has been slow to seize this opportunity, and international rivals—especially China—are eagerly filling the gap created by its inaction.

In that spirit, contemporary conceivablists worry that a minimally armed United States would suffer a hugely damaging decline in “influence” and would become less able to order the world—to be the “American Pacifier” with “leverage to restrain partners from taking provocative action.” They speculate that Europe “might” become “incapable of securing itself from various threats” materializing from somewhere or other, and that this “could be destabilizing within the region and beyond” while making the Europeans potentially “vulnerable to the influence of outside rising powers.” They also worry that Israel, Egypt, and/or Saudi Arabia might do something nutty in the Middle East and that Japan and South Korea might get nuclear weapons.143

The United States can certainly take credit for being an important influence in establishing a Western order in which the losers of the Second World War came to view the world in much the same way as those who had bombed Dresden and Hiroshima, emerging as key contributors to that order in the process. This was one of the most impressive instances of enlightened self-interest in history. However, the United States hardly forced that to happen due to its hegemonic (or limited hegemonic) status. It may have nudged, persuaded, and encouraged the process to move along, but it had a highly responsive audience in devastated peoples who were most ready to embrace the message and to get back on the road to prosperity. Indeed, it seems entirely possible that the United States was not strictly necessary for these developments at all—that much the same thing would have happened if it had never existed or if it had retreated into truculent isolationism.

Yet the world also offers a host of new opportunities. China, India, and the African Union are each home to more than a billion people with rapid economic growth and a rising middle class. The information revolution continues to advance at a dazzling rate. Robotics, artificial intelligence, and ubiquitous broadband offer the chances for dramatic breakthroughs in health care, education, and renewable energy, at home and globally.

If US foreign policy is only about the threats and not the opportunities, the United States will miss out on the rapid advances in well-being that the new technological revolution can deliver, and that would help to stabilize today’s conflict zones. The fundamental challenge facing US foreign policy is to keep America safe without busting the military budget, dragging America into needless wars, or diverting our attention and resources from the opportunity to build a smart, fair, and sustainable US and world economy.

After three years in the White House, Ronald Reagan had learned something surprising: “Many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of America and Americans,” he wrote in his autobiography. He continued: “Perhaps this shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did … I’d always felt that from our deeds it must be clear to anyone that Americans were a moral people who starting at the birth of our nation had always used our power only as a force for good in the world…. During my first years in Washington, I think many of us took it for granted that the Russians, like ourselves, considered it unthinkable that the United States would launch a first strike against them.” 100 Reagan is certainly not alone in believing in the essential benevolent image of his nation. While it is common for actors to attribute negative motivations to the behavior of others, it is exceedingly difficult for them to accept that anyone could interpret their actions in negative ways. Leaders are well aware of their own motives and tend to assume that their peaceful intentions are obvious and transparent.

Both strains of the hegemonic-stability explanation assume not only that US power is benevolent, but that others perceive it that way. Hegemonic stability depends on the perceptions of other states to be successful; it has no hope to succeed if it encounters resistance from the less powerful members of the system, or even if they simply refuse to follow the rules. Relatively small police forces require the general cooperation of large communities to have any chance of establishing order. They must perceive the sheriff as just, rational, and essentially nonthreatening. The lack of balancing behavior in the system, which has been puzzling to many realists, seems to support the notion of widespread perceptions of benevolent hegemony.101 Were they threatened by the order constructed by the United States, the argument goes, smaller states would react in ways that reflected their fears. Since internal and external balancing accompanied previous attempts to achieve hegemony, the absence of such behavior today suggests that something is different about the US version.

Such expenditures might still be justified if they were instrumental in keeping Americans safe. But, in fact, primacy is based on a number of faulty premises, including: (a) that the United States is subjected to more urgent and prevalent threats than ever before; (b) that U.S. security guarantees reassure nervous allies and thus contribute to global peace and stability; and (c) that a large and active U.S. military is essential to the health of the international economy.

Primacists hold that the United States cannot adopt a wait-and-see attitude with respect to distant trouble spots. They believe that the security of all states are bound together and that threats to others are actually threats to the United States. Primacists believe that instability and crises abroad will adversely affect American interests if they are allowed to fester. “The alternative to Pax Americana—the only alternative—is global disorder,” writes the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens, with emphasis. Because any problem, in any part of the world, could eventually threaten U.S. security or U.S. interests, primacy aims to stop all problems before they occur.

Unfortunately, this frenetic pace of military activity has seldom produced positive outcomes. As measured against their stated aims, the “long wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq have clearly failed, as have the lesser campaigns intended to impart some approximation of peace and stability to Libya, Somalia, and Syria. An equally unfavorable judgment applies to the nebulous enterprise once grandly referred to as the “global war on terrorism,” which continues with no end in sight.

And yet there seems to be little curiosity in U.S. politics today about why recent military exertions, undertaken at great cost in blood and treasure, have yielded so little in the way of durable success. It is widely conceded that “mistakes were made”—preeminent among them the Iraq war initiated in 2003. Yet within establishment circles, the larger implications of such catastrophic missteps remain unexplored. Indeed, the country’s interventionist foreign policy is largely taken for granted and the public pays scant attention. The police killing of Black people provokes outrage—and rightly so. Unsuccessful wars induce only shrugs.

The source of these dubious statistics appears to be the Council for a Strong America, a liberal advocacy group whose solution to military-recruitment problems is more public preschool. Its “Mission: Readiness” subsidiary has a dire report on military recruiting, but it offers no data analysis – just assertions from military officials. For example, its evidence that “one out of four young Americans lacks a high school diploma” is a personal communication from a military analyst. (In fact, most of the report promotes old chestnuts like Perry Preschool and the Abecedarian program. I suspect that “Mission: Readiness,” whose funders include Pre-K Now and the Birth To Five Policy Alliance, is a lot more interested in preschool than it is in the military.) Overall, the recruitment problem is probably overblown. Some eligibility constraints are hard to change, such as AFQT and criminality, but others are easier. The military is quite good at getting people in shape, so the fitness problem seems manageable. As for getting young people interested in signing up, there are probably many steps that could be taken to make the services more appealing, including higher recruitment bonuses when the private-sector labor market is strong (such as now). The broader point here is that the number of potential recruits is partly a function of how badly the military wants recruits in the first place. Trying to put a single number on who is eligible, assuming no other policy changes, does not seem all that helpful. Again, maybe I’m wrong to be skeptical of a recruiting crisis, but the evidence presented so far is not convincing.

However, these budgetary shenanigans, combined with recent high-profile accidents like the U.S.S. Fitzgerald and U.S.S. McCain tragedies, have led numerous officials to wrongly declare a military readiness crisis. To be sure, after nearly two continuous decades of war, the armed forces are under significant stress. But to exaggerate today's problems as a "crisis" is risky. Doing so can divert attention from other military challenges, like long-term modernization. It may embolden foes who mistakenly conclude we are unprepared and lead to cynicism among taxpayers who wonder why a defense establishment consistently funded at more than $600 billion a year (well above the Cold War average, in inflation-adjusted terms) is sometimes described in terms reminiscent of the "hollow force" era of the 1970s. Today's armed forces, while challenged, are far from hollow. They need more consistent and modestly higher budgets. But rather than wait for readiness salvation in the form of much higher budgets that are unlikely to appear, Pentagon officials also need to think of what they can do to mitigate readiness problems through better management of the forces at hand. Current military readiness — i.e., the ability of the U.S. military, unit by unit, to carry out assigned tasks promptly and competently — can be summarized as follows: First, most major categories of equipment are in fairly good shape, in terms of their "mission-capable rates" relative to historical norms. For example, major Army vehicle readiness rates typically exceed 90 percent today. That said, a number of categories of equipment across the services, like certain helicopter fleets, are not in good shape. Second, funding for major training is being provided to the military at 85 to 95 percent of comprehensive rates. That is not perfect, but by historical standards, it is still rather good. Third, the quality of our personnel is quite high, and recruiting as well as retention statistics are strong. Yet, we do not have enough people for some specialties, and we have real dearths in areas like certain types of pilots and equipment maintenance personnel.

It’s worth thinking about why defense spending is about to explode. It’s not because of some revolutionary change in the global security environment — aside from those pesky North Koreans and their nukes, America has never been so secure. It’s not because the U.S. military’s effectiveness has declined; it remains the most powerful force in the world, highly capable and very ready. The reason the Pentagon’s budget is now on a long-term upswing is because the military has spent years loudly lobbying for such an increase while complaining about an alleged “readiness crisis.” Complaining works, at least when the military does it, because politicians in both parties fear the military’s wrath. Partisan gridlock can still impede efforts to bump up the military’s resources, but now that Republicans are in control of Congress and the White House, there are no more hurdles standing in the way. None of this is to suggest, however, that the congressional generosity will buy Americans more security or a better force than the one they have today. Every military leader in history has wanted more resources at his or her disposal. U.S. secretaries of defense have been especially adamant since 2011, when the Budget Control Act first set limits on both defense and domestic spending. The tears shed by the Pentagon went beyond complaining about those pesky budget caps. They also touched on declining military readiness, units that weren’t combat ready, Chinese military expansion, and just about anything else that defense officials thought might put the spending train back on the tracks. All the Pentagon’s complaints ignored the reality that since 2001 the military has been receiving tens, and sometimes even hundreds, of billions of dollars in additional funding — above and beyond the budget caps — thanks to a special slush fund, the Overseas Contingency Operations account. That money is supposed to be designated for emergencies, but both the Pentagon and the Congress have routinely used this budget for nonemergency purposes, such as paying, training, and supporting existing troops (all normally in the Pentagon’s base budget) and buying equipment already in the long-term defense plan. Nevertheless, the military has complained that its readiness is in tatters. And after all those years of deployments, military officials testifying to Congress could always come up with a sad anecdote about planes being cross-decked to an outgoing carrier, fighters not ready to fly, or missing pilots. U.S. policymakers have seen this movie many times before. I experienced it myself in the 1990s, when the brass was displeased with the budget levels set by the Bill Clinton administration and whined about readiness problems to the Office of Management and Budget, where I worked. My follow-up with the Pentagon’s civil servants made it clear that the measures they were using were rigged to show low levels of readiness; they set standards that called units “ready” only if they had every capability imaginable to fight a major ground war, and they counted as “unready” units that were back from deployments and had missed a training slot for that big war, one they would soon be scheduled to receive. We knew the Pentagon was using manipulated numbers to bludgeon us with demands for more funding. Nevertheless, we caved: In 1994, we added more than $20 billion to the defense budget, not really to fix readiness but to try to make the issue go away before the midterm elections that year. (It didn’t work, by the way.) Four years later, we did it again, busting previous budget commitments to add billions of dollars more. (For an excellent analysis of that fight, read This War Really Matters: Inside the Fight for Defense Dollars by the late George C. Wilson, once the premier Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post.) Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose — the more things change, the more they stay the same — as military parade leaders in France might say. Today, once again, the U.S. military stands on the brink of an alleged readiness crisis, and more money is needed, pronto. The trail of tears became so deep that it caught up Republicans and Democrats (always eager to portray themselves as “tough on national security”). It caught up in the lachrymose flow virtually all of the think tank preachers at the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Center for a New American Security, and large panels of bipartisan heavyweights reviewing the Pentagon’s four-year defense studies. Everyone in Washington seems to have been swept up in the tide; even some of the most careful, independent analysts are on board. As Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted, “We are stretched too thin.… We are trying to do too much with the size force that we have all around the world.” All this hand-wringing is happening about a ground force that, after nearly two decades of war, is highly experienced and primed — and largely back at home; a Navy that is larger than any other navy in the world and the only one with global reach; an Air Force that is larger and more technologically advanced than any other, flying, bombing, tanking, airlifting globally. America’s is the only military that has global basing, logistics, communications, transportation, and intelligence; nobody else, not the Chinese and certainly not the Russians, comes even close. But this is Washington, where the policy and analytical sheep gather under one tree to be safe from the storm of political criticism. The British novelist Lawrence Durrell comes to mind: “How nugatory and how glum / The endomorphs of scholarship / Like hippos on a sinking ship / Stand bum to silly bum.” (Just replace scholarship with politics and the comparison is apt.)

U.S. policymakers have invited this response. For decades, U.S. foreign policy has followed a quixotic goal of primacy, or global hegemony. It presumes that the United States is the indispensable nation, and that every problem, in any part of the world, must be resolved by U.S. leadership or else will impact American safety.

But primacy has proved both difficult and costly. It is also frequently disconnected from American security needs.

Washington is abuzz with talk that the U.S. military is increasingly hollow, and that its readiness is in crisis. American military readiness, defined as the ability of individual units in the armed forces to execute their assigned missions promptly and competently, is indeed uneven today, with some serious problems. A Department of Defense that downsized by more than a third after the Cold War ended, then spent fifteen years at war, and most recently also endured the budgetary shenanigans of sequestration and recurrent continuing resolutions, has indeed been through a lot. All would agree that the United States has asked a great deal of its soldiers, sailors, Marines, airmen, airwomen and their families, as well as the U.S. Coast Guard over in the Department of Homeland Security.

But some of the current talk goes dangerously too far. If believed literally, then it could embolden U.S. enemies, suck resources that are also needed for military innovation and modernization to fix short-term readiness problems, and make taxpayers wonder why the Pentagon can’t manage its forces better on $600 billion a year (well above the Cold War average). Just as bad—or worse—it could convince lawmakers to fund a big defense buildup by cutting the State Department, Agency for International Development, and other equally crucial parts of the country’s foreign-policy toolkit, as President Trump has proposed. That would hurt diplomacy and development far more than it would help the armed forces, given the proportionate amounts of money involved for each in any such reallocation.

The United States seems to be substantially free from threats that require a great deal of military preparedness.

To begin with, it really seems time to consider the consequences of the fact that a conflict like World War II is extremely unlikely to recur. Spending a lot of money for an eventuality—or fantasy—of ever-receding likelihood is highly questionable. Some envision threat in China’s rapidly-increasing prosperity. But, although its oft-stated desire to incorporate (or re-incorporate) Taiwan into its territory should be watched, armed conflict would be extremely—even overwhelmingly—costly to the country. And Chinese leaders, already rattled by internal difficulties, seem to realize this. Russia’s recent assertiveness bears watching, but it does not suggest that the game has been crucially changed. It might make sense to maintain a containment and deterrent capacity against rogue states in formal or informal coalition with other concerned countries. However, the military requirements for the task are limited. Humanitarian intervention with military force is unlikely due to a low tolerance for casualties in such ventures, an increasing aversion to the costs of nation-building, and the lack of political gain from successful ventures. Concern about nuclear proliferation is overwrought: long experience suggests that when countries obtain the weapons, they “use” them only to stoke their national ego and to deter real or imagined threats. Europe seems to face no notable threats of a military nature, the Taiwan/China issue remains a fairly remote concern, and Israel’s primary problems derive from the actions of sub-state groups. The military relevance of the terrorism “threat” has been substantially exaggerated, and it mainly calls for policing and intelligence work and perhaps for occasional focused strikes by small units.

Over the course of the last several decades, alarmists have often focused on potential dangers presented by rogue states, as they came to be called in the 1990s. These were led by such devils du jour as Nasser, Sukarno, Castro, Gaddafi, Khomeini, Kim Il-sung, Saddam Hussein, Milosˇevic´, and Ahmadinijad, all of whom have since faded into history’s dustbin.66 Today the alarm has been directed at Iran as discussed in Chapter 6 and also at North Korea as discussed in this one. However, neither country really threatens to commit major direct military aggression. Iran, in fact, has eschewed the practice for several centuries.

Nonetheless, it might make some sense to maintain a capacity to institute containment and deterrence efforts carried out in formal or informal coalition with concerned neighboring countries – and there are quite a few of these in each case. However, the military requirements for effective containment by their neighbors, by the United States, and by the broader world community are far from monumental and do not necessarily require the United States to maintain large forces-in-being for the remote eventuality.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s long-term strategy is this — he has no long-term strategy.

The California Republican has shown, to a remarkable degree, that his day-to-day, week-to-week style in running the House is to essentially push through — to just keep dancing — and deal with problems as they come. Get through today and worry about what happens next when it happens.

A few weeks before the 2010 midterm elections, when pollsters from both parties were uniformly predicting a Republican rout, an article appeared on the right-wing Web site RedState with the title “It’s Time to Make GOP Leadership Less Powerful.” Its author, Russell Vought, was a thirty-four-year-old budget wonk who had previously worked as a House aide for Mike Pence, then the Conference chair. “I learned a lot from being on the inside,” he told me recently. In his view, the top Republicans in the House, starting with the Speaker, were primarily interested in preserving their own power, and they “distracted” conservative members from pursuing more explosive ideological fights. Vought left the House disenchanted, in the summer of 2010, taking a job with Heritage Action, an advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation. “If you are a conservative,” he wrote in his RedState article, “you want checks in the system to ensure that conservative back benchers . . . have enough road blocks to put up when Leadership is going off the rails of principle.”

The following year, after Republicans picked up sixty-three House seats in the midterms, an insurgent wing of the G.O.P. refused to raise the debt ceiling, in order to pressure the Obama Administration to cut the federal budget. To avoid a catastrophic default, the Speaker, John Boehner, made a deal with the White House, and cobbled together a majority by trading conservative Republican votes for moderate Democratic ones. To the conservatives, this was an unforgivable deceit. In 2015, they retaliated against Boehner, who eventually retired, and, in the process, created the House Freedom Caucus, a group of ideologues and extremists who made it their mission to antagonize Party leadership.

So here we are. A bipartisan majority is taking shape and the vote to pass a debt ceiling increase will probably take place by the end of this week.

What we do next depends on how the drama of the last few weeks comes to be understood as the dust settles. There have been a number of unexpected twists along the way, and we’ll need to think carefully about how those affect our plan. The most important are these:

Anger on the party’s right flank probably doesn’t threaten McCarthy’s speakership anytime soon. Few, even in the hard-right Freedom Caucus, have said they back a motion to “vacate the chair” — the parliamentary process to remove a speaker. A vote to unseat McCarthy remains highly unlikely in large part because there’s no likely candidate to replace him.

“After this vote, we will have discussions about whether there should be a motion to vacate or not,” Buck told CNN.

But even Buck acknowledged that he and his allies may not have the votes to remove McCarthy, and the speaker has said he is “not at all” concerned about losing his gavel. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who was one of eight Freedom Caucus members to support the debt ceiling bill, dismissed suggestions of ousting McCarthy as “absolutely absurd”.