The aff is founded on the false ontological assumption that the world is full of dangerous enemies to be overcome---it’s try or die for threat de-flation

The scale of the American Empire—its move from (mostly) hemispheric to global domination—only began to change in the 1930s. In fact, in my opinion the entire way Americans understand and frame geopolitics was forged during this decade, perhaps the most influential in modern US history.

The primary impetus behind the transformation in the American imperial imagination was the rise of Nazi Germany. Before Adolf Hitler’s ascendance to the German chancellorship in 1933, Americans generally believed they could negotiate with foreign powers—especially white, European powers—in good faith. But the rise of Hitler in Germany (and Stalin in the Soviet Union, though he was less important) persuaded Americans that there were some people with whom one just couldn’t reason—or, as a well-known book from the early 1940s put it, You Can’t Do Business with Hitler.

Hitler thus decisively ended two American dreams: first, that reason could replace violence in international relations (or at least, international relations outside the Western Hemisphere); and second, that the United States could afford to remain aloof from European affairs. In fact, many of the first generation of “defense intellectuals” who would staff and build the US national security establishment during and after World War II were social democrats who in the 1930s embraced a pessimistic theory of geopolitics because they believed Hitler posed a uniquely existential threat to “Western civilization.”

Put another way, it was in the 1930s that many American elites endorsed what scholars refer to as a “Schmittian” understanding of geopolitics. Now, it’s crucial to understand who Carl Schmitt was because he was one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. In brief, Schmitt was a German legal theorist (he eventually became a Nazi) who in his famous The Concept of the Political (1932) argued that “the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.” In simpler terms, Schmitt claimed that politics needed to be understood as a struggle between those who were on your side (friends) and those who were not (enemies). To Americans in the 1930s, Hitler and Nazi Germany as a whole were Schmittian enemies with whom one could not negotiate.

Needless to say, Americans were right to view Hitler and the Nazis as existential enemies. They were vicious brutes who did really want to conquer and dominate a significant portion of the world. The problem, however, was that too many Americans concluded that all geopolitics after Hitler were Schmittian geopolitics. That is to say, Americans began to argue that it was an ontological fact that international relations was a Manichean sphere in which there were good guys (Americans) and bad guys (anyone who disagreed with or challenged Americans). Indeed, the very terms “good guys” and “bad guys” only took off after World War II. In the late-1940s and beyond, a simple moralism permeated American politics and culture.

After the United States emerged victorious in World War II, it was quite easy for Americans to transfer their anxieties about Hitler and Nazi Germany onto Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. Stalin, after all, was a brutal and inscrutable dictator with a cult of personality and an enormous military. Moreover, defining the Soviet Union as an existential enemy analogous to Nazi Germany provided Americans with a simple framework through which they could negotiate (and justify) their emergence onto the world stage. The only way to stop the Soviet Union from dominating the world, Americans (and their allies) argued, was for the United States itself to become the global hegemon.

It was to this project that the United States dedicated itself after World War II. The nation increased its military budget, embraced a posture of permanent mobilization, and constructed a worldwide system of bases that today numbers about 750.

All of these actions were justified through a Schmittian “Cold War logic” that insisted that the peace and prosperity of the United States—indeed, the peace and prosperity of the entire world—depended on confronting the evil Soviet Union wherever it attempted to spread its tentacles. This logic, of course, also vindicated numerous interventions abroad, from the Korean War to the depositions of Iran’s Mohammad Mosaddegh and Guatemala’s Jacobo Árbenz to the Vietnam War. Indeed, recent research by the political scientist Lindsey O’Rourke has revealed that during the Cold War, the US government tried to covertly overthrow foreign regimes sixty-four times, and in forty-four of these attempts it supported authoritarian forces.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that in the second half of the twentieth century, the United States organized its society and foreign affairs around its supposedly existential struggle with the Soviet Union. This is why, after the Eastern Bloc’s collapse in 1989-1991, a “Cold War nostalgia” gripped, and continues to grip, the American elite. At least with the Soviet Union, Americans knew where they stood.

When the Soviet Union disintegrated, the American Empire was left without a raison d'être. In the interregnum of the 1990s, the nation’s elites endeavored to answer a fundamental question: what does an empire without an enemy look like? (As this suggests, few concluded that the United States should, say, abandon its foreign military bases and reduce its military budget.) The answer most people settled on was that the United States should become the “world’s policeman,” the “indispensable nation” that used its overwhelming power to “protect” foreign populations whenever they were threatened (or at least, whenever they were threatened by a country not allied to the United States). Thus the nation intervened in Bosnia and Kosovo. But the dramas of the 1990s couldn’t compare to the dramas of the Cold War, when a clear and present danger hovered over American civilization.

9/11 was a godsend for an increasingly adrift American Empire. The emergence of a “radical Islamic threat” allowed American foreign policymakers to return to the Schmittian logic that had triumphed during the Cold War: similar to the evil Soviets, elites argued, evil “jihadists” promoted a totalizing ideology and wanted to dominate the entire globe. The United States we live in today, with its domestic surveillance, its permanent mobilization, and its endless wars, is the natural outcome of a way of thinking that divides geopolitics into good versus evil.

Though anxieties about Islam permeated US culture in the 2000s, by the 2010s it became clear that this most recent threat du jour didn’t have the staying power of the Soviet Union—the “jihadists” just weren’t powerful enough to truly threaten the United States. It’s partially for this reason that we’re now witnessing attempts to stoke a “New Cold War” with China, which, if initiated, would provide the foreign policy establishment with the logic it needs to justify the ever-increasing expenditures that undergird the American Empire.

Since it began in the mid-twentieth century, champions of the US empire have defended its existence by referencing a series of enemies whose supposed power made it necessary for Americans to dominate the world. As such, one of the most important projects to which leftists can dedicate themselves in 2020 and beyond is threat deflation—persuading their fellow citizens that we’re actually extremely safe and have nothing to fear from terrorists, or Russia, or China, or whomever the next enemy is. While this won’t be enough to end US imperialism, it’s a crucial first step in building the public consensus necessary to begin drawing down the American Empire. Indeed, it’s especially important to move beyond a Schmittian framework given that the United States needs to cooperate with Russia and China to solve global problems like climate change, inequality, and—as is particularly apparent at the moment—pandemics.

Americans act like it’s always the 1930s, a decade in which there were clear good guys and bad guys. Today, we must recognize that it’s almost never the thirties—the future of humanity might very well depend on it.