Their scenarios are American threat inflation

In Elizabethan theater, “alarums and excursions” was a stage direction calling for actors to rush about the stage in a chaotic clamor suggestive of battle. In American politics, threat inflation has a similarly theatrical role: it tries to confuse and excite an audience to win its support for some policy, often military excursions of some sort. This chapter explains why U.S. defense politics is especially prone to such behavior—why, that is, U.S. leaders serially exaggerate the nation’s vulnerability to national security threats. The explanation, in a nutshell, is that power gives the United States the opportunity to adopt expansive foreign policy goals. “Expansive” here refers not necessarily to attempts at expansion in the sense of territorial acquisition but to a militarily active and interventionist grand strategy. To heighten support for those goals, U.S. leaders exaggerate their contribution to domestic security. Over time, expansive foreign policy also generates societal interests tied to its survival. Those interests, most prominently national security organizations, inflate threats to protect their prerogatives. Educated amid that cacophony of threat inflation, new political leaders learn to echo it, either because doing so seems politically safe or because they believe it. Assertions of insecurity become a cultural habit of American elites. The chapter begins by defining threat inflation and describing how U.S. leaders use it. It then reviews political science and economics concepts showing how special interest groups dominate debates about risk. The second section shows how the growth of U.S. power distributes the costs of expansive foreign policies, thus undermining the formation of interest groups opposed to such policies. The next shows how power concentrates the benefits of those policies, forming interests that promote themselves with threat inflation. The last section discusses conditions that make for more balanced debate about threats and how to foster them. In explaining U.S. threat inflation, the chapter sheds light on which security threats are especially prone to exaggeration; on why reactions to new threats are often slow; on why fears tend to outlast the dangers that brought them; and, more generally, how debate fails to purge myth—how the democratic marketplace of ideas fails. Threat inflation is speech that gives an exaggerated sense of danger. It need not involve lying. U.S. leaders, for example, often threat‐​inflate by abusing worst‐​case scenarios—highlighting a dangerous possibility and omitting its probability. Shorn of context, the possibility implies more danger than reality merits. If you tell someone skiing bunny slopes in New Hampshire to beware of avalanches and illustrate the danger with tales of heliskiers buried by snow in the Canadian Rockies, you are not lying. But you have failed to point out that the danger of an avalanche in the White Mountains is remote. You are inflating skiing’s danger. Of course, in national security politics, exaggeration is rarely so blatant. It can be difficult to separate the prudent warning from threat inflation, especially when the speaker’s job is to warn. In the Semi‐​Sovereign People, E. E. Schattschneider imagines democratic politics as a street fight watched by a crowd. The fight’s outcome, he tells us, depends on the extent of the crowd’s involvement. So the brawlers may try to involve the crowd, depending on its disposition and on how the fight is going. In politics, he argues, beneficiaries of the policy status quo will seek to keep conflict narrow, whereas those seeking change will often try to broaden it. Activists frustrated by local politics might try to involve state government, and statewide combatants may look to the federal government. The full Congress can reverse its committees’ actions. The secretary of defense might reevaluate an army decision, and the president, driven by public opinion, might overrule him. In U.S. politics, threat inflation is often a shout of “danger!” meant to socialize conflict, an effort to energize public opinion. The U.S. system, according to Theodore Lowi, is especially prone to such appeals. Compared with dictatorships or even parliamentary governments, power in the United States is diffuse: spread among branches of government, committees, agencies, and private interest groups. Those entities are potential points of resistance to policy change. They create a powerful bias toward the status quo. Crises and wars unify public goals, overcoming the typical stasis. Invocations of insecurity attempt to create a similarly unifying sense of crisis that removes parochial barriers to collective action. Because policymakers always struggle to implement their proposals, alarmism is a regular feature of U.S. policy debate. It rarely works. But as with most shouts for help, the absence of initial success is likely to produce louder shouting, not quiet. Threat inflators are searching for arguments that win with the public. Another species of threat inflation defends the status quo. Advocates of security organizations and policies naturally defend them by references to the dangers that they confront. Such defenses shade easily into exaggeration, especially as the relevant threat lessens. The considerable academic literature dealing with how states misunderstand and mismanage danger generally focuses on errors of perception—psychological bias, ignorance, intelligence mistakes, and other communication and comprehension problems that prevent the state from correctly interpreting information. So the Nazi threat mounted without a proper response because nations slept, blind to its menace. The 9/11 attacks resulted from a “failure of imagination.” The United States invaded Iraq because it overestimated Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction arsenal. The solution to misperception is to see more clearly—correct for predictable biases, collect better intelligence, improve analysis of it, share information faster, and use better theory about enemy thinking.