The new One Percent Doctrine
Will a broader definition of “prevention” be America’s watchword once again?
If there is “a one percent chance” that a threat is real, “the United States must now act as if it were a certainty.”
— Vice President Dick Cheney, 2001
Suddenly, “national security” ain’t what it used to be.
When Vice President Cheney articulated his “One Percent Doctrine” nearly two decades ago, he was talking only about the threat of “weapons of mass destruction” in unfriendly hands.
After five hundred thousand American, Afghani and Iraqi deaths and six trillion taxpayer dollars, the way that the United States responded to that threat is much debated. But few would question the wisdom of acting swiftly and strongly if there really were a one percent chance of a nuclear bomb being detonated in an American city.
The real shortcoming of the original One Percent Doctrine is that it didn’t recognize that, as today’s coronavirus pandemic has illustrated, many major threats of mass destruction don’t come from foreigners hellbent on revenge or wrecking our civilization.
Instead, they come from the choices we have made — and continue to make — about how to build that civilization.
Reducing international and internal restrictions on commerce and travel has made human life vastly more sustainable and enjoyable. But it also makes it easier for new infectious diseases to spread rapidly. In the 1400s, the Black Plague took five years to spread throughout Europe. This year, the coronavirus took less than five months.
Feeding healthy farm animals with antibiotics has made protein more affordable and available to all. But it also drastically increases the likelihood of the birth of a drug-resistant mutant superbug that none of our lifesaving medicines can stop.
Building nuclear power plants reduces the need to burn dirty fossil fuels. But it also makes possible an accident or a “dirty bomb” that could “render an area the size of Pennsylvania uninhabitable.”
And I probably don’t have to detail for you the benefits of burning oil, gas and coal and the dire consequences for our climate. Even the Pentagon describes climate change as an enormous national security threat.
These threats and a handful of others of civilization-altering magnitude are not, to quote another Iraq War official, “unknown unknowns.”
Nor, throughout history, have governments entirely neglected them.
Just in the U.S. during the past fifty years, we’ve spent countless dollars on water treatment plants, car exhaust scrubbers, nuclear power plant safety measures, food inspections, renewable energy research and development, etc., etc.
And that investment has paid off many times over, by way of higher life expectancy, cleaner air and water, fewer car accident fatalities, and so on.
Imagine an America that hadn’t taken those steps. We could easily be living in a world today where every metro area looked like the smog-choked Los Angeles of “Blade Runner,” where there is at least one Chernobyl-level nuclear accident every decade, and where traffic fatalities are at late 1960s’ levels, with 171,000 Americans dying annually, instead of 38,800.
But it hasn’t been nearly enough.
For example, we obviously haven’t stamped out virus pandemics. Seven hundred thousand people around the world die annually due to antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Air pollutants are far deadlier than imagined fifty years ago, now killing 100,000 Americans each year. Deadly radioactive nuclear waste continues to pile up — now over 80,000 metric tons in the U.S. alone — with no solution in sight.
And it hasn’t been enough largely because the powers-that-be (largely regardless of their professed ideological bent) have chosen — with the acquiescence, if not downright urging, of much of the public — to downplay the likelihood of catastrophe in order to create more and more material goods, to rid society of the terror of scarcity.
In the U.S. and the “developed” world, there’s long been far more than enough food, water, shelter and other basic necessities for everyone, though our systems for distributing that bounty have left too many people bereft.
But the “grow, grow, grow” attitude is so ingrained in our society that most leaders seem to have no idea when and how to declare even a temporary victory in the war on scarcity.
They define success too often by growth in the GDP, median income, jobs and other numbers that, as Robert Kennedy famously put it, measure everything except that which is worthwhile.
But attitudes may be changing right now.
A potential silver lining in today’s coronavirus crisis, albeit one that is coming at a terrible cost, is that many Americans are rethinking our country’s priorities. It’s not surprising that a lack of preparation and prevention potentially leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths and 30 percent unemployment is enough to get people saying “we’re not going to do that ever again.”
Perhaps more importantly, the calls for a new attitude won’t be coming just from people who have been waving red flags and proposing solutions for decades.
It’s encouraging to see many Republicans and conservatives call for bold action and decry the “business-as-usual” approach initially recommended by President Trump.
I applaud Gov. Mike DeWine (Ohio), Gov. Charlie Baker (Massachusetts), Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, and Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney (Dick Cheney’s daughter) for many (but not all) of their actions and statements. They’ve saved lives and set precedents for other fellow party members and ideological compatriots, who are more reluctant to buck the old-school way of thinking, to follow.
If, and it’s a very big “if,” they and the millions of Americans who heed their opinions choose to apply the lessons learned this year to all of the major threats our society faces, that is, to redefine the concept of “national security” and to set a full-blown “One Percent Doctrine” as a guiding principle, there’s a real chance that the doomsayers and dystopians of the 21st Century will be proven wrong.
If that comes to pass, the sorrow our country is suffering now — especially the grief of those whose loved ones the pandemic is claiming — will be mitigated somewhat by a new expectation that our children and their children should not go through the same trauma or worse. That’s a definition of “national security” worth fighting for.
