Daily Times

America has had some close calls. After the Revolution and well into the 19th century, while protected by two oceans, America remained vulnerable to outside interlopers from Europe. The British burned Congress and the White House in the War of 1812 and a war with British Canada loomed. The Civil War could have partitioned America at the Mason-Dixon line. And if the Japanese generals guessed right and America had been shocked and awed into some form of forced peace following the attack on Pearl Harbor, America’s first language may not have been English.

Today, if the polls are accurate, over three-quarters of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track. A strong majority fear some form of a civil war will break out. Twenty million Americans think that only violence will fix the broken government in Washington. And, for the first time in the history of polling, no former and current president; Congress; and the Supreme Court were concurrently ever held in such low standing and high disregard.

Abroad, America has taken on China and Russia as chief adversaries without necessarily remembering that two-front conflicts are often lost. War warnings over Taiwan flitted across the media after two Congressional delegations visited that island. And the war in Ukraine risks expanding beyond those borders.

Right now, the 2024 presidential elections could be between two old men, one approaching eighty and the second well into that decade. No matter who wins control of Congress, geriatrics abound on both sides. While Congress “passed” significant legislation on Chips and Science and a partisan basis, the oxymoronic named “Inflation Reduction Act, vitriol-filled politics show no sign of abating-indeed quite the opposite as the 2022 elections approach.

Anyone betting against America would have lost all, or most, of their wagers.

Perhaps one of the most sinister warnings is not that both parties violently disagree on virtually everything. It is that each views the other as evil. Regardless of whether the January 6th Hearings in Congress and the investigations in Georgia and New York on possible crimes committed by Donald Trump, intensified by the FBI search of Mar a Lago, lead to indictments, the prospect of a former president standing trial and possibly running for re-election in jail is perhaps too bizarre for even a Hollywood movie. However, that Trump’s Corporation Chief Financial Officer has pleaded guilty to various crimes as did Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen and Rudy Giuliani is under investigation is not good news for the former president.

America has been in trouble before. But never has that trouble come when the globe has been under so many simultaneous attacks of massive disruptions caused by nature including pandemics, natural disasters and violent weather extremes concurrently with great power rivalries having no obvious off-ramps to prevent catastrophe. The last such rivalries brought World War I.

Yet, no serious elected leader has publicly acknowledged these dangers to the nation or acted to prevent them. Most White Houses work on the principle that bad news is a dish that should rarely leave the kitchen. In an election year, the opposition will elevate bad news to deafening proportions in eviscerating the administration. In this process, allegations need not respect truth or fact in condemning the other side- a further aberration of current American politics. That a majority of Republicans still assert the 2020 presidential election was stolen is no more surprising than the significant number of Senate Republicans who disdain Trump in private while supporting and even praising him in public.

If one were Vladimir Putin with his KGB instincts or Xi Jingping and his Sun Tzu genes, exploiting these conditions should be no surprise. Misinformation, disinformation, propaganda and “deep fakes” are very much in evidence to weaken an already “decaying and corrupt America.” V. I. Lenin had it right. “Give the capitalists (i.e. America) enough rope and they will hang themselves with it.”

Are conditions that hopeless? After all, anyone betting against America would have lost all, or most, of their wagers. The nation has proven its resilience many times. After the 1918-20 Spanish Flu and World War I, the nation embarked on the greatest economic boom in its history although that ended abruptly with the 1929 crash.

One grim prospect: imagine hundreds of January 6-like attacks to destroy, occupy or damage local, state and federal buildings and offices over the coming months or years. And then ask why this will not happen. You cannot!

The writer is a senior advisor at Washington, DC’s Atlantic Council and a published author.