Three decades covering foreign policy has taught me one thing: the story is almost never as simple as your side wants it to be. That’s why I call balls and strikes without keeping score.
That means you get reporting and analysis that makes partisans on both sides a little uncomfortable. Clear-eyed, fact-based, and beholden to no one.
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Washington woke up after the midterms to a Democratic Congress and a president with new limits at home. The wars, the rivals and the bills abroad didn’t get the memo.
So what does a Democratic Congress mean for America’s military commitments overseas and the country’s role in the world?
In my latest Cosmopolitics conversation, I sat down with Patrick J. Murphy, former Acting Secretary and Under Secretary of the Army, Iraq War veteran and former congressman, who now helps shape the next generation of military innovation at West Point. We talked about what comes next for American power, and whether a divided Washington can find common ground on national security.
Murphy has seen the problem from every angle: in combat, in Congress and at the top of the Army’s civilian leadership. His view is that Washington’s ambitions and its actions are increasingly out of sync.
Administration after administration has declared the Indo-Pacific the center of America’s economic and strategic future. Administration after administration has then poured enormous resources into the Middle East. The pivot to Asia keeps getting rerouted. Now the war with Iran has rattled global energy markets, strained allies and raised a fair question: are America’s military commitments serving its long-term interests, or just its most recent ones?
But this wasn’t only a conversation about what Washington gets wrong.
We dug into how drones, artificial intelligence, directed energy and other emerging technologies are changing modern warfare, and opening real opportunities for American innovation, manufacturing and investment. Murphy sees promise in public-private partnerships to rebuild the defense industrial base, secure critical mineral supply chains and build cheaper ways to counter new threats. In an era of million-dollar missiles fired at thousand-dollar drones, cheaper counts.
We also talked about the politicization of military leadership, the erosion of congressional oversight, and what the new Congress could do to restore public trust, assuming it remembers it has oversight powers.
The question underneath all of it: can America define its global leadership by more than military might?
Over the next several weeks, Patrick will join me for a series of Cosmopolitics conversations on how national security and geopolitics are reshaping the global economy, and where that creates opportunities for American businesses, investors and innovators. We’ll look at where defense, technology, capital and competitiveness meet, and how the U.S. can put its considerable strengths to work in a fast-changing world.
American power isn’t only about the wars we can fight. It’s also about the technologies we develop, the industries we build and the partnerships we forge. That’s where the next competition will be won.
Watch our conversation below, and join us next Friday, November 13, for the next one.
Thank you Cash Flow Collective, Joseph Tucker, Dan Smith, Beth walter, and many others for tuning into my live video with Patrick J. Murphy! Join me for my next live video in the app.
