Vital Interests: You and Michael Cohen recently wrote a book titled Clear and Present Safety: The World Has Never Been Better and Why That Matters to Americans. Can you explain your thesis and what you describe as the “threat-industry complex?” 

Micah Zenko: The main thesis of the book is that American leadership, as well as American media influencers, are engaged in a fundamental, strategic misdiagnosis of what actually harms Americans. The greatest threats, risks, and harms that Americans overwhelmingly face, both in terms of consequence and probability, are all domestic. 

They're all within our borders and largely under our control. They are things that national and state legislatures could do a lot about.  However, we don't spend much political time or political capital on them. 

We look abroad and construct national security policy, Homeland Security, based upon foreign threats, whether it is North Korean missiles, Iranian missiles, trans-national terrorism or just China, in general. 

These are the conversations that overwhelmingly dominate national discussions about security and protecting the American people. The things you can do to protect the American people at home simply do not receive that degree of attention. 

I'm talking about things like the epidemic of drug-related deaths, car and road deaths, the whole suite of health infirmities, we call the non-communicable diseases, gun deaths, particularly the incredible increase in suicides over the last 15 years. All those sorts of things where we know how to make policy interventions to reduce the threat that they pose to Americans, we just don't do it. That's the basic thesis in the book, that we have incorrectly diagnosed what puts Americans at risk and subsequently prescribed policy interventions that are incorrect and ineffectual.

VI: In your book, you give a history of this, the idea of looking abroad for threats. Why is this misdiagnosis so endemic to foreign policy?

Micah Zenko: A lot of countries, I would say, misdiagnose what harms their people. What is most problematic is when you have a country like the United States which has constructed vast global interests. America, over the last basically seven years has decided to have global interests everywhere and when your interests are global, they're always at risk, because things happen in other countries or regions which you cannot dictate or control or prevent. There's always a reason to feel threatened and at risk. It fundamentally begins with the construction of global threats and global interest of the United States.

VI: Did this start with the Cold War and the notion that the United States has this arch enemy, the Soviet Union, threatening worldwide Communist domination? This, coupled with the threat of the nuclear Armageddon, was pretty convincing. Are you saying this was just hyped-up propaganda for political purposes? 

Micah Zenko:  The idea is, you get to decide what threatens you. Just because a general standing behind a podium or politicians or alleged cyber experts tell you something is threatening, does not necessarily mean it is a threat. Nobody is the final arbitrator or expert on the future and so, we overwhelmingly look towards a handful of elite opinion shapers to determine what should threaten us. 

During the Cold War, we had ideas like the Domino Theory, which is basically the notion that a communist government in one country would lead to communist takeovers in neighboring states, each falling like a row of dominos, the idea that a communist presence anywhere should concern the United States. Combine that with an arms race - the United States constructed the idea that it needed to have a first strike advantage over the Soviet Union to decapitate them and, over time, the Soviets had that same opinion of the United States, which led to literally trillions of dollars of wasted money. Those threats are not unreal, but there is a choice in how we talk about them and subsequently act based upon them.

VI: What you are saying is that while there are real strategic issues, a lot of the notions about threats and how to confront them are not grounded in reality?

Micah Zenko: The risk that they pose to American interests is actually quite low. For example, today there were pictures in the news of American soldiers guarding oil fields in Eastern Syria. People are shocked to see these pictures after a declared military pull back, but if you know the Carter Doctrine - you know that the United States will protect oil anywhere in the Middle East because, under the Carter Doctrine, natural resources are of  "vital national interest" to the United States. The United States reserves the right to use military force in the Middle East to secure that resource and has for 40 years. This is a strategic decision that the United States has chosen to make, elevating its importance beyond what it actually should be.

VI: The Carter Doctrine was formulated at a time when there was a serious disruption in the oil supply chain which caused long lines at gas stations and spiking gas prices. Today, the United States is supposedly close to energy independence. How can that policy still have any validity?

Micah Zenko: This is actually an interesting debate. The contention remains that it is in the United States' vital national interest to ensure the free flow of natural energy anywhere, to allies or adversaries or neutral countries. The United States takes the lead military role through U.S. Central Command and its forces. There are something like 45,000 to 50,000 US troops in the Middle East right now. We talk about Iran, Iraq, or ISIS but the primary United States mission in the region- when it comes to protecting the ports, overflight rights, host nation support - is fundamentally to protect oil. 

That remains true even if we don't actually need foreign oil for the United States because if there is a cut off of oil to the European Union, Canada, or even Mexico, it would harm global economic performance and be a threat to the U.S. economy. That's the claim. How the United States became the primary actor responsible for protecting the oil is another story.

VI: To get back to the fundamental problem with misdiagnosing national and international threats. Where is the flaw - Is it in our intelligence system? How is it that among our elites and political leaders this kind of disinformation is allowed to flourish and then get picked up by this threat-industrial-complex that you talk about? 

Micah Zenko: Some of it is our psychological makeup. Threatening information is more easily imprinted on our minds. It is more easily recalled, and it is more vivid and we tend to act more based upon it. Media figures, political leaders, advertisers - they know this and they subsequently weaponize more threatening information to achieve things they want -which is get elected, which is to get budgets passed, or simply to get you to buy something.

We are predisposed to be more receptive to threatening information than we are to un-threatening information. Subsequently, it is almost impossible in the news media today to find any information that does not assert a threatening situation. Just open the newspapers today to try to find a positive news story. These kinds of stories simply are not reported. Positive news in contemporary American society is just not considered newsworthy. It is deemed unimportant. 

Positive global trends, which we document throughout the entire course of the book, on global public health, on reduction of civil wars, and violence of all forms, those stories are never reported in the news. We have several surveys where we've asked people whether global poverty increased or decreased since the Cold War? Well it has decreased almost 80% and mostly people think it has stayed the same or gotten worse. I can give you numerous examples of this frame of mind where we are predisposed to bad news. As a result the people who need to get something out of the American public have no reason to be sincere or balanced with us.

VI: Was this susceptibility impacted by 9/11 when the homeland was attacked and we were shown to be vulnerable? Was it sensationalized news that convinced the American public that the Global War on Terror was necessary to keep international jihadists from further attacks.?

Micah Zenko: If you look at the response to 9/11, to 2700 American citizens being killed as well as 300 non-American citizens, the cost of America's response to those 2700 deaths is going to be something like $7 trillion by 2050. Then, by comparison, American life expectancy has fallen for three straight years which has not happened since the period from 1919 to 1921 when there was a national economic depression and World War One going on. It should be the most alarming headline in the world and it should be repeated by every politician when life expectancy and social advancement falls for two years. If you look at what has been spent in response to the shorter life and poor health that defines American society today compared to the 2700 deaths from transnational terrorism, it's nothing. 

It's true that we were attacked and the responses are not just overwhelmingly costly but in terms of minimizing the probability of jihadist terrorism from abroad, we know from reliable sources that the number of jihadist foreign fighters in the world has been increasing every year. So the question can be posed, is this $7 trillion being spent effective when by comparison almost nothing is being spent to protect Americans from the causes of their deaths from health threats?

VI: This phenomenon of using these threats to polarize societies, the nationalist populist movements that we see all around the world, isn’t this a tactic by governments to consolidate their own influence over their populations?

Micah Zenko: I would say that's always been true but it's never been as effective as now due to narrow targeting that is available through social, online, and data-gathering media. Claims made from the bully pulpit are repeated over and over again in a 24/7 news cycle. Media sources from lots of different mediums are willing to repeat over and over again and reinforce the messaging that they get from whichever ideologically focused pundits they support.

It is different now, and in the United States it's more consequential because no other country on earth has constructed global interest like the United States.

VI: You talk about the ills that are besetting our society - avoidable health threats, gun violence, opiate addiction, greatly increased suicide rates. Does that point to the real problem in society, that there's something truly affecting the psyche of people that makes them feel vulnerable and hopeless? 

Micah Zenko: We know a good deal about suicide because there has been considerable research. We know the pathways that lead people to take such a tremendously catastrophic act, to attempt to kill themselves. We know the pathways and it's often not simply hopelessness but it's fundamentally more structural. 

We know that people who are largely disconnected from global marketplaces and do not have upward mobility- or economic opportunities, or get to go to college, suffer from a life rupture. Either a lost job, a lost relationship, a divorce - we know the pathways. We know that by keeping a gun in your house you are three times more likely to kill yourself. The reason for so many suicides in the United States is, in part, a gun ownership issue. I would say it's not just that there's an issue of hopelessness. 

It is worth noting that the growth in suicides is a fundamentally American issue. In the United States suicides have gone up about 20 to 25% since 2000. In China, they've gone down 60% since 2000. In India they've gone down 40%. Even in Russia they've gone down. According to the World Health Organization the average global suicide rates have gone down thirty percent since 2000. 

The United States is an aberration. It is an aberration within countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. According to documented studies, compared to other advanced countries, the United States is becoming further and further like a developing country. In terms of economic opportunity, social mobility, and health outcomes, the United States is becoming like a developing country in many areas, not a developed country.

VI: To get back to the 2020 elections, these are major challenges that the candidates should be thinking about. You state that dealing with domestic threats is best done at the state level and then filter on up because you don’t think a top down federal government response is possible?

Micah Zenko: Ideally there could be a federal top down approach but there is no reason to believe it will happen and I invite people to look at the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank. They have construed a Political Conflict Index which is a measure of bipartisanship in the United States. It shows that partisanship in the federal legislature and Congress is just getting worse and worse all the time.

To wait for Democrats and Republicans in Washington to be motivated to work together is, I think, crazy.  It is simply not going to happen. There is a role for the federal government which is to reconstruct foreign policy. That is not a state legislation responsibility, it is a federal government responsibility. 

Here if you look at commitments under the Trump administration on issues of defense spending, it has largely sustained global commitment despite rhetorical claims by President Trump. But to reorient national security to confront that which overwhelmingly harms Americans, that we cannot expect from a federal government at loggerheads. 

VI: What about the big global challenges like climate change? Is that something that could be a unifying factor within the country?

Micah Zenko: I'd like to believe so because there are two consequential decisions of the Trump administration finally being implemented. One is the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement., This is really troubling not just because it shatters the one global attempt to reduce carbon emissions and hopefully reverse the negative impact of climate change but also because of the economic impact.

The National Bureau of Economic Research published a study in August 2019 that estimates, by every projection, climate change is going to hurt the United States economically far worse than it will hurt China or Russia or even India through 2100. Even if all you care about is American power or great power competition you should be supportive of reducing the impact of climate change.

It is hard to imagine that climate change will be addressed in any effective way by the current United States government. The Republican Party in the United States is the last major national party in the world that doesn't have in its platform the belief in the need to reduce climate change. It's hard to believe that will change in the next presidential term. 

The other existential threat is nuclear exchange. The most effective way to reduce the probability of a nuclear exchange is to have some predictability and transparency between the United States and Russia, which still has close to 90% of all nuclear weapons on earth. That predictability and transparency was a New START Treaty - the New START Treaty expires in 2021, I don't see any interest-- there is no interest in extending it. I don't think that will happen since Moscow is not interested and neither is Washington. Again this should be unifying issues but I just don't see it happening.

VI: You say the world is increasingly a better place. We currently see demonstrations all around the world - in Hong Kong, in Chile, in Lebanon, in Iraq They are protesting against corruption, against their lack of economic opportunities, for better governance. Is that a movement that you see as gaining momentum and being a positive force in the years to come?

Micah Zenko: According to people who track these things - the non-violent movement people - they are increasing both in terms of the number of them and then the size of them. What people are trying to determine now is, what's the correlation between them and a change in the behavior of people who have power? Because people who have power want two things - more power and then no oversight or influence on how to exercise their power.

I think it is too soon to tell if protests make a difference, but it is absolutely the case that there are more non-violent protests today than there were five years ago or 10 years ago. people who counter them find that when you try to crack down on those types of protests they actually get worse pretty quickly.

VI: There is a worldwide social media so that we all know what's going on all the time, in real time. How does this impact global developments?

Micah Zenko:  You do know but also the people with power know that you know. They can pollute social media with disinformation and misinformation. It's both additional insight to what happens around the world but also the reality of those people feeding your data streams with just fake news.

VI: To address the problems that you enumerate - lack of effective healthcare, substandard schools, failing infrastructure, out-of-control gun violence, and income inequality - wouldn’t that require reorienting away from massive spending for the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security? 

Micah Zenko: It's not a massive shift but it's a shift between the finite resources and discretionary spending in the federal government. A lot of the things that we've been discussing don't require a lot of money, just a shift of attention to small but meaningful fixes.

A good example of this: according to a 2014 Federal Communications Commission study, at least 10,000 American lives could be saved each year if ambulances were able to respond one minute faster to 911 calls.  When you dial 911 emergency responders do not instantly know where the call actually comes from. We used to think like the police will immediately come to your home, they actually don't. To activate a 911 call and get a first responder to arrive takes a lot of coordination. If you're in an apartment complex they can't find your building or your actual residency. If you're short of breath and you can't give your address it is likely you will not be found.

If the police could respond to 911 calls two minutes faster they could save thousands of lives. We actually know how to do this - it is a technical fix. Authorities would have to mandate the telecommunication companies and technology companies to implement it and then the fixing occurs. It will cost us pennies more per service but we can save thousands of lives every year. We don't do it because telecom companies lobby aggressively to ensure that they're not mandated to make these changes.

Another example - we know that a quarter of a million people in the United States die of medical errors. We know how to prevent them. You have to put in more stringent regulations, you have to mandate training at all levels.

There are many instances of fixes that do not require significant costing, it's just the government has to make it a requirement of the stakeholders, oftentimes companies to do something about it.

VI: What you're saying is that there has to be a concerted effort to counter the threat-industrial-complex and that things can get better, and they can get better soon, it's just a matter of making better decisions?

Micah Zenko: I would say not just get better soon but the overwhelming percentage of the world has gotten better. If you look at life expectancy issues, the education rates, if you look at maternal deaths, if you look at women’s education rates, almost everywhere things are getting better except for parts of Europe and the United States, and the Middle East. 

All the Middle East and North Africa make up less than 4% of global population, yet if you picked up a newspaper you would think it's about half the population of the world.

Our perceptions of the world are really anchored in the Middle East. The conflict and problems of the region are not what's happening to most of the world. This is not the reality of what is happening in Latin America, South Asia and Africa - Subsaharan Africa in particular.

The real story is different but because it's primarily positive it's just never ever told. The innovations due to access to the marketplace, access to education, the healthcare changes, the government changes those were not swept in a by a revolution, they were just slowly implemented and strengthened. Much of what has transformed the developing world has to be re-exercised in the United States.

We sort of have to manage that and look again at those structures and harms that overwhelmingly kill Americans and dedicate our attention to them if we claim we really do care about protecting America.

VI: Are people accepting this thesis about clear and present safety?  What’s been the reception to your book and the idea that there are ways that we can move forward faster and better?

Micah Zenko: I'd say that, and it's true of every book author, most people don't actually read your book.

VI: They hear about it, read a review?

Micah Zenko: They hear about it or they make an assumption about it. Most people think that the book is about the claim that the world is safer and then they look in their newspaper about unsafe conditions or civil wars or state-to-state wars and they say you're wrong because this is happening. They don't know the state of the domestic side of things. I would say on the domestic front that's where the book had gotten the most receptivity.

The need to re-orientate national security around that which is harming Americans and away from essentially scary-sounding nouns like China, Ebola, ISIS -things that are distant, uncertain and relatively minor threats to Americans but get the overwhelming focus from the media, from politicians and in terms of funding.

If we reorient to simple things like preventing medical errors or increasing 911 response times, that's how we can protect Americans. It's a very hard case for the politicians to make. the questions they will get in the debates will be relatively simplified, relatively dumb, and focus overwhelmingly on terrorism or China and that will be it.

VI: I hope that that's not the case and that people read your book thoroughly and understand the significant message you are making about what are the real threats that cause harm to the American people.

Micah Zenko: Thank you so much I appreciate it.

Micah Zenko is a columnist at Foreign Policy, and the Director of Research and Learning at McChrystal Group. He previously worked in research positions at the Council on Foreign Relations, Chatham House, Harvard’s Kennedy School, and the State Department. He is the author of Between Threats and War: U.S. Discrete Military Options in the Post-Cold War World and Red Team: How to Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy.