Reality, Grief, Hope: Three Urgent Prophetic Tasks

by Walter Brueggemann

The extravagant commitment to military domination leads to a denial of the reality that the U.S. cannot for long afford to be the single surviving superpower. Our most recent wars — Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan — have exhibited the limits of U.S. military capacity. Beyond that, of course, the rise of Chinese economic-military power — acknowledged by the recent redeployment of U.S. military to the Pacific — means that U.S. domination has important limits that cannot be overcome by louder exceptionalism. The over-sized Pentagon budget that is beyond criticism denies that such military capacity is limited and that economic resources to sustain it cannot be constantly expanded. The maintenance of such a budgetary commitment depends on the denial of limits.