Political violence looms large in our national history, to our shame. It does not have to define our future.
Foreign policy theorists have a term for when two countries unwillingly drift toward war. It’s called a security dilemma, and as Harvard international relations scholar Stephen M. Walt has explained at Foreign Policy magazine, it’s a scenario where “the actions that one state takes to make itself more secure—building armaments, putting military forces on alert, forming new alliances—tend to make other states less secure and lead them to respond in kind.”
“The result is a tightening spiral of hostility,” Walt wrote, “that leaves neither side better off than before.”
It’s easy to understand how this plays out internationally, with armies and bases and bombs. If Washington is concerned about a rising China, for example, it might expand US naval presence in the Indo-Pacific. But then Beijing, seeing American warships massing off its shores, might reasonably conclude our plans are more aggressive than we’re letting on—and amp up its weapons development and naval drills in turn. And so we could go round and round until one side or the other, perhaps in an unintended failure of communication, starts a world-altering war.
In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump on Saturday, it’s time to apply this concept closer to home: America’s right and left, Republicans and Democrats, are in a security dilemma. This tightening spiral of hostility is dangerous, and it must be unwound.
This is not a prediction of a second civil war in the style of the first, with large-scale armies and battles in the streets. I’ve long been skeptical of such forecasts, and I remain skeptical now. But an …
