The United States has always had a special advantage against its global competitors and that’s it’s isolation in the Western Hemisphere. This is a geopolitical and historical point of differentiation that cuts across geography, economics, military history, and political development. The advantage has been enormous, though with some important nuances. In terms of the geographic advantage, the U.S. sits in what strategists sometimes call a “geopolitical paradise.” It is bounded by two vast oceans, two relatively weak and non-threatening neighbors to the north and south, and no great power rivals anywhere in the hemisphere. This is extraordinarily rare in world history. Compare it to the fate of Germany, France, Russia, or China, all of which spent centuries locked in existential land warfare with powerful neighbors on multiple fronts. The energy, treasure, and blood those nations poured into continental defense and repeated invasions shaped them in ways the U.S. simply never had to experience. The American mainland has never been successfully invaded by a foreign power in its entire existence as a nation. The attacks that did reach U.S. soil were largely pinpricks, a shelling of an oil derrick, balloon bombs, a sabotage team that never struck a single target. That is a stunning record for a nation of its size and ambition.
The attacks that we have suffered can be categorized as foreign military invasions or domestic terrorism. The history of the military actions against us began just a few years after our founding Revolution. The War of 1812 happened when the British forces invaded Washington D.C. in August 1814, burning the Capitol, the White House, and other federal buildings. It remains the only time since the Revolutionary War that a foreign power occupied the U.S. capital. Then, 100 years later came the Black Tom Island incident of 1916, when German saboteurs blew up a munitions depot in New York Harbor on July 30, 1916. It was considered the first major attack on American soil by a foreign terror cell. We all know about Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 when the Japanese navy struck the U.S. naval base in Hawaii, killing 2,403 Americans and wounding 1,178 others, and drawing the U.S. into World War II. That wasn’t technically on U.S. soil, as in the continental U.S., but it felt almost as invasive. During WWII there were even west coast attacks. In February 1942, a Japanese submarine surfaced near Ellwood Oil Field outside Santa Barbara and shelled the coast. Later, Fort Stevens on the Oregon coast became the target of the only direct attack on an American mainland military installation during the war. Japan launched incendiary balloons across the Pacific; nearly 350 reached North America and were spotted in more than 15 states. The only fatalities occurred in Oregon, where a pregnant woman and five children were killed after encountering a downed balloon, the only combat casualties on U.S. soil during WWII. Operation Pastorius in 1942 saw eight Nazi saboteurs arriving by U-boat in New York and Florida carrying cash and explosives, with orders to attack transportation hubs and industrial targets. The mission collapsed before any sabotage occurred when one of the agents turned himself in to the FBI. But think about how that history compares to the histories of our European neighbors.
And then there’s domestic terrorism of both the political and ideological variety. The Haymarket bombing in Chicago in 1886 was when a bomb was thrown at police during a labor rally, killing seven officers and four civilians. It became a defining moment in the American labor movement and the anarchist political milieu of the era. Then came the Wall Street bombing of 1920 when a wagon packed with explosives detonated on Wall Street, killing 38 people and injuring hundreds. It was the deadliest terror attack in U.S. history at the time and was never definitively solved, though anarchists were suspected. The Bath School disaster of 1927 saw a disgruntled school board member in Michigan detonate dynamite he had planted in a school, killing 38 children and 6 adults. It remains one of the deadliest attacks on a school in American history. The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham in 1963 was when the KKK bombed a Black church on a Sunday morning, killing four young girls. It became a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement. That was reciprocated by the Weather Underground domestic terror group carrying out bombings of the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, and the New York Police Department headquarters, among other targets. In 1993 the World Trade Center bombing killed 6 people and injured over a thousand and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 that killed 168 people including 19 children became the deadliest domestic terrorist attacks in U.S. history and remained the deadliest act of homegrown terrorism until 9/11. The nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers that seized four commercial aircraft, flying two into the World Trade Center towers, one into the Pentagon, while a fourth crashed in a Pennsylvania field after passengers attempted to overpower the hijackers resulted in 2,977 deaths and becoming the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil in history and a moment that changed our collective sense of security in this country.
Over the years, because the U.S. faced no existential land threat from neighbors, it could maintain a relatively small standing army for most of its history. This had several compounding effects. We were not a garrison state like the European powers were forced to be, with massive standing armies that consumed enormous portions of national wealth and often distorted political development toward militarism. The U.S. could largely demobilize after each conflict until the Cold War changed the calculus permanently. American military power could be designed around power projection with navies, expeditionary forces and such rather than defensive fortifications and border armies. This ultimately gave the U.S. a unique capacity to intervene globally while remaining safe at home.
The geographic insulation had profound economic consequences as well. The U.S. was able to industrialize rapidly in the 19th century without fear of foreign armies disrupting factories, railroads, or capital formation. Investment could flow into productive enterprise rather than fortifications. Immigration fueled labor supply without the security concerns that might have throttled it. The vast internal market, eventually the largest in the world (with China and India now on the verge of eclipsing that) could develop without fear that a rival power would simply march in and seize it.
The two oceans also meant that the U.S. sat in the middle of the great sea lanes of global trade, giving it natural access to both European and Asian markets as those economies grew. The U.S. benefited more from the expansion of global trade than anyone else. Perhaps most subtly, the absence of constant existential threat gave American political institutions room to develop in ways that were much harder elsewhere. Standing armies are enemies of liberty. This was a conviction shared by the Founders and borne out repeatedly by contrast in European history, where military necessity repeatedly crushed nascent democratic movements. The U.S. could afford to be suspicious of executive power and standing armies in a way that France or Prussia simply couldn’t. The relative internal security also meant that political disagreements didn’t carry the same existential stakes they did in countries surrounded by hostile powers. A weak central government, a federal system, civilian control of the military these were all easier to sustain when the country didn’t face a rival army on its border. The Trump logic chooses to ignore all of these inherent and historical advantages
Today I read that there is evidence that Iran has been investigating using drones to make attacks on U.S. soil, specifically here in California. Boom! That’s bringing it home. We have all lived in the rarified air of geographic safety. As the Iran War has ratcheted up the threats against American travelers, we have the big problem of having to adjust our travel plans and limiting them to domestic locales. Imagine how confining that is? Now imagine what its like living somewhere like Turkey or Israel, which seem always to be in the thick of things. Everyone in the world deserves to feel as safe and free from threat as we in America do every day. Why can’t we help make that happen rather than taking our thirst for violence offshore to reign fear down on whole areas of the world like the Middle East or the Andean areas of Latin America? Let’s try bringing peace home rather than war.