Tom Cotton recently said this in an exchange with the father of an airman killed in Afghanistan:

At Johns Hopkins, Cotton said the “threat environment that we face here at home and throughout the west is more grave today than at anytime during our lifetimes” [bold mine-DL], and added: “I wish that weren’t that case.”

Cotton’s statement is horribly wrong as a description of the threats that the U.S. faces, but it is unfortunately a very common one in our debates. According to these warnings, the U.S. not only faces myriad serious threats, but they are always the worst that we have ever seen or at least the worst in a generation or more. These warnings have long been overstated, and over the last twenty-five years they have become only more so. Many hawks rely on constant threat inflation to defend their foreign policy preferences, and our foreign policy debates are typically skewed by the consistent overestimation of the number and scale of foreign threats. One would think that repeatedly exaggerating threats and then being proven wrong should discourage politicians and analysts from making alarmist claims, but that doesn’t happen. What explains threat inflation’s continued, outsized role in foreign policy debate?

Benjamin Friedman offers an explanation in his essay in the Cato Institute’s new volume, A Dangerous World?: Threat Perception and U.S. National Security. Friedman writes:

But nothing sells foreign policy in public like danger. To increase public support for an interventionist foreign policy, leaders portray it as a means to lessen threats. That portrayal requires threat inflation. There is a paradox: security increases the sense of insecurity. In economic terms, the costs of expansive U.S. foreign policy might badly outweigh the benefits, but the costs are diffuse. (p. 289)

The U.S. keeps paying a price for overestimating threats to our security and for overreacting to the exaggerated threats. However, because relatively few Americans are directly harmed by policy debacles and because most Americans are otherwise not significantly burdened by these debacles, there is little resistance to proponents of more aggressive policies and their threat-inflating ways. Perversely, hawks can seize on the chaos created by their previous failed policies to justify more of the same. Hyping the threat from Iraq in the ’90s and early 2000s led to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which proved far more damaging and costly to the U.S. than anything Hussein’s government had done or could do to the U.S. Now we are being treated to a new round of alarmism about the threats from jihadists that have filled part of the vacuum created by the earlier disastrous war, and that has dragged us into yet another unnecessary conflict. In both cases, the actual threat to the U.S. is small or non-existent and is entirely manageable in any case, but the impulse to exaggerate it and then to overreact to it with military action has not diminished that much.

This is deplorable for many reasons, but perhaps the most important one is that the alarmist assessments are utterly false and misleading. The U.S. is more secure now than at almost any point in the last century, and it is certainly more secure than it was even thirty years ago, and yet threat inflation persists and actually keeps getting worse. It is probably the case that our extraordinary security has bred a culture of being easily alarmed by even the smallest potential threat. We have become so unaccustomed to the major threats that the U.S. successfully faced and overcame in the past that many of us perceive the world to be far more dangerous for our country than it is, and most of our leaders encourage us in this error. Cotton is one of the worst offenders in this regard, but he has lots of help.

We see this in hawks’ misplaced nostalgia for the “simpler” times of the Cold War when threats to the U.S. were far greater than they are now, McCain’s ahistorical, amnesiac declaration that the world is “in greater turmoil than at any time in my lifetime,” and Graham’s claim that we “live in the most dangerous times imaginable.” These claims should make the hawks and the policies they favor into targets for ridicule, but strangely enough these baseless assertions influence the debate and shift the limits of that debate in their direction. The hawks are aided in this by the fact that there is no accountability for bad foreign policy decisions and arguments.

Despite the major policy failures that often come from threat inflation and the resulting overreaction by the U.S., hyping threats is taken as proof that the person doing it takes the threats “seriously.” Putting a threat in context, acknowledging it to be much smaller than threats in the past, or questioning a threat’s existence are all attempts to think seriously about it, but these responses are more often derided as proof of naivete or wishful thinking. It is politically safer and more rewarding to err on the side of panic while pretending it is caution, and in the end that is why threat inflation thrives in spite of the fact that its users are consistently wrong.