This article is part of David Leonhardt’s newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday.

Whenever I have heard military leaders argue that the biggest long-term threat to American national security is our national debt, I’ve had mixed feelings.

On the one hand, I’ve been glad that the leaders are willing to engage in important issues beyond military matters. On the other hand, I think they’re wrong on the substance — and that the debt is not the pre-eminent danger to American interests. I’d rank it behind climate change, the stagnation of mass living standards and the erosion of democracy.

In Foreign Policy magazine, Jennifer Harris and Jake Sullivan have published a piece urging not just military leaders but the entire foreign policy community to focus more on economic questions than they have in recent years. It’s happened before. After both the Revolutionary War and World War II, foreign policy experts saw economic policy as a way to strengthen the United States against foreign rivals, Harris and Sullivan point out.