Second, Hurricane Katrina led to the drowning of a major US city, the loss of 2,000 lives, and the destruction of property along the Gulf Coast. It was less a natural than a preventable disaster, exacerbated by inadequate infrastructure, poor environmental management, and a tardy and ineffective governmental response. Years after the event, large parts of the city of New Orleans have yet to recover.

Third, in 2008 the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted from 14,066 on October 12 to 6,626 in March 2009. Trillions of dollars of value on the stock market evaporated in the subsequent recession along with the financial security of millions of households. The economic ripples were felt around the globe. At home, house prices collapsed, seven million families lost their homes, four million jobs were lost in 18 months, and unemployment reached almost 10 percent. It was the Great Recession, a downward economic slide not seen since the 1930s.

Finally, there was the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. On April 20, 2010, an explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig led to oil gushing uncontrollably from the underground reservoir. For 87 days, 53,000 barrels a day, almost five million gallons in all, escaped from the well into the Gulf of Mexico, poisoning the water, contaminating the beaches, and killing sea creatures and animal life. Day after day the televised images showed oil flowing uncontrollably from the deep earth into the sea. The event highlighted corporate indifference and government inadequacy in dealing with the risks of deep-sea drilling.

These four events broke all kind of records: the longest foreign war, the costliest “natural” disaster, the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression, and the largest oil spill—not just a quiet police action like Grenada, a memorable hurricane like Andrew, an economic downturn as in the early 1990s, or “average” oil spill. No, they were of such a magnitude, individually and collectively, that they provide a perfect storm of a combined stress test. They reveal what the mundane and the ordinary cannot. Not simply was the size impressive in each case but so was the level of incompetence: military fiasco, an emergency response debacle, economic mismanagement of epic proportions, and an environmental tragedy—four huge disasters all in one decade. If triumphal success justifies social institutions, extreme failure should produce piercing critiques of them. The events represent extreme cases and thus the most profound of stress tests.

In this book I will stress test the United States using these four case studies to highlight fundamental fractures in US society. Stress testing is a long-established procedure to determine the stability of a system. Software is stress tested to see how it reacts with heavy Internet traffic. So are our hearts when the doctor makes us ride stationary bikes and then monitors our heartbeat and blood pressure. Force is applied to containers to determine how they stand up to heavier-than-normal loads. Economists also bring stress testing into play when they utilize models to assess changing variables, such as when interest rates rise sharply, demand shrinks, or supplies dwindle. There is now an annual stress test of major US banks.² Stress testing shows how a system responds to pressure and, if carried far enough, highlights the system’s weak spots. It reveals how a system responds in a crisis and exposes its deep structural flaws.

The stress testing used here is not an empirical technique but rather an analysis of the events in some detail and a widening of the frame of reference so that we move on from assigning blame to individuals to identifying the deeper and more profound causes. The stress test used here foregrounds a search for structural, endemic causes of the four apocalyptic events of the new millennium rather than assigning individual culpability. It is so much simpler if we could just blame George Bush, Michael Brown, greedy bankers, and the CEO of BP: their failures, however palpable, nevertheless transcended them. The size and impact of the disasters discussed in this book, like all good stress tests, tell us more about fundamental weaknesses in social structure than simply reconfirm the eternal verities of human frailty.

In 1979 during a televised speech to the nation, President Jimmy Carter addressed the looming energy crisis and the deepening recession. He said, “It’s clear that the real problems of our Nation are much deeper.” It was not a popular or successful speech. It is now described as the “malaise speech,” much criticized for presenting problems not solutions. A year later, Ronald Reagan beat him in the presidential race. Reagan offered a sunny optimism, a hope in a future presided over by the United States. While there are many who believe that Reagan turned the country around, there are some, like me, who see his presidential victory as inaugurating a huge military buildup, rising deficits, and a massive transfer of national wealth from the poor and the middle classes to the very wealthy. Reagan’s new dawn in America shone most warmly on the rich. The fate of Jimmy Carter’s failed second presidential bid should be a warning to those who ask the United States to look at the deeper problems. A nation that is so invested in an optimistic future rarely takes time to attend to the anxieties of the present, let alone to acknowledge the failings of the past. It is a national habit to “put things behind us,” “look to tomorrow,” to “move to the next level,” “win the future,” a trait that is superficially constructive, but actually avoids any sustained search for structural weakness, as it alights upon the quick fix. The four disasters are of such magnitude that they demand a sober assessment of the United States and its institutions rather than an unthinking affirmation.

I am perhaps genetically programmed to focus on problems. I was born in Europe, Scotland to be precise, where the past hangs heavy. The great years of Scotland’s global eminence during the Enlightenment, when it was one of the centers of intellectual thought and then one of the epicenters of the Industrial Revolution, are long over. Located on the periphery of the periphery, shaded with the darker hues of Scottish Presbyterianism and burdened with long historical memories, late-twentieth-century Scotland was not a place to engender a fierce commitment to the future. It was not a place of despair; rising living standards took care of that. But it was a place where the future was to be managed with care, not embraced with abandon. I took these sensibilities with me when as an adult I relocated to the United States. I have now lived here for more than 20 years, my accent a constant reminder of where I came from. The result then is a book written by someone raised in Scotland, the old Europe, but living in the New World of the United States. I have held onto my intellectual legacy but imbibed a belief in the future. A dour Scottish Presbyterianism meets a New World sunny optimism is the unlikely result. A foreign-born longtime citizen, I am reminded of my liminal (dis)location when Americans tell me I have a strong Scottish accent and my family in Scotland remind me that I sound very American. It is this awkward shifting space that provides the perspective for this book.

But the United States is also losing some of its easy optimism, chastened no doubt by the four events. There is now a deep sense of pessimism in the United States. In a poll conducted in January 2012 by Rasmussen Reports, 60 percent of people interviewed in a telephone survey responded that they felt the country was going in the wrong direction.³ Other surveys reveal similar if not higher levels of disapproval. There is a darkening mood to the national spirit. Not only is there a lack of confidence in specific government policies, but the belief in the idea of government itself is at an all-time low. Approval rating for Congress is in the single digits. Across the spectrum of political opinion there is a profound sense that the country has lost its way. Compounding the feeling of malaise, there is no general agreement in which direction it should be headed. The elections results in November 2012 embodied rather than solved the deadlock. With a Democratic president, a Republican House, and markedly differing competing ideologies, the United States remains a house divided. While some propose even more military spending, deeper tax cuts, and further deregulation, some others argue that this is exactly the policy that got us into the present mess. While the sense of pessimism is shared, there is no general agreement on the direction of the way forward. There is a real sense that the country is floundering. In this book I will examine some of the events that got us into the present state. I will also look at how these events reveal some of the structural flaws that we need to address if we are to move forward. I will conduct a stress testing of the United States.

The book is meant not to anchor us in despair because of the depth of the structural problems. It is not, I hope, solely a “malaise” book. However, optimism unconnected to realities is a naiveté that risks perpetual disappointment. It is only by identifying the profound problems can we address and overcome them. Only by soberly identifying the deeper origins of our crises can we map a successful path to the future. A belief in a better future requires a deeper understanding of the crises of the present.

Crises and disasters reveal, like nothing else, the fracture lines within a society. In this book I will explore the four events to see what they reveal about the fracture lines, strengths, and weaknesses in US society. I explore the settings, causes, consequences, and representations of these four recent events. It is not a politically partisan exercise; rather, the events will be a prism through which to view issues of power, class, race, money, globalization, the meaning of patriotism and citizenship, environmental issues, and private influences on government and public policy. It will highlight the unexpected consequences of agreed-upon ideas. The book is less about assigning blame than about uncovering structural faults.

In the next chapter I examine the root causes of the invasion of Iraq. I argue that the existence of what I term Empire is a major structural flaw in the contemporary United States. Its prosecution and maintenance makes the United States vulnerable to embarking on foreign interventions such as in Iraq. Empire is an important metanarrative, a big picture that influences perceptions and shapes outcomes. Another metanarrative that has emerged in the last 30 years is the pursuit of a neoliberal agenda of small government, low taxation, and deregulation. In Chapter 3 I outline the evolution of this agenda because its unfolding implications influence, to varying degrees, the three other disasters that form the material for chapters 4 (the drowning of New Orleans), 5 (the financial crisis), and 6 (Gulf oil spill). In Chapter 7 I draw some general policy conclusions from this decade of disasters.

Waging a war is one of the biggest burdens for any society and the stresses of this war tested the United States to its breaking point. The War on Terror was an open-ended and vaguely strategized response that would quickly mire the United States in a fiasco. How are we to situate this war? So soon after 9/11 it seems we have a simple origin: a swift response to an unprecedented attack on innocent civilians in the United States. In this reading, the shallow and narrow view, the resulting problems are then just short-term tactical blunders that tell us about the failings of the Bush administration and its flawed policies. This is the standard interpretation made attractive by its simplicity. And it can be made even simpler through personalization: Bush is to blame. Eager to assert military might, he was unconcerned about the postwar construction of the country he ordered to be invaded. And a slice of blame should be placed on Cheney: the vice president who refused to believe intelligence that did not support his long-held belief that the United States should invade Iraq. And then there was Rumsfeld: the defense secretary whose arrogance covered an almost criminal incompetence in managing postwar Iraq. And there was Paul Wolfowitz, whose decades-long obsession with Iraq led him to promote the invasion of the country even while the World Trade Center was still smoldering and there was absolutely no proof of Saddam Hussein’s involvement in 9/11. There is a lot of raw material for the simplistic blame-the-incompetents argument but it does not provide a deep stress test. Change the president, vote out the administration, or change the policy and, according to this perspective, the problem is solved. But the flaws are much deeper than one misguided president, a war-mongering vice president, an arrogant and incompetent defense secretary, or an Iraq-obsessed advisor and far longer than a two-term administration.

The very limited interpretation that focuses on one administration’s failure does not stand up to even the rudest of scrutiny. Even if we concentrate on the very immediate decisions, the responsibility quickly shifts from just a narrow group in the Bush administration. It was not just the president who made “wrong decisions” but the Congress, Democrats as well as Republicans, the Pentagon, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. An embedded press provided cover and support. And early on, The War on Terror received tremendous public support. The conception and implementation of The War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq did not just reveal the mistakes of one administration and the failure of sensible leadership to emerge at a time of crisis; they also highlight the fundamental problems of a United States committed to global military intervention. I will refer to this commitment as Empire. From this wider frame and deeper historical context, the problematic nature of the invasion of Iraq suggests a longer and more complex genealogy. Big events, such as a long-running war, rarely have singular origins. And epic failures have multiple births. Among the many, let me mention four that deepen our understanding of the fiasco.

The Korean War propelled the United States into a permanent global empire. But there were imperial ambitions even at the birth of the republic. George Washington envisioned the United States as a rising empire. Even as colonials, ambitious men like Washington resisted the British limitation of westward expansion. When the British declared the Proclamation Line in 1763 forbidding settlement west of Appalachia, Washington wrote to a friend in 1767,

The Proclamation Line did not last long as the ambitious colonials and then the new nation laid claim to territory across the continent. The expansion was fueled by the claiming of sovereignty over indigenous people as well as by imperial clashes with the other empires. The United States ...