The “war on terror,” the “war on drugs,” and the fight against irregular migration all exhibit a pattern in which politicians and private interests benefit from problems that cannot be solved with the strategies they offer. Instead, the purported threat worsens as politicians, contractors, and enforcers exploit it for their own ends.
LONDON/OXFORD – In Constantine Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians,” the much-feared barbarians never turn up. “Now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?” the poem asks. “Those people were a kind of solution.”
We seem to have become addicted to useful “barbarians.” From terrorists and drug lords to human smugglers and even refugees, our politics increasingly revolves around simplified threats and facile solutions. So, for example, congressional Republicans tell Democrats they will not support more military aid for Ukraine unless something radical is done to stem the flow of migrants and asylum seekers at the United States’ southern border.
Lost in these debates is an appreciation of the larger game that is being played. The “war on terror,” the “war on drugs,” and the fight against irregular migration all exhibit a pattern that we call “wreckonomics”: a state of functional dysfunction in which the purported threat worsens as politicians, contractors, and enforcers exploit it for their own ends.
LONDON/OXFORD – In Constantine Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians,” the much-feared barbarians never turn up. “Now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?” the poem asks. “Those people were a kind of solution.”
We seem to have become addicted to useful “barbarians.” From terrorists and drug lords to human smugglers and even refugees, our politics increasingly revolves around simplified threats and facile solutions. So, for example, congressional Republicans tell Democrats they will not support more military aid for Ukraine unless something radical is done to stem the flow of migrants and asylum seekers at the United States’ southern border.
Lost in these debates is an appreciation of the larger game that is being played. The “war on terror,” the “war on drugs,” and the fight against irregular migration all exhibit a pattern that we call “wreckonomics”: a state of functional dysfunction in which the purported threat worsens as politicians, contractors, and enforcers exploit it for their own ends.