Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis cautioned that the internal strife roiling the country between those who disagree politically is serious enough to be considered a national security threat.
CBS’ Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan asked Mattis on Sunday what he thinks is the biggest national security threat to the United States, to which the retired Marine Corps general responded, “I think the biggest national security threat can be broken into two segments.”
Mattis first pointed to Russia and China as the nation’s most dangerous external enemies because of their authoritarian and imperialistic impulses. “So, externally I would look at those two. That’s why we rewrote the national defense strategy to acknowledge the reality of those nations — not the nations that we wanted to be dealing with, but the Russia of Putin, the reality; the China of President Xi.”
Mattis then reflected that the country’s internal issues might be even more of an existential threat. “But internally, my bigger concern is twofold: It’s our growing debt that we’re going to transfer to the younger generation with seemingly no fiscal discipline. And more than that, it’s the lack of friendliness, it’s the increasing contempt I see between Americans who have different opinions. We’re going to have to sit down and remember, if we want this country to survive, we’re going to have to work together. There’s no way around that. That’s the way a democracy is set up. So, I would break it into those two fundamental different threats.”
Mattis is not the first to warn against the potential consequences of the escalating political rhetoric among Americans. After having abandoned the House chair in July during a particularly contentious floor vote, Democratic Missouri Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver reflected to Fox News host Martha MacCallum that “there are forces outside the United States that are trying to tear us apart, and [by fighting with each other] we’re raising our hands, saying, ‘Please get us. Let us tear our country up.'”
