To my friends, my family, and my fellow citizens:
As a Quaker, I have spent much of my life trying to understand what peace requires of us.
Our testimony of peace is sometimes mistaken for passivity. But peace is not passive. It asks courage of us. It asks discipline, stewardship, truthfulness, and a willingness to confront the conditions that lead human beings toward violence in the first place.
That is why I believe Quakers have something important to say about national defense.
I do not write because I want America to become more capable of waging war. I write because I want us to become less dependent upon war as the measure of our strength.
For generations, we have acted as though national security could be purchased primarily through aircraft carriers, overseas bases, weapons systems, and ever-larger military budgets. Meanwhile, some of the foundations upon which genuine security depends—fiscal stability, productive industry, functioning government, public trust, infrastructure, healthcare, and a sense of common purpose—have steadily weakened.
We have guarded the walls while neglecting the house.
It is time to ask a different question:
What actually makes a nation strong enough to preserve its freedom, protect its people, and remain at peace?
A Fortress Built on Debt
America is approaching a national debt of roughly $40 trillion. Interest on that debt now consumes an extraordinary share of the federal budget.
We should consider what this means.
Every dollar required simply to service yesterday’s borrowing is a dollar unavailable for tomorrow’s bridges, laboratories, schools, factories, public health, energy systems, or debt reduction. Eventually, excessive debt constrains even the military power it was partly accumulated to support.
History offers a simple warning: a nation cannot remain powerful abroad indefinitely if it becomes financially brittle at home.
Yet our political culture often seems incapable of meeting the seriousness of the moment.
Too much of public life has become theater. Politicians are rewarded for the sharpest insult, the most viral clip, and the most emotionally satisfying attack. Governing is slower, quieter, and far less entertaining. It requires compromise, competence, patience, and sometimes the courage to tell voters things they do not want to hear.
Those qualities rarely dominate our screens.
But a republic cannot be sustained by performance.
National strength begins with stewardship.
If we wish to leave our children a secure country, we must begin treating the public treasury not as an unlimited political resource but as a sacred trust.
The Difference Between Size and Strength
We should also reconsider what military strength actually means.
The largest force is not necessarily the most effective force.
France entered the Second World War with one of the world’s most formidable armies. Yet in 1940, German forces defeated France with astonishing speed. The lesson was not that France lacked soldiers or weapons. It was that military size alone could not compensate for failures of doctrine, organization, adaptability, and command.
The United States entered that era from almost the opposite position.
Our peacetime Army was comparatively small. What ultimately made America formidable was not the enormous standing military we possessed before the war. It was the extraordinary depth of the society behind it.
We had factories.
We had engineers.
We had energy.
We had railroads.
We had workers.
We had financial capacity.
And, for a time, we possessed a powerful sense of national purpose.
Automobile plants became aircraft plants. Civilian industries transformed themselves with astonishing speed. The United States became what Winston Churchill described, in essence, as a vast industrial engine whose full power had scarcely been awakened.
That history suggests a profoundly different understanding of national defense.
The ultimate reserve of a free nation is not the number of weapons it keeps permanently deployed. It is the capacity of its people and economy to respond when genuine danger comes.
America does not need an endlessly expanding military establishment scattered across the globe.
We need a force that is disciplined, technologically advanced, highly trained, adaptable, and ready to defend the nation and its legitimate interests.
Behind it, however, must stand something far more important:
a healthy republic capable of mobilizing its industrial, economic, technological, and human resources when necessary.
Rebuilding the American Forge
If we want a smaller but more capable permanent military, we must rebuild the productive foundation behind it.
For decades, Americans were told that it did not matter where things were made. Markets would provide. Supply chains would stretch across the world, and efficiency would take care of the rest.
We have learned that efficiency without resilience can become vulnerability.
A nation that cannot reliably manufacture essential medicines, semiconductors, electrical equipment, machine tools, transportation systems, and other critical goods has surrendered a measure of its independence.
But rebuilding American industry requires more than slogans.
Blanket tariffs may offer political satisfaction, but they can also raise the price of raw materials and components used by American manufacturers themselves. A serious industrial policy must be more precise.
The CHIPS and Science Act demonstrated one possible approach: identify strategically essential capabilities, invest deliberately, and use public policy to encourage much larger amounts of private investment.
We should apply that seriousness more broadly.
We should modernize the electrical grid.
We should strengthen critical supply chains.
We should invest in advanced manufacturing, scientific research, energy, transportation, and technical education.
And we should recognize an uncomfortable truth about American competitiveness: employers bear enormous healthcare costs that businesses in many competing nations do not bear in the same way.
Finding a national solution to healthcare is therefore not merely a social question. It is an economic one.
If we want American companies to compete successfully, employ American workers, and build things here, we should stop asking employers to carry burdens that make domestic production unnecessarily expensive.
We must also recover an older understanding of enterprise.
A corporation should not exist solely to maximize next quarter’s return. Businesses should create things of lasting value. Engineering matters. Craftsmanship matters. Employees matter. Communities matter. The quality of the product matters.
An economy devoted entirely to short-term extraction will eventually consume the foundations upon which its own prosperity depends.
The Enemy Within Our Gates
Yet our economic problems may not be the greatest danger we face.
The deepest threat to the American experiment is the growing conviction that our fellow citizens are our enemies.
We divide ourselves into red America and blue America, rural America and urban America, conservative America and progressive America. Increasingly, political success comes from teaching one group of Americans to fear or despise another.
Donald Trump has often intensified this politics of grievance, personal loyalty, scapegoating, and division. But the problem is larger than one man or one party.
All of us should ask what happens to a republic when contempt becomes its dominant political language.
Democracy requires disagreement. It does not require hatred.
A free society depends upon citizens who can lose an election without rejecting the country, win an election without seeking revenge, argue passionately without denying one another’s humanity, and accept that no faction possesses a monopoly on truth.
When those habits disappear, something dangerous enters the vacuum.
Autocracy rarely announces itself by saying, “I have come to destroy your freedom.”
It promises order.
It promises strength.
It promises that one leader, one movement, or one faction can sweep away the frustrations of democracy.
But authoritarian power contains its own weakness.
Russia provides a sobering example. For years, it projected an image of overwhelming military strength. Its invasion of Ukraine revealed profound problems beneath that image: corruption, distorted information, rigid command structures, logistical failures, and institutions shaped by fear rather than honest accountability.
This should matter to Americans regardless of party.
Truth is a national-security asset.
So are independent institutions.
So is accountable government.
So is the freedom to tell a leader that he is wrong.
A democracy can appear disorderly because disagreement happens in public. An autocracy can appear strong because disagreement is hidden.
We should not confuse silence with strength.
A Civic Mobilization for Peace
There is another weakness in modern America that we rarely discuss.
Millions of young people are searching for belonging, purpose, useful work, and a place in the life of their country.
At the same time, most Americans experience national service only at a distance.
Our all-volunteer military has many advantages, but it has also produced an unintended separation. A remarkably small percentage of American families bear the direct human burden of our wars.
For everyone else, war can become an abstraction.
We vote.
We watch.
We argue.
Someone else’s child goes.
I believe we should restore the idea that citizenship carries obligations as well as rights.
Not through a military draft.
Through universal national civic service.
Imagine asking every young American to devote a period of life to the country that nurtured them—and paying them fairly for that service.
Some might restore forests and national parks.
Some might rebuild communities after natural disasters.
Some might assist hospitals, elder-care facilities, schools, or public-health programs.
Some might work on infrastructure, conservation, housing, or environmental restoration.
Some might serve in the military by choice.
The particular work would matter.
But something else might matter even more.
Imagine an eighteen-year-old from rural Alabama spending a year working beside someone from Brooklyn.
Imagine a conservative young man from Texas repairing homes alongside a progressive young woman from Oregon.
Imagine young Americans of different races, religions, incomes, politics, and backgrounds discovering one another not through social media, but through work.
They would sweat together.
Solve problems together.
Disagree.
Laugh.
Fail.
Try again.
And perhaps they would discover something our politics encourages us to forget:
The person on the other side of the political divide is still our neighbor.
A year of common service would not heal every division in America.
But it could begin rebuilding something we desperately need: a shared experience of citizenship.
What Peace Requires
Quakers speak often of peace.
But peace cannot survive indefinitely in a society hollowed out by debt, distrust, inequality, political hatred, failing institutions, and economic insecurity.
Peace requires foundations.
It requires justice.
It requires competent government.
It requires economic opportunity.
It requires restraint.
It requires truth.
And it requires citizens who still recognize one another as members of the same human family.
That leads me to five convictions.
First, we should transform our military from an endlessly expanding global presence into a leaner, highly prepared force focused on genuine national defense and strategic necessity.
Second, we should rebuild America’s industrial and economic foundations—modernizing infrastructure, strengthening manufacturing, addressing healthcare costs, and restoring opportunity to working families.
Third, we should establish a broad system of paid national civic service, giving young Americans the opportunity and responsibility to rebuild both their country and their relationships with one another.
Fourth, we must confront our national debt while we still possess the freedom to choose how to do so.
And fifth, we should demand something more difficult from our political leaders—and from ourselves.
We should demand seriousness.
Less spectacle.
Less humiliation.
Less hatred.
More governing.
More listening.
More stewardship.
More truth.
A Different Kind of Greatness
I do not believe America’s greatness should be measured by the number of nations that fear us.
Nor by the number of weapons we possess.
Nor by how loudly we proclaim our superiority.
A great nation is one whose children believe they have a future.
A great nation builds things.
It educates.
It heals.
It invents.
It keeps its promises.
It protects liberty even when doing so is inconvenient.
It cares for the vulnerable without extinguishing personal responsibility.
It argues fiercely without teaching citizens to hate one another.
And when danger comes, it can defend itself because the society behind its defenses is healthy, productive, united, and free.
That is the America I want us to rebuild.
My daily work as a Quaker is for peace. But I have come to believe more deeply than ever that peace is not simply the absence of war.
Peace is the presence of justice.
The presence of trust.
The presence of opportunity.
The presence of truth.
The presence of community.
And the presence of enough moral courage to choose a better path before crisis chooses one for us.
We do not need another American century defined by domination.
We need an American renewal defined by service.
Let us build a country that inspires the world not through the size of its military machine, but through the strength of its democracy, the vitality of its communities, the ingenuity of its people, and the moral courage with which it pursues peace.
That would be a form of national strength worthy of defending.
And it would be a form of greatness worthy of passing on.
