Washington usually measures American decline in external terms: China’s rise, Russia’s revisionism, strained alliances, and military crises in the Middle East. But one of the clearest warnings is coming from inside the United States. In 2025, only 43% of Americans ages 15 to 34 said it was a good time to find a job where they lived, 21 points below Americans 55 and older. In no other surveyed country was the generational gap this wide.

That finding should unsettle a country that is still speaking the language of primacy. Young Americans are not turning gloomy because they have forgotten how to be optimistic. They are reading the economy in front of them. Youth unemployment stood at 9.5% in April. Renter cost burdens hit a record 22.7 million households in 2024. The share of first-time home buyers fell to a record-low 21%, while the median first-time buyer’s age rose to 40. For a generation told that education, discipline, and work would translate into stability, the bargain looks broken.

This is not only a domestic story. It is also a foreign policy failure, because budgets reveal what a government treats as urgent. The Defense Department’s 2026 request totaled $961 billion, among the largest inflation-adjusted requests of the past half century. Additional military-related funding has pushed “national defense” spending beyond $1 trillion. The point is not that every dollar spent on the Pentagon could be mechanically converted into a job, an apartment, or a mortgage. The point is that Washington still knows how to mobilize at scale—but most reliably when the beneficiaries are weapons programs, contractors, and permanent military infrastructure.

The war with Iran has made that imbalance harder to ignore. By May, the US campaign had cost an estimated $29 billion, including operations and equipment repair or replacement. The conflict has also disrupted energy flows through one of the world’s most important corridors, raising the risk that households already squeezed by rent, debt, insurance, and food costs will face still more pressure. For young workers, “foreign policy” is not abstract when it comes back as higher prices, lower confidence, and another delay in leaving home.

If Washington continues to protect an empire more energetically........

© Common Dreams