Policy makers have been engaged in a de facto Ponzi scheme intended to extend indefinitely the American line of credit. The fiasco of the Iraq War and the quasi-permanent U.S. occupation of Afghanistan illustrates the results and prefigure what is yet to come if the crisis of American profligacy continues unabated.

Long accustomed to thinking of the United States as a superpower, Americans have yet to realize that they have forfeited command of their own destiny. American people have allowed their democracy to be hijacked. One result of that hijacking has been to raise up a new political elite whose members have a vested interest in perpetuating the crises that provide the source of their power. These are the people who under the guise of seeking peace or advancing the cause of liberty devise policies that promote war or the prospect of war, producing something akin to chaos.

In President Bush’s war, the role allotted to the American people was to pretend that the conflict did not exist. Despite claims that his would be a generational struggle, the president never considered restoring the draft. Nor did he bother to expand the size of the armed forces. This guaranteed that the 0.5 percent of the population that made up the all-volunteer force would bear the brunt of any sacrifice. With only a handful of dissenters, the remaining 99.5 percent of Americans happily endorsed this distribution effort.

The privatization of war suggests a tacit willingness to transform military service form a civic function into an economic enterprise, with money rather than patriotism the motive. Americans may not like mercenaries, but many of them harbor an even greater dislike for the prospect of sending their loved one to fight in some godforsaken country on the other side of the world.

Given the extent to which a penchant for consumption had become the driveshaft of the global economy, the Bush administration welcomed the average citizen’s inclination to ignore the war and return to the shopping mall.

While soldiers fight, people consumed. With the United States possessing less than 3 percent of the world’s known oil reserves and Americans burning one out of every four barrels of petroleum produced worldwide, oil imports reached 60 percent of daily national requirements and kept rising. The personal savings rate continued to plummet. In 2005, it dropped below zero and has remained there.

In 2001 came the main event, an open-ended global war on terror, soon known in some quarters as the “Long War.” By and large, Americans were slow to grasp the implications of a global war with no exits and no deadlines. Seeing themselves as a peaceful people, Americans remain wedded to the conviction that the conflicts in which they find themselves embroiled are not of their own making.

In the aftermath of the September 11, Washington’s resolve that nothing interfere with the individual American’s pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness only hardened. People weren’t flocking to Disney World, and airlines seemed to be sliding into bankruptcy. This sudden reticence threatened to bring the empire of consumption crashing down. Hence the urgency of the president’s charge to “Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.”

With Americans, even in wartime, refusing to curb their appetites, the Long War aggravates the economic contradictions that continue to produce debt and dependency. Meanwhile, a stubborn insistence on staying the course militarily ends up jeopardizing freedom at home.

Americans now confront a looming military crisis to go along with the economic and political crises that they have labored so earnestly to ignore. The day of reckoning approaches. Expending the lives of more American soldiers in hopes of deferring that day is profoundly wrong. History will not judge kindly a people who find nothing amiss in the prospect of endless armed conflicts so long as they themselves are spared the effects.

If the young United States had a mission, it was not to liberate but to expand. From the outset, Americans evinced a compulsion to acquire territory and extend their commercial reach abroad. Expansion made the United States the “land of opportunity.” From the expansion came abundance. Out of abundance came substantive freedom. Documents drafted in Philadelphia promised liberty. Making good on those promises required a political economy that facilitated the creation of wealth on an enormous scale.

As the Industrial Revolution took hold, Americans came to count on an ever-larger economic pie to anesthetize the unruly and ameliorate tensions related to class, race, religion, and ethnicity. Money became the preferred lubricant for keeping social and political friction within tolerable limits.

If one were to choose a single word to characterize the American identity, it would have to be more. For the majority of contemporary Americans, the essence of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness centers on a relentless personal quest to acquire, to consume, to indulge, and to shed whatever constraints might interfere with those endeavors. The chief aim of the U.S. government is to satisfy that desire, which it does in  part through the distribution of largesse at home [Congress] and in part through the pursuit of imperial ambitions abroad [Executive Branch].

As individuals, our appetites and expectations have grown exponentially. The collective capacity or our domestic political economy to satisfy those appetites has not kept pace with demand. Whether the issue at hand is oil, credit, or the availability of cheap consumer goods, we expect the world to accommodate the American way of life.

It would be misleading to suggest that every American has surrendered to this ethic of self-gratification. Resistance to its demands persists and takes many forms. Yet dissenters, intent of curbing the American penchant for consumptions and self-indulgence, are fighting a rear-guard action, valiant perhaps but unlikely to reverse the tide.