In a February 2025 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Elon Musk went viral when he stated that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” He is half right. Empathy is America’s weakness — not because it has too much of it, but because it does not have nearly enough.
The United States’ long-held cultural dominance is vast — and well-documented. It is home to the world’s most powerful companies, richest universities, and the dominant global reserve currency. Yet, despite this unrivaled influence, the US government has consistently demonstrated that it lacks the capacity to wield this power for the global good. Instead, it is used for destruction, followed by an occasional, belated public apology.
In 1993, then President Bill Clinton apologized more than 100 years too late for the US role in overthrowing the Hawaiian monarchy. Further back, in 1988, President Ronald Reagan issued an apology for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. In 2009, President Barack Obama apologized for the government’s past treatment of Native Americans.
During a 2010 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Haiti, Clinton publicly expressed regret for supporting trade policies that weakened Haiti’s agricultural sector.
As his presidency came to a close, President Joe Biden visited Indian Country to express regret for a 150-year boarding school policy that forcibly separated Native American children from their parents to assimilate them into white culture. That same week, the US Navy apologized for burning an Alaskan Native village 142 years ago. More recently, in June 2025, former Biden State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller reversed 15 months of pushback to affirm what everyone knows: Israel has been committing war crimes in Gaza.
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It seems that in American political culture, alongside other storied traditions like pardoning the Thanksgiving turkey, is an institutionalized acknowledgment of past national wrongdoings in a way that often seems more performative than substantive. These apologies are emblematic of the infamous American adage, shoot first, ask questions later. Taken together, these instances exemplify an apology-industrial complex that is the natural outgrowth of the short-termism embedded in American foreign policy. And ultimately, this same empathy deficit centrally intersects with issues at home.
The US is paying for this empathy deficit in social decline. According to the Watson Institute at Brown University, the US spent over $22.76 billion on Israel’s military operations and related US operations in the region from Oct. 7, 2023, to Sept. 30, 2024. Rather than further destabilize the region, those funds could go to helping close the wealth gap through paid community college or feeding communities facing hunger.
Why do American legislators laud a now $1 trillion defense budget in a nation with neither universal child nor health care, no federal parental leave, and underfunded public transportation?
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If even 5% of that proposed $1 trillion defense budget went into social welfare programs, that $50 billion could dramatically alter our national and even international landscape. The National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates it would take $9.6 billion annually to secure stable homes for everyone living in shelters across the United States. For $50 billion, America could go five years without homelessness.
On an international level, The World Food Programme noted that it needs only $40 billion dollars per year to feed all of the world’s hungry people and effectively end global hunger by 2030. This would be an infinitely better use of funds of that magnitude. Each time America invests lopsidedly in military power while underinvesting in social infrastructure, it is not strengthening the nation: it is straining it. This is not a rejection of defense, but when force consistently outweighs function, it risks undermining the very foundation it aims to protect.
The US is paying for this empathy deficit in social decline.
The US can overthrow regimes, drop aid, or deploy drones in record time. However, there are major shortcomings when it comes to ushering in more egalitarian systems both at home and abroad. This is the fallout of the apology-industrial complex: an American hegemony shaped by delayed remorse rather than preventive wisdom. This is both a moral and strategic failure. Embedding foresight and empathy into policy can usher in sustainable diplomacy and even quell anti-American sentiment.
Rather than propping up an overused military-industrial complex, policymakers ought to root US foreign policy in something more holistic. A foreign policy built on empathy would prioritize sustainable development and human security, ultimately mitigating both human and environmental fallout abroad. Investing in things like universal childcare, affordable higher education, and bolstered unemployment benefits would also leave our leaders with far less to apologize for.
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Meanwhile, the myth of American hegemony is cracking under the weight of this short-termism. In 1945, as World War II ended, an American-led hegemony of global institutional leadership began. Now, just 80 years later, Washington is rapidly gutting these same institutions. Through scrapping funding for UN missions, gutting USAID, and greenlighting the ongoing human rights abuses in Gaza and Ukraine, the US is now, in essence, destroying the very institutional and humanitarian scaffolding it helped to build. With this comes international distrust in American power but also domestic distrust in democracy, equity, and even the state itself. To reference Noam Chomsky’s oft-cited polemic, this is a question of “hegemony or survival.” It’s time to choose.
As the US-led liberal international order begins to crumble, it continues to leave a trail of devastation behind. Across the globe, everyday citizens are left to grapple with the shared trauma of witnessing global conflicts unfold from the palms of our hands. Future generations will one day be forced to reckon with the fallout from these present atrocities at the hands of the US. How many decades will pass before the current crises born of this hegemonic structure — Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen, Honduras — get their own apologies as well? Given America’s ever-worsening empathy deficit: it will definitely come too late.
