Marty Wilde: The next Pearl Harbor might be already happening
Presenter: The next Pearl Harbor might be already happening, by Marty Wilde, and published on his Substack Copyright ⓒ 2026. Read with the author’s permission by Robin Bloomgarden.
The next Pearl Harbor will not begin with dive bombers over Oahu. It will probably not begin with Chinese missiles slamming into an American carrier or a fleet engagement in the Pacific.
It is more likely to begin quietly with a sudden interruption of merchant shipping, mysterious failures in undersea cables, cyberattacks that paralyze ports and logistics systems, or financial coercion that drives up American borrowing costs just as Washington needs to mobilize.
The decisive blows in a future great-power crisis may land first on the American economy rather than on the U.S. fleet.
That possibility should force a larger strategic reckoning. Great powers often assume that the tools and habits that made them dominant will preserve their dominance indefinitely.
Before World War II, the leading colonial powers largely believed that imperial wealth, command of the sea, and inherited military prestige would carry them forward. Their challengers were often more willing to innovate. Germany embraced submarines, operational mobility, and new industrial methods. Japan bet on naval aviation and long-range strike earlier and more decisively than many of its rivals.
The empires that thought history belonged to them were often the least prepared for the way war was changing.
The United States now risks a similar complacency. It still tends to think about great-power rivalry through a Cold War lens, and too often through a colonial one as well. Rising powers are treated as imitators rather than innovators. Cheap systems are dismissed as inferior because of their very affordability.
The assumption lingers that American qualitative superiority will always offset another state’s quantitative scale or willingness to experiment. That mindset is not just strategically stale, it is in part a racial and civilizational conceit that serious innovation remains the preserve of established powers, while rivals merely copy, improvise, or cheat…
(continue reading on Marty Wilde’s Substack)
