We are living in a time of deep and dangerous instability. Wars are threatened or underway, democratic norms are eroding, and economic inequality is no longer episodic — it is structural. Historian Margaret MacMillan calls moments like this ones of radical uncertainty: periods when old assumptions no longer hold, power is shifting, and leaders respond less with wisdom than with force. 

As we mark the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., it is worth remembering that King did not ask to be praised once a year. He asked to be heard — and acted upon. 

In 1967, King offered a diagnosis that still unsettles. He warned that the U.S. was imperiled by a triple threat: racism, materialism and militarism. These were not separate sins. They were a governing system. Racism determined whose lives mattered least. Materialism elevated profit over people. Militarism enforced both at home and abroad. Together, they hollowed out democracy while pretending to defend it. 

That framework fits our moment with uncomfortable precision. 

Racism is now routinely denied even as it structures outcomes. It appears in persistent racial wealth gaps, in environmental sacrifice zones, in policing and incarceration, and in who is most likely to be asked to fight America’s wars. Materialism — King’s term, not mine — measures national success by markets rather than human well-being. It tolerates billionaires alongside homelessness, medical debt and food insecurity. Militarism then becomes the default response to uncertainty, swallowing public resources while social needs are met with lectures about scarcity. 

Look at U.S. foreign policy and the pattern is unmistakable. In the Western Hemisphere, pressure campaigns and regime-change fantasies aimed at Venezuela, deepened military cooperation and “advisory” footprints in Colombia, and the enduring intervention reflex toward Cuba treat sovereignty as provocation. These are not declared wars. They are the quieter, bureaucratized forms of militarism King warned us about — sanctions that function as siege, security assistance that invites escalation, and rhetoric that replaces diplomacy with dominance. 

The same logic travels. Strategic attention to Greenland — wrapped in Arctic competition and resource access — shows how militarism now adapts to climate change, recasting melting ice as a security opportunity. And in Iran, the U.S. continues to circle confrontation through sanctions, proxy conflict and the ever-present threat of force, despite knowing that a direct war would be catastrophic. Instability is treated not as a warning, but as justification. 

King insisted that militarism does not merely destroy lives abroad; it distorts democracy at home. A nation perpetually prepared for war, he argued, cannot fully commit to justice. Budgets confirm the point. There is always money for weapons systems, overseas bases and contingency plans. There is rarely enough for housing, schools or health care. Scarcity, in this context, is a political choice. 

That is why rhetoric matters. When that man who lives in the House Enslaved People Built claims that white people are discriminated against by civil rights laws, he is not offering a provocative aside. He is attempting to invert King’s moral framework. Civil rights laws were designed to dismantle legally enforced exclusion and violence. To recast them as discriminatory is to deny the structural nature of racism and to sanctify accumulated advantage as merit. This inversion strengthens the triple threat by denying racism, glorifying material advantage and legitimizing coercion in the name of “order.” 

Radical uncertainty sharpens these tendencies. When leaders feel unmoored, they reach for militarism and nostalgia — promising safety through force and stability through hierarchy. King rejected that reflex outright. He argued that uncertainty becomes dangerous only when it is managed through domination rather than repair. 

Racism decides who pays. Materialism decides who profits. Militarism enforces both. Break one link and the system strains; leave all three intact and injustice persists with administrative efficiency. 

King warned where that road leads. He also told us how to choose differently. 

The writer is an economist and author.