KENNETH S. ROGOFF is Professor of Economics at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund from 2001 to 2003 and is the author of Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider’s View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead.

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For too long, the status quo approach in Washington has been to ignore the massive debt problem and hope that a return to miraculous levels of growth and low interest rates will take care of it. But the United States is approaching the point at which the national debt could undermine not only the country’s economic stability but also the things that have sustained its global power for so many decades, including the military spending that it has leveraged in many ways to maintain the dollar’s formidable influence over the global financial system since World War II. Whether in the case of Spain in the sixteenth century, the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, or the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century, no country in modern history has been able to sustain a dominant currency without also being a superpower.

The United States may avoid a debt crisis, and Trumpian and progressive economists who count on growth dividends ultimately outweighing the interest costs of higher debt may turn out to be right. But the debt policy that both the Republican and the Democratic Parties have engaged in over the first quarter of the twenty-first century amounts to a huge wager on long odds, especially if the country wants to remain a dominant power for the rest of this century and beyond. Given the current trajectory of deficits, it has become much more difficult to sustain the belief that no matter how high U.S. debt gets, it will have no effect on the country’s capacity to fight financial crises, pandemics, climate events, and wars. And it will certainly be a drag on the country’s growth.

It is impossible to predict how and when a U.S. debt problem may erupt and what the consequences will be: unpalatable austerity, high inflation, financial repression, partial default, or a mix of these. There are strong reasons to assume that inflation will have a pronounced part, as it did during the 1970s. Regardless, a debt crisis will be destabilizing for the United States, the global economy, and the dollar’s reserve status. Left unchecked, it could erode the country’s position in the world.