For decades, the United States borrowed against the future with relative ease, its debt a quiet abstraction underwritten by the dollar's unchallenged dominance. Now, with national debt surpassing $40 trillion and annual interest payments exceeding the military budget, the world's largest creditors are beginning to ask whether the arrangement still makes sense. Norway's sovereign wealth fund is pulling back, Treasury yields are at their highest since 2007, and the era of cheap American borrowing is quietly closing — not with a crisis, but with a slow, structural reckoning that policymakers have