We defended our economic and geopolitical influence. I really don’t know how much “policing” we did from any truly moral or ethical standpoint. it’s almost all been about keeping rivals at bay in some way or another. We delivered democracy…or whatever puppet government that promised the do what we wanted…at the point of a gun more often than not. China will likely move into the US’s economic role and has been pushing that way for quite some time. As far as military intervention, we won’t be able to afford it anymore with the loss of favorable trade or other agreements. Where the US may have felt like a necessary evil to some countries allowing us to have bases or other dominant presence, those countries are probably going to start looking elsewhere or solve those issues internally and hold the US at arm’s length.
The mistake is thinking that any of that redirected budget will actually be used to help people in the US, and also not factoring in the loss of favorable trade and other soft power. Save a billion on bases, lose 2 billion in trade agreements kind of thing. These aren’t simplistic one-dimensional math problems, there are a lot of moving parts and downstream effects.
We defended our economic and geopolitical influence. I really don’t know how much “policing” we did from any truly moral or ethical standpoint. it’s almost all been about keeping rivals at bay in some way or another. We delivered democracy…or whatever puppet government that promised the do what we wanted…at the point of a gun more often than not. China will likely move into the US’s economic role and has been pushing that way for quite some time. As far as military intervention, we won’t be able to afford it anymore with the loss of favorable trade or other agreements. Where the US may have felt like a necessary evil to some countries allowing us to have bases or other dominant presence, those countries are probably going to start looking elsewhere or solve those issues internally and hold the US at arm’s length.
might help to reduced the overbloated Defense budget, if the countries expelled all americans bases.
The mistake is thinking that any of that redirected budget will actually be used to help people in the US, and also not factoring in the loss of favorable trade and other soft power. Save a billion on bases, lose 2 billion in trade agreements kind of thing. These aren’t simplistic one-dimensional math problems, there are a lot of moving parts and downstream effects.