Opinion
The U.S. Military Machine Is Unsustainable
By Staff Writer
August 15, 2024
Views: 1714
Public Domain
Reprinted with permission•Mises Wire•Jacob R. Swartz
For nearly two centuries the United States has been an expansionist power. Though it was the War of 1812 when the U.S. solidified its dominion over the Americas, it was at the twilight of the Spanish-American War when the American Empire finally came of age. The first two decades of the 20th century marked America’s transition — for better or worse — into a global superpower.
By the end of the First World War, the United States had solidified itself as an emerging global power until finally asserting itself as the world’s dominant ascendancy in the aftermath of World War II. From 1945 and over the course of the next fifty years, the U.S.’s sphere of influence would continue to expand its global network of military installations in order to curtail Soviet influence. Now, nearly three decades following the USSR’s collapse, there are still 800 formal U.S. bases across eighty countries worldwide. Not only is this unacceptable, but it is also needlessly wasteful. Since 2001, close to $6 trillion has been spent on wars in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan alone. The utility of the empire’s foreign military infrastructure is simply not worth the cost required to sustain it; therefore, the number of bases worldwide should be strategically reduced to only those installations that are essential to defending the homeland and protecting international commerce.
Though the USSR no longer threatens liberal hegemony, U.S. foreign policy is still rooted in a Cold War mindset. While an official plan for base realignment and closure was presented in the 1990s under President Bill Clinton, only a select few installations were shut down; most were simply repurposed and assigned to deter other perceived threats to U.S. primacy. However, very few of these installations actually do much to help secure the homeland. In fact, this was not even their original intended purpose! They were designed to defend liberal hegemony, which is no longer the centralized bloc it once was. While American primacy may have made logical sense in the post-war era, in order to halt the spread of communism (although that too has been subject to debate), there is no longer any practical need for the extent of its power to be so expansive.
https://armedforces.press/the-u-s-military-machine-is-unsustainable/
