Look I’m a numbers guy, ever since the end of the Cold War and especially since the end of the GWOT the US electorate has become more and more isolationist. Even Biden has been reluctant to involve the US military in directly in foreign wars.

I also dont mind intervention when it is in our interests. But much of our foreign policy is an echo of the Cold War which is no longer relevant.

The US lost a little over 7,000 lives and spent between 6.2 to 8 trillion on the GWOT… what benefits did we see besides scarring an entire generation and burning 8 trillion in the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan. Imagine how much sooner we could have achieved energy independence if we had invested that money in oil, gas and clean energy sources.

We now one of the largest exporter of oil in the world… why would we go back to the Mid East, why do we need to ensure anyone’s safety in that region. China is now the largest importer of oil from this region. In ten years when the US is done with building out our own industrial plant in NA and moving production to other countries, why would we continue to secure China’s access to that oil?

The US has 296 ships in active service, this is less than half of what we had during the Cold War. Yet we still patrol the world water ways while promising to aid Taiwan if they are invaded. We simply do not have the fleet size to maintain the mission tempo for all of these obligations. If you google ship readiness rates and deployment lengths you will see the damage this is causing our navy. I don’t see the political will to increase the size of the Navy to a level that would allow us to support those commitments. The current intervention off the coast of Yemen keeps trade lanes in the Red Sea open. This benefits Europe and China, but does very little for the US.

Let the world go to war, we can sell arms to countries at war and tip the scales in our favor. The best thing to happen to US foreign policy in the last 20 years was not the GWOT, it was Russia invading Ukraine.

We can sell or provide arms when it is in our interests. We can use our fleet and military to intervene when our interests are directly threatened. But we don’t need to guarantee other nations safety or economic security with our own blood and treasure.