[nyokodo]

> The notion that the US has stepped back at all is entirely unsupported by the actual facts.

40 years ago the US Navy was equipped and staffed to patrol the global oceans. Now, the US has a relatively few massively powerful forces of naval power projection but is woefully understaffed and under-equipped to maintain the global order against multiplying chaos. This is unlikely to change at all let alone be fast enough to influence outcomes. Growing sentiment after decades of the war on terror is for the US to be hesitant to intervene internationally, and while that isn’t current policy it’s predictive of future policy. It’s not at all clear that it would be popular in the USA to, for instance, go to Moldova’s defense.

> the US just spent another hundred billion dollars on a foreign war in two years.

The vast majority of this was accountancy fictions about the value of stockpiled obsolete materiel we couldn’t sell but had to pay to maintain or pay to scrap. We have demonstrably not gone all in on supporting Ukraine and Congress is currently strangling any attempt to do so. This is another sign of the US inevitably devolving into an unreliable defense partner.