[enraged_camel]

>> France and Britain alone used to be able to defend trade routes. I don't think it's a huge expense.

That was a different world. France and Britain today have nowhere the kind of force projection the USA does, via its military bases and aircraft carriers.

[impossiblefork]

Yes, but the US basically had to intervene and tell them to stop using it. If that hadn't happened they wouldn't have.

The US probably wasn't in preventing an invasion of Egypt, but if not restrained I'm sure that Britain and France could have realised their objectives, and if they had had a continuous need to realise different changing objectives they would have retained more capability.