[transcriptase]

You’re missing the point.

Though it would never come to it, the U.S. will always be able to pay back creditors because it could, in theory, simply take whatever was needed to settle. Uncomfortable to reconcile but ultimately true at present.

[mindslight]

What is with this pervasive assumption that the US owing other countries in USD somehow implies that the US might somehow end up wedged trying to pay back debts denominated in USD? These are not household finances - the US is monetarily sovereign. The US can always pay any USD-denominated debt by conjuring new money, meaning politics is the only thing that can actually cause a default.

Your top level comment is basically a huge red herring. The dynamic is not one of the US starting a war to take others' lootable assets to pay off debt denominated in USD. Rather, benefiting from US military hegemony in the future is what other countries are buying into when they choose to store their wealth in USD. They accept the demurrage from holding continually-inflating USD as the cost of moving bulk wealth forward in time, and our spending much of the proceeds of that arrangement on maintaining our global hard and soft power made perfect sense.

Trump's policies have directly made the US an unreliable ally, and therefore made USD less attractive. Monetary inflation has always been acceptable (there isn't a better game in town). But after our allies have trusted buying shares in our economic empire, leaving them high and dry or overtly extorting them for even more is breaking the arrangement.

All of these points about "cutting spending" and "making other countries pay their share" are essentially quack narratives covering for actions aimed at directly undermining the United States and the Dollar. It's even more blatant when you see things like spending is not actually being cut. Presumably if he (they?) succeed at the goal, the plan is to blame the results on purported inevitability when the reality will be that they blew it up.