They also learned. No more direct US involvement in major military conflicts apart from auxiliary support role. Importantly, the US stopped Europe from attaining energy sovereignty through buying oil in euro.

Even today, the US is no longer directly involved. It is the Ukrainians and Israelis and ISIS/HTS who are dying on the front, while the US slowly drips its military equipments to the frontline to ensure that it will not run out of munitions beyond its capacity to replenish.

It's interesting to track the development and contradictions of the US military. The military used to have a draft, but there's the lesser contradiction of the US public being more receptive towards being anti-war and soft anti-imperialism as with the case of Vietnam War protests and the greater contradiction of the internal colonized getting free military training that they can then use against the state. This was most clearly demonstrated when AIM had a shootout with the FBI, where the FBI got owned because those AIM revolutionaries were all vets from Vietnam while the FBI agents managed to dodge Vietnam. I believe this was the real reason why the draft was abandoned. It's absolutely foolish for a state to provide free military training for people who want to eventually take up arms against the state.

And so the draft ended. The US military is purely voluntary, which means there will be no more fragging of officers and a military that's willing to be lapdogs of US empire. No draft also meant your average Burgerlander isn't going to have their relatives or themselves come home in a body bag, which means no more anti-war protests and potential 5th columns. But contradictions are eternal and the dialectic is ever in motion. The military might be more loyal, but there's also less manpower in general because there's less people. The separation between your average Burgerlander with the rest of the world plus the US being the center of the imperial core cultivates a population that fits all the stereotypes of pampered first-worlders who have never had to experience a day of hardship. Even the degradation of physical fitness is related to this. Would HFCS be this prolific if the US population was expected to be drafted at a moment's notice?

So how are these new contradictions being resolved? It's through greater reliance on proxies and client states. Instead of engaging in direct kinetic warfare, various other forms of warfare like cyberwarfare, sanctions, and color revolutions which do not require the military readiness of the general US population are waged instead. This works up until the part where the US military's ability to wage kinetic warfare has degraded too far. You can already start to see this with how the US navy has compared Ansarallah to naval warfare during WWII (combat against a de jure nonstate actor should never be on par against state actors with war economies) or how your average Burgerlander is unfit for military service (how many Burgerlanders can run a mile in less than 10 minutes?). History is filled with former empires who rely on past glories and present proxies to project an image of military supremacy. But sooner or later, a challenger will seek to contest the throne and all that projected strength evaporates into thin air when the rubber hits the road.

Thank you comrade. Your posts are always really helpful. I think the trade/sanctions war against solar panels / green tech from China is the next stage of trying to hold on to that energy dominance over Europe as well.