1945 to date, not 250 years

Until WW2, USA was not a world power

America can't just go back to the way things were before Trump. Trump is a symptom of deeper systematic problems. If we try to pretend this all just goes away when he does, we're going to find ourselves right back in the same shit in a few years when the base latches on to the next psychopath.

The Biden Administration, for instance, was viewed very favorably

Careful. A positive comment about the Biden administration goes against the narrative.

Do you remember why NATO was founded, and why the biggest European country was mostly demilitarised, and forced to have its army limited?

Let's remember that the US has been, by far, the richest country in the world since the world wars, largely because it stayed out of them til the ends, and issued massive loans to European countries that they continued to profit off of for decades and decades.

You talk about GDP percentage, as if every country had a similar GDP per capita, and could thus afford to spend similarly. The reality is that the US had more then enough money to both fund its military and fund its social programs, but it chose to instead fund the military and the already wealthy.

If you think we ‘happened’ to keep a large standing army just because we were defending Europe.

The plain fact is we didn’t even try and reap the peace dividends following the Cold War. We doubled down and found an excuse to pad the pockets of the MIC.

If we’d shrunk down instead of maintaining all this obsolete gear, it’d be easier to be proactive to changes in warfare like drones. We wouldn’t maintain fleets of fourth gen fighters and build out our fifth gen fleets.

You maintain military production capacity by having a strong civil industrial capability.

As we learned in WW2, it doesn’t take much to convert from making cars to making tanks.

Bonus side effect: prevents us from getting embroiled in nation building or getting after commercial wet dreams for regime change when it takes 2-3 years to build up a force.

You're right of course.

But two things I'd like to point out:

1. Yes, the US WAS the military of the treaty. WAS being the important part here as the trust that made this arragement possible is heavily eroded today due to the lunatic in charge.

2. You're first paragraph is onesided and resembles the talking points of the Trump admin. The reality is more complex: The Us would have spend that money anyways as it aimed for global military domination during and after the cold war. The NATO treaty allowd to convert this alread spend money not only in hard military but also in soft power: The US gained massive multi-level influence in the member states due to the military depency and also bought their international voices (for example inside the UN) with it. It was a win-win situation with kooperative cost advantages for both sides. Not a one sided deal to the disadvantage of the US as Americans seem to be made believe by Trump and his oligarchy.

The Internet as a whole is real broken. But Lemmy is very rapidly taking the cake for THE place where you can never discuss anything and the only responses are people who are incapable of having a conversation and are just angry that you didn't say what they wanted to hear.

Did you expect a bunch of responses just agreeing with you? Allow me to placate that ego.

wow, so true!

I agree with your actual post, but the bitching that you're not just getting blind praise is wild.