The Ukraine War is showing a lot of issues with how the U.S. would take a fight to any peer country's shores. Carriers have never been more vulnerable and there was that recent report about how we'd need to restart conscription to keep up with the casualties of such a war.

If I were a State Department ghoul this would drive home the importance of having heavily-militarized vassal states who can act as a forward base and do as much of the dying as we can get away with. Hopefully that plan is becoming increasingly obvious to the people and leaders of those vassal states as well.