The perspective is not isolationist: the United States should be a constructive world citizen. Nor does it arise from pacifism, although sometimes it may be wise not to seek to win wars, but to end them. Given war aversion and the essential absence of threat, military spending is hugely excessive. However, even if the US should substantially disarm, it is probably wise to keep some military forces to carry out limited missions, to hedge a bit against the highly unlikely rise of an effective adversary, and to develop a capacity to rebuild. There would be risk if military forces were very substantially reduced, but experiences in Vietnam and Iraq suggest that there is risk as well in maintaining large forces-in-being that can be deployed in an under-reflective manner. It also facilitates misguided militarized assertiveness, fatuous political rhetoric, and arrogance. The American public has not become newly isolationist or militaristic. It has long been willing to engage internationally, but not to expend American lives in costly and questionable foreign adventures: the 9/11 wars are not indicators of change in this. Indeed, an Iraq Syndrome has taken hold, and military intervention, particularly with ground troops does not seem to have much of a future.

Some worry that international peace may some day be punctured either by the rise of China as a challenger country or by excessive assertiveness by Russia backed by its large nuclear arsenal. Each wants to play a greater role on the world stage, but they are both trading states and do not seem to be territorially expansive (except for China on Taiwan), and do not have the wherewithal or, it seems, the ambition, to “run the world.” Indeed, there is a danger of making China into a threat by treating it as such. The dispute between Russia and neighboring Ukraine in 2014 was a unique and opportunistic escapade that proved to be costly to the perpetrators. Russian cybergeek interference in the 2016 US presidential election scarcely constituted a security threat: election fake news simply became higher and deeper. China, Russia, and Iran may present some “challenges” to U.S. policy, but none really presents a palpable security threat requiring large standing forces. Indeed, all three seem to be descending into stagnation. The current “new Cold War,” then, is quite a bit like the old one: an expensive, substantially militarized, and often hysterical campaign to deal with threats that do not exist or are likely to self-destruct.

Current threats might include in particular the proliferation of nuclear weapons and terrorism as well as international crime, policing the oceans, the antics of cybergeeks, securing energy sources, climate change, economic challenges, and the protection of allies. Singly or in groups, these problems and issues scarcely justify the maintenance of a large military force in being, and complacency is, in general, a more fitting response than agitated, and particularly militarized, alarm. Proliferation has been of little practical consequence, and alarmed efforts to prevent it have proved to be very costly and may hamper the forging of a permanent normalization in Korea. Counterterrorism policy has been driven primarily by public opinion, not by an apt analysis of the threat. Cybergeeks may be able to commit sabotage, steal intelligence, or spread propaganda, but any military disruptions are likely to be minor and call more for a small army of counter-cybergeeks than for a large military. One possible use of American military forces in the future would be to deploy them under international authority to police destructive civil wars or to depose vicious regimes. However, this would not require a large number of troops and is unlikely to become routine.

Although the American military record since 1945 has been pretty unimpressive, some argue, first, that the United States, aided perhaps by the attention-arresting fear of nuclear weapons, was necessary to provide worldwide security and thus to order the world, and, second, that the United States was vital in constructing international institutions, conventions, and norms, advancing economic development, and expanding democracy–processes, it is contended, that in various ways have ordered the world and crucially helped to establish and maintain international peace. However, it seems more plausible that the positive developments would mostly have happened even without much American security participation, and that, for the most part, world order has developed not from the machinations of the reigning superpower but from the aversion to international war embraced after World War II especially by developed countries. In fact, if the nearly 200 states that inhabit the world order come substantially to abandon the idea that international war is a sensible method for solving problems among themselves, the notion that they live in “anarchy” becomes misleading and could encourage undesirable policy developments. “World order” is based on a general aversion to international war and does not depend on the United States.

At the conclusion of World War II, the Western victors found that the defeated peoples of Germany and Japan ready for a return to the comparative liberalism of the 1920s. In the meantime, there was an emerging conflict—the Cold War—with another victor: the Soviet Union. Soviet support of a military invasion of South Korea by the Communist North in 1950 provoked unwarranted fears of an imminent World War, and these were taken to require the assemblage of a vast arsenal of weapons designed to deter a war that neither side had any intention of starting. The Cold War also came furnished with a set of alarming crises. In the most famous, the Soviets sought in Cuba to solve two problems that essentially didn’t exist: a potential US invasion and a strategic “imbalance” that was irrelevant because neither side had any intention of initiating a nuclear exchange whatever the disparity of the arsenal. But leaders on both sides were successful at keeping the crisis from escalating. Even if the missiles had been installed in Cuba, however, the only consequence would be that, like other nuclear forces, they would have spent the next decades gathering dust.

American military policy during the current century has been an abject, and highly destructive, failure. Misguided and failed wars instituted in the aftermath of the spectacular terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, have cost trillions of dollars and killed well over 200.000 people, including more than twice as many Americans as perished on 9/11. Much-exaggerated alarm after 9/11 made politically possible an armed invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, spilling over into Pakistan, to depose an unpleasant regime that, despite some appearances, had essentially nothing to do with 9/11. And in 2003, the American military was sent to Iraq to remove the fully-containable and fully-deterrable regime of Saddam Hussein. Initially successful at first, the two ventures ultimately inspired lengthy insurgencies against the occupiers. In Iraq, Iran and Syria, concerned they might be next, worked successfully with friendly Iraqis to make the American tenure in Iraq as miserable as possible. Insofar as the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were motivated by a romantic notion that the forceful intervention would instil blissful democracy on grateful peoples, impelling other countries to follow suit and in time to love the United States and Israel, the ventures have been a fiasco of monumental proportions.

It really seems time to take into account the consequences of the fact that countries, particularly leading or developed ones, reversing the course of several millennia, no longer envision international war as a sensible method for resolving their disputes. Indeed, the aversion to international war or the rise of something of a culture or society of international peace that has substantially enveloped the world should be seen as a causative or facilitating independent variable. International war seems to be in pronounced decline because of the way attitudes toward it have changed, roughly following the pattern by which the institution of formal slavery became discredited and then obsolete. Under the circumstances, there is potential virtue in the traditionally maligned diplomatic techniques of complacency and appeasement for dealing with international problems. The phenomenon asuggests that there is little justification for the continuing and popular tendency to inflate threats and dangers in the international arena—even to the point of deeming some of them to be “existential.” In addition, although problems certainly continue to exist, none of these are substantial enough to require the United States (or pretty much anybody) to maintain a large standing military force for dealing with them.