Empires have lives of their own. They go forward...expanding...spending...stretching...until, boom, they go too far. Empires do not back up.
The portion of our economy spent on the military has been in a long term decline since the end of WWII, its bliped up in recent years, as it did before in the 80s, but both blips are small compared to the long term downtrend, which looks set to resume.
The long term deficit problems are entitlement problems. "Imperial overstretch" is a non-issue.
Which doesn't mean we should not look for savings from military spending. Its no longer the bulk of spending like it used to be, but it still too large to ignore. The downward trend I talked about above should resume, and probably will, but we don't need to take any dramatic new effort to cause that to happen, and even if the trend ended, defense spending wouldn't be the drive of the deficit.
Also the US is not an empire, or at least not much of one. Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, United States Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, and an additional few, small, often uninhabited islands, doesn't make for much of an empire.
As for not going back as an empire
see en.wikipedia.org |
