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There are multiple points in the parent's post. While I agree that the idea of unnecessary military spending is noxious, the impact of safe global shipping and the unmeasurable deterrent effects for global stability may still be important. It's not clear to me how we measure and assess the value of this vs. hypothetical and more desirable alternatives.

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If we weren't maintaining safe global shipping and other elements of global stability on the sly and with a self-serving twist, maybe the vacuum would have caused the global community to come together to achieve the same ends, in a more transparent and less lopsided and brutal (one can only hope) way.

While I agree that sounds nice, my intuition suggests that the incentives and scale would tend to lead towards conflict. It might be interesting to model the stability of systems like this, though it's a hard problem to model chaotic nonlinear dynamical systems. It's not even clear what the state variables should be, but I'm curious if anyone has tried this.

Maybe and Hope are the usually the best plans.

The planning equivalent of Thoughts and Prayers.

To speak to the parent's points -- WW1 happened and the League of Nations failed to prevent an even worse conflagration.

Say what you will about US v USSR, or the post-Cold War US hegemony, there has been no WWIII.

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