I would hope we someday learn to stop polluting our world in the pursuit of killing each other.
There will be a judgement call made, a balance struck. Some amount of business, not enough to invest in catching contaminants or keep workers off food stamps, but enough to fund lobbying and other efforts to maintain that comfortable permanence.
Your representatives in Congress and the Executive Branch still need to get paid, and blowing up brown people is their most reliable play to get re-election votes from their base.
In a more sensible world, we could be achieving those jobs by hiring ecological restoration workers, building public transit, etc
The tariffs costing us jobs play well because we’re told we’re making “them” pay, just like we made “them” build the wall.
Half the country has been conditioned to associate ecological and public transit work as woke socialism, and only get emotionally motivated by hurting/punishing whoever “them” is during election season.
The people with enough money to buy media empires will invest whatever it takes to make sure they’re not the next “them.”
Whether and how we pollute is a political choice. That we want to is a problem unrelated to defense.
The only way you can protect a society is by being strong enough to intimidate the people in the world who would otherwise look at you and go "I want, I take." Wars are a great evil, but being prepared to fight one is a necessary evil.
Calling it the "Department of War", maintaining a fleet of over a dozen aircraft carriers, and having over a hundred overseas bases? Your goal is to invade, not to defend. You are the reason everyone else is forced to spend a fortune on maintaining a defensive military.
Peace requires policing, a credible deterrent to abuse. On the world's stage, there's no actual hegemon for the planet. You gotta choose who will police by mere "I'm stronger than you". I think the US is the most acceptable police, at least it's an elected democracy with individual freedom at its core.
At the end of the day, a government is whoever is strong enough to prevent the other one from governing: provide protection and services to your people in exchange for being the boss. Roaming bands overthrow each other, still visible in Afghanistan and Syria, and dictate who's effectively Government on a given day in a given area. Who applies the laws, who provides justice, who keeps you safe. Scale that up to modern nations and we look at it as if it was the natural order of things: just stick to you backyard and all will be good. But no, it was never like that and even less so these days: the world is shrinking rapidly.
Can't have peace without deterrence against bad actors. And deterrence doesn't stop only on your turf.
And the US has 11 carriers, not "over a dozen." And we do that to keep world trade flowing because it's good for business, Trumpian idiocy notwithstanding. We have 11 carriers so we can keep about 3 or 4 on patrol at any given time, because that's the level of maintenance and staffing that's required to do that.