Is that efficiently spent, or a bloated subsidy to the military-industrial complex? Because if it is just spent on expensive toys and duds like missile defence, your corollary doesn't follow.
I don't know either way. The peak-to-trough part of the business cycle is an outlier. Carnot would have died laughing.
People like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs packaged the research for popular consumption, but there would have been no Apple and no Microsoft without Whirlwind and SAGE.
At the same time vast amounts of military spending are pure pork - either spent corruptly, spent on projects that are plainly silly (like a 50s attempt to create a nuclear powered bomber), or militarily and diplomatically questionable, like missile defence.
The US could probably afford to cut military spending by 50 or 75% without losing any real military effectiveness.
But another way to look at it is who else has enough economic resources and domestic willingness to establish fully staffed and supplied military commands in every region of the world that are capable of toppling the governments of large, enemy powers? Who else has Naval and Air base networks allowing logistical movements capable of toppling governments of large countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. Note, that although it has not proven easy or possible to politically impose peace or allied governments in Afghanistan or Iraq by military means, America found it quite easy to remove, virtually single-handedly, the offending governments from power, which really was the only military objective in each adventure. Is there any other country, or collection of countries, in the world that has the capacity of doing that today (even Russia couldn't do it in Chechnya, a tiny country by comparison), because that is the infrastructure that would have to be replaced by any group of countries hoping to replace American power with their own collective version of a security bubble for liberal democratic governance.
Nor have these interventions, on balance, done very much for global security, democracy or human rights and dignity. While you may be able to name one or two cases over the last fifty or sixty years, for each case of high-minded humanitarian intervention, I can give you at least a handful - more like a dozen - colonial wars aimed at securing the shady dealings of various moneyed interests.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
You forget Spain before Britain, and the phrase was coined to refer to the Spanish empire. The peak-to-trough part of the business cycle is an outlier. Carnot would have died laughing.
This means that opting to go America-free in terms of international commitments might by the same as becoming trade free regarding the level of external contact outside of the EU that currently exists. Perhaps that's okay and even a desirable outcome, but it might behoove us to look first and see what kinds things that we do actually like in the world today might not exist were it not for the sizable commitment made to international institutions by the United States and that might then have to be replaced by someone else if the US was to reduce its provision (or capability) of providing them.
At the very least, with the threat of expanding additions of carbon and greenhouse gases by non-OECD countries, a means of asserting and compelling international commitment outside of a narrow EU region are probably necessary for the well-being of the EU.
