From Tomgram:

The United States remains by far the world’s leading proliferator of conventional arms, accounting for some 50% of all global sales and 48% of all sales to the developing world. During the 2011-2014 period alone, U.S. weapons deliveries included a wide array of advanced weapons technologies: 104 tanks and self-propelled guns, 230 artillery pieces, 419 armored personnel vehicles, 48 supersonic aircraft and 58 other aircraft, 835 surface-to-air missiles, and 144 anti-ship missiles, much of that to the volatile Middle East. Skeptics would say that such transactions are motivated less by an urge to enable recipient countries to defend themselves than by the desire to buy influence abroad while aiding and abetting arms manufacturers at home. The result of such massive sales is, of course, the creation of yet more instability where stability should be.

Garrisoning the planet: The military maintains up to 800 bases in more than 70 countries and stations more than 200,000 active-duty personnel in some 150 countries. This global presence represents the geostrategic equivalent of Parkinson’s law: operational and social entanglements expanding exponentially to fill the space created by these far-flung outposts.

The nuclear black hole: The military remains the permanent keeper and executor of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal: an estimated 4,700 nuclear warheads on some 800 delivery systems, as well as another 2,340 “retired” but still intact and presumably usable warheads. A three-decade, trillion-dollar upgrade of this already monstrous arsenal is now underway. The Economist has called this Washington’s “unkicked addiction.” It should be clear, but apparently isn’t, that these are weapons of disuse. Other than for destroying the planet if used, their only value is as a measure of muscularity against mirror-image peers. They deter nothing at other levels of muscle-flexing but do feed an insatiable thirst for emulation among jealous non-possessors of such weaponry.  (by Gregory D. Foster is a professor at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., a West Point graduate, and a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War.)

And yet the United States seems unable to win a war, and any success against, for instance ISIS, comes at the cost of untold devastation of ancient cities and displacement of huge number of people.  Trump says he “ain’t gonna do nation building”, so these people are on their own, unless they can find their way to Europe. What is the point in these military empires?  At least the British brought with them a common language, railways, education and orderly government, even if sometimes corrupt.  No, the United States has many good things to its name, but as a hegemon it hasn’t a clue, and is wasting treasure while the country, its environment, infrastructure and education itself ( to name a few things) are falling to pieces.