Haven't you done enough to wreck your reputation by now?

For reference:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46685072

NATO was a thing in 1960. France and the UK spend lower proportions of their GDP than in 1960 not because of an increase in the amount of white-knighting America does on their behalf but because they are no longer administering global empires (France was in active conflict at the time), and because per capita spend isn't a great way of measuring ability to project military power either particularly not post Cold-War; the US has also cut it and is still relatively more powerful than it was in 1960.

The US military industrial complex primarily does invest domestically and sells more overseas than it buys. It employs millions of US citizens, sells more US tech than it buys and subsidised the creation of dual use technology the wider US economy does rather well out of, including an early version of the internet we're interacting over. And if it's too big or too wasteful, that's a decision made entirely by the US, which fights the wars which - for better or worse - the US wants to fight (it's actually Europe throwing lives at American wars; last time the UK actually had to defend its own territories US support was restricted to sharing intel and selling us some missiles). Same goes for the bases in Europe. The Trump administration is furiously trying to sanewash Trump's acquisitiveness into an imperative to have more bases close to Russia on European territory - if its that important, kind of hard to argue there hasn't been a benefit to any of the other bases over the past 80 years...

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