The US defense budget represents not only a significant burden on the domestic economy, but looks completely disproportionate relative to other countries’ military outlays. By adding it all up, defense spending is set to exceed $1 trillion in 2022-i.e., 14 percent of the federal budget and 4 percent of gross domestic product. The budgets of Department of Veterans Affairs ($113 billion), Homeland Security ($55 billion), the State Department ($64 billion), and the FBI and Cybersecurity in the Department of Justice ($10 billion) add another $242 billion to the base budget of the Department of Defense (DoD). However, this is not the full picture, because other federal spending is also closely tied to defense. The US defense budget was $754 billion for the financial year 2022, before President Biden increased it by another $29 billion following the war in Ukraine. The US spends about 11 percent of its federal budget on defense, which is the third largest item after Social Security and Health, and costs almost twice as much as education. From this point of view, Lew Rockwell’s scathing criticism of the US military interventions in Iraq and global hegemonic ambitions in general, appears still relevant after almost twenty-five years. The USA has also multiplied its foreign military actions and engaged in controversial and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, harming both international peace and the global economy. The USA not only spends a disproportionately high amount of money on military relative to the rest of the world, but has also continued doing so when the Cold War was over and it could have set in motion a virtuous cycle of international disarmament. Among other, one can judge how true this is by looking at the amount of US military spending and size of its foreign military interventions. The US opposes a sphere of influence for Russia and other regional powers, while at the same time has steadily expanded its own global outreach.
Ryan McMaken argues that the US administration’s claim that countries should not have the right to a sphere of influence, implicitly addressing Russia, is hypocritical. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought America’s foreign policy interventions under the limelight once again.
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