Originally Posted by loquitur

actually, Tully, that is a vast overstatement. It's obvious that we use the military more than a number of other western democracies but that's a function of the fact that we have one with real capabilities, and most comparable countries don't. So we have more than one tool, as compared to most European countries, say, which have soft power and nothing else. Soft power is great, but it's even better if there is hard power behind it.
Whether we always use the power wisely is a different question. But that applies to soft power too.

I'm not sure why we have bases all over the place, why we're in Japan now 65 years after the war, or in Germany. Those deployments have become more like goodwill ambassadorships than military assignments. Not everything that happens in the world is our business, but a lot of people seem to think it is, particularly outside the US.