Quote Originally Posted by poop
It's not because the US needs to overspend on military to protect itself.
I was thinking more along the lines of securing resources to maintain economic dominance. Oil. Geopolitics seems to me to revolve around the petrocurrency. It's not about protecting themselves from military threats, it's about protecting themselves from someone else controlling global resources and shutting USA out. That would hurt America a lot more than a bomb in New York.

All you have to do is look at a graph showing how the US spends more on military than the next ten biggest spenders combined to get an idea of how out of control it's gotten.
Even the Russians can't compete with this level of corruption. Obviously the interests of arms dealers and lobbyists are an important factor.

Not sure what this has to do with the conversation. No country is anywhere near capable of sinking the dollar, and military spending is not what's keeping it up.
I agree that no country can sink the dollar. Those who have tried have been destroyed. We're moving into conspiracy theories here, but there were suggestions that Saddam Hussein was trying to sell his oil in Euros while others were looking to dump their dollar reserves and boost their alternative currency reserves, ie take contingency measures predicting the collapse of the dollar. America nipped it in the bud. Whether this is true or not, idk, but it makes some degree of sense on the surface.

Military spending is what's keeping the dollar propped up, at least to a degree. America need a powerful deterrent against their enemies.

According to them, military power comes from economic power, not the other way around.
This may be true, but military power may be necessary to maintain economic power, at least in today's world.

Historically, there is a pattern of being the strongest country on the planet and the response to the inevitability of losing that status (someday) is to spend more and more on military to try to protect that status with the effect being that the status gets lost faster than it naturally would.
History doesn't take into account technology. For example, the first nation to create a viable army of nanobots will be very powerful and might never lose their status as top dog. How do you dislodge them from their economic dominance? They can take what they want, they can defeat who they want, they can infiltrate and control anyone they want.

The UK, France, and Spain have all been in the US' position in the last few centuries.
This was before toasters existed, let alone thermonuclear weapons.

USA might not maintain their status as the world's most powerful nation, but history isn't a consistent and reliable indicator of what happens in the future. Eventually, someone will remain at the top and be impossible to dislodge. That might be USA.Or it could be someone else.

For the US, this problem is multiplied by the corruption that leads it to not just overspend, but overspend to an absurd degree.
This will probably be their downfall.