The perspective is not isolationist: the United States should be a constructive world citizen. Nor does it arise from pacifism, although sometimes it may be wise not to seek to win wars, but to end them. Given war aversion and the essential absence of threat, military spending is hugely excessive. However, even if the US should substantially disarm, it is probably wise to keep some military forces to carry out limited missions, to hedge a bit against the highly unlikely rise of an effective adversary, and to develop a capacity to rebuild. There would be risk if military forces were very substantially reduced, but experiences in Vietnam and Iraq suggest that there is risk as well in maintaining large forces-in-being that can be deployed in an under-reflective manner. It also facilitates misguided militarized assertiveness, fatuous political rhetoric, and arrogance. The American public has not become newly isolationist or militaristic. It has long been willing to engage internationally, but not to expend American lives in costly and questionable foreign adventures: the 9/11 wars are not indicators of change in this. Indeed, an Iraq Syndrome has taken hold, and military intervention, particularly with ground troops does not seem to have much of a future.

A definitional modification has had the effect of greatly magnifying the perceived importance and frequency of terrorism. The United States failed in its military interventions in Libya and in the Syrian civil war, both of which replaced coherent if unpleasant regimes with chaos and murderous disorder. There was, however, a successful campaign against Islamic State, or ISIS, or ISIL, an especially vicious, ultimately self-destructive, insurgent group that had a genius for making enemies and owed its initial successes in 2014 primarily to the often-monumental incompetence of the US-trained Iraqi army. However, as with al-Qaeda after 9/11, ISIS scarcely presented a challenge to global security, inspired near-total hostility in the area, and was soon pushed back. In defense and in decline, ISIS relied primarily not on counteroffensives, but on planting booby traps, using snipers, and cowering among civilians, and the costs for defeating it might have been lower if the methods to do so had been more measured. The strategy against ISIS worked because of a couple of features not likely to be found in many other conflicts: local forces were prepared to do the fighting and dying, and ISIS inspired existential angst in the US public.