The United States spends more on its military than the next ten nations combined and still publishes an annual document listing the worldwide threats it faces. It is time to ask the obvious question: threatens whom, exactly?
March 2026
There is a particular kind of absurdity that becomes invisible through repetition. Every year, the Director of National Intelligence walks into a congressional hearing room and delivers what Washington calls the Worldwide Threat Assessment, a grave, leather-bound catalogue of enemies, rivals, and dangers lurking beyond America’s shores. Senators lean forward. Cameras flash. The republic holds its breath.
Meanwhile, the United States operates over 750 military bases in more than 80 countries. It maintains 11 aircraft carrier strike groups, the rest of the world has a combined total of one. It spends, depending on the year, somewhere between $800 billion and $900 billion annually on defence. Its nuclear arsenal can end human civilization several times over.
And yet: the threats. Always the threats.
$886B – US defence budget, 2024
750+ – Overseas military bases
11 – Aircraft carrier groups (rest of world: 1)
#1 – Arms exporter on earth, for decades running
The Architecture of Permanent Threat
The threat assessment is not merely a document. It is a worldview, institutionalised and self-perpetuating. It begins with the premise that America’s interests, economic, military, and ideological, extend to every corner of the globe. And from that premise flows a necessary corollary: every corner of the globe is therefore a potential source of danger.
This is circular logic wearing a uniform. If you station troops in 80 countries, you will find resentment in 80 countries. If you sell weapons to one side of every regional dispute, you will be implicated in every regional dispute. If you name yourself the guarantor of the rules-based international order, rules you yourself wrote, rules you yourself routinely break, you will find challengers at every turn. The threats are, in no small part, the predictable consequence of the posture that claims to guard against them.
“The biggest kid in school who tells you the playground is dangerous is usually the one who made it that way.”
What the Numbers Actually Say
- China is the pacing threat, according to the latest assessment. Its military has indeed grown, dramatically. Yet China has one overseas military base (in Djibouti). The United States has dozens in the Pacific alone, including bases on China’s maritime doorstep in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Guam. If the situation were reversed, if China had bases in Mexico, Cuba, and Canada, the United States would call it an existential provocation. From Beijing, that is precisely what it looks like.
- Russia is listed prominently. Its invasion of Ukraine is real and wrong. But even here, honest accounting complicates the story: the expansion of NATO, a military alliance whose founding purpose evaporated in 1991, to Russia’s borders is not the innocent, purely defensive act that Western briefings describe. A country that lost 27 million people in the last world war, and was promised by Western officials that NATO would not expand one inch eastward, has at least a comprehensible, if not justifiable, paranoia.
- North Korea. Iran. Cyber threats. Terrorism. Fentanyl flows from cartels. All real. All serious. All addressable. And none of them require 750 overseas bases, $886 billion annually, and the rhetorical posture of a nation perpetually under siege.
The Alternative: A Pro-World Posture
Here is what the United States could be. Here is what, at its best moments, it has briefly been.
The Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe. The Peace Corps built goodwill across the developing world. American science gave the world the internet, mRNA vaccines, and the green revolution that fed billions. American universities trained generations of global leaders. None of this required a single aircraft carrier. All of it produced more genuine security than any military base ever has.
A pro-world United States would redirect a fraction of its defence budget, say, a tenth of it, toward climate adaptation in vulnerable nations. It would cancel the debt of the world’s poorest countries. It would lead on pandemic preparedness, not as a geopolitical instrument, but as a simple acknowledgment that viruses do not respect borders and that healthy neighbours are good neighbours.
“The world does not need America to be its policeman. It needs America to be its most capable partner.”
A pro-world United States would close its most provocative foreign bases, not all of them, not overnight, but the ones that exist primarily to project dominance rather than ensure genuine security. It would sign and honour the international treaties it has abandoned: the Paris Agreement (re-entered, then sabotaged at the margins), the International Criminal Court, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (the only nation on earth not to have ratified it).
It would stop selling weapons to every autocrat who promises to buy American. It would recognise that when it arms Saudi Arabia, it prolongs the war in Yemen. When it arms Israel without conditions, it is complicit in what happens next. When it sells F-16s to one neighbour and Abrams tanks to another, it is not preserving peace, it is curating conflict for profit.
The Realist Case for Idealism
This is not naive. The realist case for a pro-world posture is overwhelming. Countries that trade extensively do not go to war with each other. Countries that receive genuine development assistance do not produce the desperate, radicalised populations that terrorism requires. Countries that feel respected, not surveilled, not sanctioned at will, not subjected to regime-change operations, do not align themselves with America’s rivals out of spite.
The Cold War produced a logic of zero-sum competition that America won, and then never escaped. The wall came down in 1989. The threat assessment barely changed. The military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about in 1961 had too much invested in the architecture of permanent threat to let a little thing like the end of the Cold War dissolve it.
But the world has changed faster than Washington’s imagination. Climate change does not care about NATO. Pandemics do not respect sanctions. Artificial intelligence will be shaped by whoever builds the most collaborative international frameworks, not whoever has the most submarines. The challenges of the 21st century are irreducibly global. They require partners, not subjects.
A Different Kind of American Greatness
America is great at many things. It produces extraordinary science, extraordinary art, and extraordinary entrepreneurship. Its founding ideals, flawed in practice, luminous in aspiration, still move people around the world. When an American president stands before the United Nations and speaks of human dignity, people still lean in. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, everything.
The question is whether that country, the America of ideas, of generosity, and of genuine democratic possibility, will reclaim its foreign policy from the America of bases, contractors, and threat assessments. Whether it will choose to be admired rather than feared. Whether it understands, finally, that the most powerful nation in history does not need to be afraid of the playground.
It built a playground. It can rebuild it. Better this time. For everyone.
The world does not ask America to be weak. It asks America to be wise. There is a difference, and it is time the annual threat assessment came with a companion document: an annual opportunity assessment. What could the United States build, heal, and share, if it chose to lead with its best self rather than its most frightened one?
The biggest kid on the playground does not need to be afraid.
But first, the biggest kid has to stop making the playground dangerous.
