'Great Power Competition' Is the Path to Decline

Given limited resources, the demands of militarism will crowd out all other priorities, and the neglect of domestic needs will get even worse.

Hal Brands sets up the flimsiest strawman he can find and proceeds to knock it over:

Attaining a flawless democracy at home has never been a precondition for defending a favorable order abroad.

Brands has made some version of this argument before, but it isn’t any more persuasive this time than it was then. He misunderstands the position he is criticizing. More to the point, he is simply ignoring the much greater danger of having a more activist U.S. that is simultaneously experiencing democratic backsliding.