What 'Peace Dividend'?

No one has enjoyed a “peace dividend” because the U.S. has not been at peace for decades.

Dalibor Rohac of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) writes from another universe:

The U.S. needs to adjust to a more dangerous world. It is past time to prioritize hard power over other areas of government spending—in other words, more guns and less butter—and plug the holes left by decades of enjoying the “peace dividend.”

The U.S. already spends close to $900 billion a year on the base budget for the Pentagon, and that doesn’t include hundreds of billions more spent on other agencies involved in some aspect of national security. It is ludicrous to suggest that the U.S. should be devoting even more resources to building up hard power when it outspends the next closest rival by more than half a trillion each year. The military budget in this country is obscenely large right now, so if that isn’t sufficient to fund the strategy the hardliners want then the problem is clearly with their strategy.