(NYTIMES) For much of its history, the United States was a big country with a small peacetime military. World War II changed that permanently: American leaders decided that a country with new global obligations needed a very large peacetime military, including a nuclear arsenal and a worldwide network of bases. They hoped that overwhelming military capacity would avert another world war, deter adversaries and encourage foreign countries to follow the US' wishes.

Yet this military dominance has hardly yielded the promised benefits. The collapse of the US-supported government in Afghanistan two weeks ago, after 20 years of effort and billions of dollars, is just the latest setback in a long narrative of failure.