>Personally, I was thinking we could privatize the entire military in one fell swoop. And then let them sell their services to various foreign nations. Turn that one big cost center into a revenue opp.

The USA gets a whooole lot of soft power from its military hegemony, it's already paying for itself in the form of better trade deals - for instance, Taiwan basically only exists because of US hegemony, and they have better chips than the US does, and they don't sell their best outside of NATO.

The US is doomed to always be the away-team - they can't stay neutral because wars involve blocking the trade of their trading partner, which includes US merchant ships. They won't have a war on the home front, because they have the two biggest oceans in the world to make such an invasion a logistical impossibility (and the US navy is giant to enforce that).

Military hegemony is basically the definition of hard power

> The USA gets a whooole lot of soft power from its military hegemony

Definition of soft-power: Soft power is the ability to co-opt rather than coerce (in contrast with hard power).

* looks up list of foreign intervention by the US over the last 60 years *

I think you might want to rethink your argument.

> They won't have a war on the home front

Yup. Enormous geographical advantages + a population armed to the teeth (relatively speaking) means the US is as close to impenetrable as is possible