Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
Beyond the record military budgets (going mostly to procurement of equipment and platforms) mentioned above, Trump has been a thorough chickenhawk of a president, and though troop levels abroad have hardly changed he's done a lot of damage to American interests and influence (you're right in the sense of contributing to the decline of the empire).

Not surprising for a President who, as a private citizen under Obama, affirmed a desire to be in Iraq and Libya "to take the oil," and who redeployed troops from Northern Syria to Southern Syria a year ago - enabling Turkish ethnic cleansing of local Kurds - in order to "protect the oil."

It could always be a rank coincidence that Trump's foreign policy has consistently been above replacement value for Putin, since whatever degrades the American Empire is almost definitionally of benefit to Putin. :P

I should point out though that the interests of empire are much bigger than the relatively-measly arms industry, per se.
It should also be mentioned that I think the biggest foreign policy hit has been in America's soft power, not hard power. The damage that Tillerson started with hollowing out the State Department and Pompeo continued will last a generation. A friend of mine works for a State Dept contractor and she says shes just barely hanging on. Morale is so low that the only reason people have stopped quitting is because of the pandemic and the subsequent recession. Just under Tillerson, over half of the State's top-ranking career diplomats resigned and many posts still remain vacant or by people who are underqualified. Biden, if he wins, will have to work fast to undo the worst of these changes.