The cheapest way to win a war is to make it too expensive for anyone especially near peers to fight you, this is how the US won the Cold War. Whilst the US can

The cheapest way to win a war is to make it too expensive for anyone especially near peers to fight you, this is how the US won the Cold War. Whilst the US can maintain a decent defensive posture at a much lower cost the cost of an actual war when it comes (not if) would be far greater than any savings you’ll make along the way. It would also make it far more expensive for the rest of the world to boot, to some extent the US is subsidizing peace or reduction in the intensity of conflicts world wide which is what you do when you are a super power. Soft power comes mainly from having actual power to back it up, either direct or through alliances and if you look at smaller states with a lot of soft power most of them rely on long term cultural ties and alliances with the US. The reality is that the US can fund better healthcare, better public eduction and better public services in general without giving up its military spending its very difficult to for people to understand just how much wealthier the US is as a nation than everyone else. The US on a wider cultural level doesn’t seem to want these things, heck the cost of Medicare and Medicaid alone outstrips per capita the cost of just about every universal health care system even when accounting for the entire population of the US not just for those eligible for it. If the cost of healthcare in the US was similar to that of Germany it could outspend Germany 5 fold per capita whilst granting everyone in the US access to healthcare for what Medicare, Medicaid and the VA health expenditures currently cost.