Across the United States, politicians routinely claim there is no money for universal healthcare, affordable housing, modern infrastructure, debt-free education or social welfare programmes needed to address poverty, unemployment and growing insecurity. Similar arguments justify austerity across much of the world. Yet, when it comes to war, resources seem virtually unlimited. “How will we pay for this?” is a question unheard of when it comes to waging wars or supplying arms to proxies.Since 1945, the US has spent trillions of dollars on building and sustaining a global military order: funding wars, interventions, occupations, overseas bases and weapons systems on an unprecedented scale. Such spending is measured not only in dollars, but also in terms of opportunity cost. Public needs are left unmet at home while societies are shattered abroad through displacement, destruction and a systematic generation of trauma. For Americans, this opportunity cost is immense. However, for several countries on the receiving end of this military power, the damage is impossible to calculate. The recent US and Israeli war on Iran offers a useful starting point for examining this wider history.According to Brown University’s “Cost of War” project, the Iran war had already cost around $29 billion in terms of missiles, bombs and personnel deployed, by May 18, 2026. On top of that, additional energy costs paid by American consumers had reached $40 billion. This massive amount of money could have been spent elsewhere on more beneficial projects, had there been a will to do so from the US state.Although the Iran war is the most unpopular in US history, the question of military spending prompts deliberation on the overall costs of wars waged by the US, since the end of World War II. A permanent war economyThe US has invested trillions of dollars – in inflation-adjusted terms – since the late 1940s in military spending and the maintenance of a global military posture far exceeding any plausible requirements for national defence. From the Korean War stalemate and the catastrophe in Vietnam, through proxy conflicts across Latin America, Africa and Asia, to the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond, the record of human and financial loss is staggering. The “Costs of War” project estimates that post-9/11 conflicts alone cost approximately $8 trillion, when direct operations, veterans’ care, homeland security and interest on borrowed funds are taken into consideration. Broader Cold War-era elevated military outlays push the cumulative figures into the tens of trillions of dollars. World War II, itself, cost roughly $5 trillion, when adjusted to the current rates. Nevertheless, the subsequent architecture of militarised containment and primacy added vastly more to this number. These resources funded not merely battles, but also an entire ecosystem of global warfare, including global bases, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and other alliances, intelligence agencies, weapons industries and the related ideological apparatuses that justified endless military engagement.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.The returns? Selective geopolitical advantages, vast profits for defence contractors and aligned elites and the consolidation of a US-led liberal international order (LIO). The costs, on the other hand, comprised millions of lives lost – primarily in the global south – with American workers and soldiers bearing disproportionate burdens, exacerbated domestic inequality and a long-term hegemonic corrosion. This imbalance raises a pressing question: What if just half these war-related resources had been redirected toward social programmes, healthcare, education, developmental aid and multilateral peace-building?This counterfactual is an interesting as well as instructive way to diagnose the character of American power itself. The authors’ scholarship on the foundations of the American century, including the Iraq war and other occupations, the roles played by Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie foundations, think tanks, universities and transnational elite networks, shows that US hegemony has always been more structural, ideological and economic than purely coercive. Militarism has been a blunt, and often self-defeating, instrument within the larger project of elite-managed global order. Even in a lesser militarised path, American primacy would likely have endured, though possibly in a more sustainable, legitimate and effective form. The actual choice of ‘armed liberalism’ reveals deep-seated classist, racial and imperial assumptions, embedded in the LIO – imperialism under a different name. The real costs: Destruction, profits and blowbackPost-1945, US military engagements were branded as defences of ‘liberty’ against communism and later terrorism, while supposedly promoting ‘democracy’ and free markets. The consequences of these operations tell a different story, one marred by widespread death and destruction to unfairly profit a nefarious corporate order. The US invasion of Korea ended in an armistice in 1953, with millions killed and a divided peninsula and the war is technically continuing without a peace treaty in place. This led to the development of a ‘military industrial complex.’ This very complex fostered and waged the Vietnam war in 1955, ending in a strategic defeat for the US, with about 3 million Indochinese casualties and lasting environmental and generational trauma. The 1991 Gulf War despite appearing successful, sowed the seeds for future conflict. Though post-9/11 military operations achieved initial regime changes, they engendered prolonged occupation, the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), regional destabilisation, extensive refugee crises and chaotic withdrawals. Total direct, violent deaths in post-9/11 zones approach one million, with indirect deaths – due to disease, forced displacement, infrastructure destruction, et cetera – being several times higher. Displacement figures crossed tens of millions. Financially, these wars enriched the military-industrial complex. Private firms received trillions in contracts. Elevated baseline defence spending, often 4-10% of the gross domestic product (GDP) during peak Cold War years and still hundreds of billions annually up till today, diverted resources from domestic needs. American workers, especially those belonging to the working-class and minority communities, supplied the troops while simultaneously absorbing the opportunity costs: underfunded schools, healthcare gaps, infrastructure decay and rising debilitating inequality. War veterans’ long-term health care alone runs into trillions of dollars. Meanwhile, US interventions frequently empowered authoritarian allies and destabilised societies, generating blowback in the form of terrorism, anti-Americanism and empowered rivals like China.This path was not inevitable. It flowed from specific elitist worldviews. Foundational and knowledge networks socialised generations of policymakers to a racialised and hierarchical internationalism, which viewed the US and its allies as ‘civilised trustees’ guiding ‘developing’ countries through managed transitions to a market-oriented modernity. This is Gramscian hegemony: rule authorised by the consent of incorporated elites, backed by massive coercive superiority and a military definition of reality. Furthermore, the LIO’s rules were universal in rhetoric, yet selective and particular in application: open markets for US capital and selective sovereignty for others, with tanks and fighter jets reinforcing the point. Half redirected: A more sustainable hegemony?Imagine roughly half of this spending, coming up to several trillions of dollars over eight decades, channelled instead into domestic social investment and global peaceful development. At home, this kind of investment would have enabled universal or near-universal healthcare expansion decades earlier, along with debt-free public education, robust vocational training, housing programmes and worker-life transitions to mitigate the effects of globalisation – leading to a healthier, more skilled and less polarised populace. Inequality might not have vanished, as elite capture is resilient, but gaps in the healthcare, education and employment sectors could have narrowed significantly. Additionally, a stronger social compact would have bolstered domestic legitimacy for international engagement, in turn reducing the appeal of isolationist or revanchist populism.Internationally, scaled-up ‘Marshall Plan’ equivalents – for Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East – emphasizing infrastructure, public health, education, agricultural modernisation, and technology transfer, could have exponentially accelerated human development. Fewer proxy wars and interventions mean millions of lives spared, less state fragility and reduced refugee crises. Multilateral peace-building, conflict mediation and ‘human security’ initiatives, funded generously and pursued consistently, might have mitigated multiple local conflicts before escalation. Global public goods, including pandemic preparedness and climate adaptation, would have been stronger, serving as reservoirs of goodwill rather than resentment.Geopolitically, although the collapse of the Soviet Union might have still occurred, driven by its internal contradictions, economic and soft-power competition could have ensued in place of a bankrupting armament race. China’s rise, inevitable given its scale and reforms, could have potentially been better integrated into a reformed LIO via joint development projects, reducing sharp containment dynamics. Moreover, a less militarised US would project greater attractiveness as a prosperous, equitable society, modelling successful liberalism rather than endless war. Thus, anti-Americanism would likely have been lower with greater soft power. In this hypothetical scenario, US hegemony persisted but in a significantly transformed manner. The dollar’s reserve status and control over key financial institutions, technological leadership (boosted by civilian research and development), cultural export power and dense elite networks would have maintained primacy. Foundations and think tanks would have redirected energies towards developmental aid with strings, promoting market reforms, elite co-optation and US-favoured governance models. Despite not being neutral altruism, this alternate is a subtler imperialism: ‘ultra-imperialism,’ in a Kautskyian sense updated through Gramsci, where leading capitalist states cooperate under US coordination on shared class interests, while managing global south peripheries through economic leverage and normative influence, instead of occupation.Enduring pillars: Why hegemony survives demilitarisationThis counterfactual illuminates the structural character of American power. Militarism amplified dominance yet often undermined it through overstretch and a loss of legitimacy. Core strengths lie elsewhere:Economic and financial architecture: Post-1945 institutions (International Monetary Fund, World Bank, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the World Trade Organisation) embedded US advantages. Redirecting funds into developmental causes would expand markets and supply chains on favourable terms.Transnational elite networks: As detailed in Foundations of the American Century, philanthropic organisations, universities and policy institutes forged alliances with foreign elites, socialising them into liberal internationalist worldviews. In a peaceful scenario, scholarships, policy institutes, joint ventures and aid programmes would intensify this co-optation, producing more stable and pro-US partners.Ideological and cultural hegemony: The ‘American dream,’ English language, universities and popular culture exert pull. A more socially cohesive US enhances this model’s appeal, making the LIO seem less hypocritical.Adaptive elitism: Finally, power structures reproduce themselves. Even massive social investments face capture by class interests. Racial and civilisational hierarchies – often subliminal – persist in the developmental discourse, framing the global south as perpetual recipients needing guidance.The actual militarised path, by contrast, exposed contradictions such as universal rhetoric clashing with particularist violence and elite gains propagating mass suffering. It accelerated US’ relative decline by empowering rivals, hollowing out domestic capacities and fuelling polarisation.Lessons and persistent realitiesSynthesising both scenarios reveals uncomfortable truths about the LIO. It was never primarily about abstract liberal values and focused on sustaining a class-based, often racialised, hierarchy favourable to US and its allied elites. Wars were weaponised when softer methods faltered, but proved to be frequently counterproductive. The redirected path, conversely, suggests a more humane and efficient hegemony, resulting in fewer deaths, higher global living standards, stronger US legitimacy and better-positioned responses to transnational crises like climate change.Nevertheless, realism tempers hope. Local power struggles, rival nationalisms, corruption in aid and domestic US resistance from vested interests would persist. Hegemony evolves, it rarely dissolves. Deep inequalities and ethno-racial tensions within the LIO remain foundational challenges. Embracing genuine diversity and reducing class polarisation, domestically and globally, is essential for long-term viability. The order’s Eurocentric, elitist DNA resists such transformation.History cannot tell us exactly what a less militarised American century would have looked like. But, it can tell us what the one we witnessed lost. Trillions of dollars, millions of lives, shattered societies and sacrificed opportunities for human development in the pursuit of armed primacy. The most revealing question is, therefore, not whether the US won or lost wars, but whether the world, and America itself, would have been better served had resources been devoted to building rather than destroying. The answer to this question carries profound implications for whatever international order is to come next. Understanding this is the first step towards imagining genuinely progressive alternatives, both within and beyond the existing order.Inderjeet Parmar is a professor of international politics and the associate dean of research, School of Policy and Global Affairs, City St George’s, University of London. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and writes the American Imperium column at The Wire. He is also an International Fellow at the ROADS Initiative think tank, Islamabad, on the board of the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences, USA, and on the advisory board of INCT-INEU, Brazil. He is the author of several books including Foundations of the American Century, and is currently writing a book on the history, politics and crises of the US foreign policy establishment.Bamo Nouri is a visiting lecturer at City St George’s, University of London and an independent investigative journalist and writer with interests in American foreign policy and the international and domestic politics of West Asia. He is the author of Elite Theory and the 2003 Iraq Occupation by the United States.