Much of my recent investigations into why it is both corporate and the bureaucracies act the way they do has made me come to a key insight as to why American Foreign policy has taken the course it has up to now, and why it's failure is causing a crisis among the existing elite as we speak.
To summarize, the system that we suffer under in Academia, the Bureaucracy and Corporate is the core reason for this. It is best characterized as "Organized Irresponsibility" in which advancement in power is essentially a single-elimination ass-kissing tournament. These empty suits are incapable of taking real risks and as such only attacked nations they believed were pushovers. To do anything else would be to put promotion at risk. Similarly, this is why the absurd overreaction to a viral outbreak which is quite mild by historical standards has happened. Their operational principle is to avoid being held responsible for anything at all costs.
The fact that they nevertheless failed to defeat these "pushover" nations, and their actual acknowledgement of this via finally withdrawing from the Sandbox is prima facie evidence that there is serious crisis among the ruling elite brewing. Until now, they were following the groupthink "you can't go wrong spending more on the terror war" script that had worked for 20 years. In the meantime their near-peer competitors of Russia and China technologically leapfrogged them with hypersonic guided missiles (for which the pentagon has no equivalent, and likely won't for years).
Now NATO is faced with the options of slinking away with their tails between their legs whilst declaring victory to save face, or finally getting their heads blown off by making good on their perpetual threats. I'll give you one guess what these cowardly empty suits are gonna do.
This will of course be a huge hit to the bluff which is behind American economic hegemony, just as happened in Vietnam when the reality of defeat destroyed Bretton Woods. It is this more than anything else which heralds the return of inflation and hard times for the USA.
