The US has spent $1.5 trillion on war since Sept 11 attacks
I see a lot of talk here about what we could have done with the money instead, which is fine. It&#x27;s good to be able to reason about your mistakes and missteps.<p>My question is, now that we&#x27;re here, what do we do now? Pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan seems, irresponsible to say the least. Certainly surrending the whole country of Afghanistan back to the Taliban would be an incredible blemish, and no citizen of another nation would ever risk their lives to help a nation who so callously discarded those who did the same.<p>And certainly abandoning the Kurds in Iraq would be another tragedy, as well as opening up that nation to another horrific power vacuum situation.<p>And that&#x27;s the lower bound of what we could do. We could unilaterally pull out our forces from all over the world, abandoning our commitments to the incredibly succesful NATO and to other allies including Israel, Japan, and S. Korea.<p>I&#x27;m not a big fan of prolonged war. I think Afghanistan was more justified than the incredible shit show that was Iraq. I think the Taliban and Isis and Assad (where the US gets criticized both for not doing enough and doing too much) and Hussein are horrific people and entities.<p>But these articles, while important for highlighting the incredible drain on national treasure we&#x27;ve subjected ourselves to seem to me to avoid very important questions about where to go from here and instead just assign a number to matters of geopolitics which affect billions of lives the world over.<p>Of course, as geopolitics is such an incredibly vast and complicated topic perhaps that is beyond the scope of these stories.<p>Still... where do we go from here?