US Military Dominance Is the Backbone of Prosperity

Excerpt

Calls to cash out the Pentagon to fund domestic promises miss a basic point: credible US power is itself a kitchen-table policy. It keeps trade lanes open, market access possible, money cheap, and breakthrough technologies moving into American factories. It gives the United States leverage at the negotiating table, turning security guarantees into bargaining power that opens foreign markets to American companies. When those pillars wobble, grocery bills, mortgage rates, net worth, and payrolls move the wrong way.

Start with trade corridors, the maritime, undersea, orbital, and digital arteries through which goods, energy, data, and payments flow. When those arteries are threatened, costs jump quickly. Rerouted ships mean longer voyages, tighter schedules, and higher war-risk insurance. Those line items don’t stay on spreadsheets; they migrate to the checkout aisle and the small-business cash-flow statement. The inflation pass-through from freight costs is real and lagged: protecting lanes today cushions prices a year from now. The same logic applies to energy chokepoints. Disruptions at narrow straits ripple into US fuel prices and freight rates even when cargoes are bound for other continents. Securing chokepoints is not charity for allies; it is price-stability work for American households.

The cost of money also depends on credibility. Historically, military dominance makes one’s currency dominant. The dollar’s central role in global finance reflects confidence in US power and institutions. Investors pay a safety and liquidity premium for Treasuries, which provides a convenience yield that lowers Washington’s borrowing costs and, by extension, mortgages, auto loans, municipal bonds, and small-business credit. Let that premium erode, through doubts about US power, payment rails, settlement continuity, or cyber resilience, and Americans pay first and monthly.

Then there is technology. Mission-driven budgets pulled the internet’s precursor across the commercialization gap and built the global positioning system that undergirds logistics, agriculture, and finance. Today’s frontier, resilient space systems, secure communications, AI-enabling hardware, advanced materials, and energy storage, will not scale on press releases. It will scale when procurement demands performance, sets technical targets, and places patient orders that make domestic production economical.

Saeed Ghasseminejad is a senior adviser for Iran and financial economics at FDD, specializing in Iran’s economy, financial markets, sanctions, and illicit finance.