But in making this argument, Biden left a larger question unanswered: what are we to do about the immense global military machine that remains very much in place? As intent as Biden is on bringing the so-called forever wars to an end, the reality is that he and others skeptical of U.S. intervention abroad need to look not at particular conflicts, but at America’s massive military apparatus. Thus far, such criticism has been confined to the periphery of national security debates. But Biden may have laid the foundation for a more fundamental rethinking of the enormous, and largely unquestioned, amount of resources America expends in the name of national security.

The United States has a military budget of some $700 billion a year, supported by a web of multibillion-dollar procurement contracts that turn members of Congress into enthusiastic lobbyists for weapons that do not work and drain the treasury. We have 800 bases in dozens of nations around the world. Our spending, on armed conflicts and more generally on preserving this empire, staggers the imagination. Biden did not mention this in his speech, but the combined cost of the Afghanistan and Iraq engagements would more than fund his $3.5 trillion spending proposal. Critics of his domestic plans deplore that amount, but it’s only a fraction of what we have in fact spent not on child care, free community college, universal pre-K and better care for older people, but on a pair of largely futile conflicts — one bogged down for years in stalemate, another irreparably tainted by the false pretenses under which it began.