Military primacy solves economic growth, prolif, and great-power war.
Brands & Edel, 19 — Hal Brands; PhD, Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Charles Edel; PhD, Senior Fellow and Visiting Scholar at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. (“The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order;” Ch. 5: The Contemporary Amnesia; Published by Yale University Press; //GrRv)
As William Wohlforth has noted, American primacy and activism acted as a powerful deterrent to great-power conflict by creating enormous disincentives for Russia, China, or other actors to incur the “focused enmity” of the United States.11 The persistence and even extension of the U.S. security blanket smothered potential instability in unsettled regions such as Eastern Europe, while removing any possibility of German or Japanese revanchism—a prospect much feared in the early 1990s—by keeping those countries tightly lashed to Washington. American intervention helped extinguish bloody conflicts in the Balkans before they could spread to neighboring countries; U.S. diplomatic and military pressure kept aggressive tyrannies such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea bottled up and helped slow the spread of nuclear weapons. U.S. support helped democratic forces triumph in countries from Haiti to Poland, as the number of democracies rose from 76 in 1990 to 120 in 2000;