No Competitiveness impact.

Christopher J. Fettweis, an American political scientist and the Associate Professor of Political Science at Tulane University, “Chapter 1: Unipolarity and the System,” Psychology of a Superpower: Security and Dominance in U.S. Foreign Policy, Columbia University Press, 2018, accessed through Georgetown Libraries

If U.S. power is the only thing holding back the forces of global chaos, then we would expect to see some variation in violence as the relative capabilities of the United States wax and wane. During the 1990s, the United States cut back on defense by about 25 percent, spending $100 billion less in real terms in 1998 than it did in 1990.74 To those believers in the neoconservative version of hegemonic stability, this irresponsible “peace dividend” endangered both national and global security. “No serious analyst of American military capabilities doubts that the defense budget has been cut much too far to meet America’s responsibilities to itself and to world peace,” argued Kristol and Kagan at the time.75 The world grew dramatically more peaceful while the United States cut its forces, however, and it stayed just as peaceful even as spending rebounded after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The incidence and magnitude of global conflict declined while the military budget was cut under President Clinton, kept declining (though more slowly) as the Bush administration ramped it back up, and stayed steady as Obama cut back again. U.S. military spending has varied during the New Peace from a low in constant dollars of less than $400 billion to a high of more than $700 billion, but war does not seem to have noticed.

The same nonrelationship exists between other potential proxy measurements for U.S. power and conflict. No connections exist between warfare and fluctuations in U.S. GDP, or alliance commitments, or forward military presence. Europe experienced very little fighting when there were 300,000 American troops stationed there, for example, and very little after 90 percent of those troops were removed. It is hard to find much correlation between U.S. actions and systemic stability. Nothing the United States actually does seems to matter to the New Peace.