Might the old war hawk be forced to end some wars?

Erudite Partner has published a retrospective look at the United States' "war on terror" and our still extant forever wars. You can find it at Moyers on Democracy.

With a new administration coming in, we face, again, the question of whether we, and the peoples of the world, will get more of the same from an imperial, militarized, waning superpower. When she is writing these surveys, I often remind her that we had a president --Barack Obama-- whose life experience outside the bubble might have prepared him to attempt to let a bellicose country down gently. But the inertia of great power overcame any instincts he might have had in that direction.

 EP ponders the next phase:

On January 20, 2021, Joe Biden will become the president of a country that spends as much on its armed forces, by some counts, as the next 10 countries combined. He’ll inherit responsibility for a nation with a military presence in 150 countries and special-operations deployments in 22 African nations alone. He’ll be left to oversee the still-unfinished, deeply unsuccessful, never-ending war on terror in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia and, as publicly reported by the Department of Defense, 187,000 troops stationed outside the United States.

Nothing in Joe Biden’s history suggests that he or any of the people he’s already appointed to his national security team have the slightest inclination to destabilize that Democratic-Republican imperial pact. But empires are not sustained by inclination alone. They don’t last forever. They overextend themselves. They rot from within. ...

Those of us who never wanted these wars still have work to do. There's not much of a popular peace movement these days, but Win without War does a respectable job of afflicting Congress in the interests of less wars.