For more than half a century, U.S. leadership of the international system has been justified, in part, by claims of a positive relationship between global stability and domestic prosperity. However, there has been no empirical proof of this relationship, leading some prominent voices to question the value of today's U.S. overseas security commitments. The U.S. Air Force asked the RAND Corporation to determine the extent, if any, to which the United States derives economic benefits from its overseas security commitments. Researchers estimated that U.S. economic losses from major retrenchments of U.S. overseas security commitments would be more than triple any gains, even using conservative assumptions. This visualization allows for comparisons among different estimated "gains" and "losses" from selected retrenchment levels and selected tax, spending, and trade multipliers. The data presented in this tool are drawn from the main report, Estimating the Value of Overseas Security Commitments.
Estimating the Value of Overseas Security Commitments
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