Ike Was Right!
Empires rise on a strong economy and fall on a weak economy. Empires are built by elites for elites, sucking the blood out of the economy that propels them onto the world stage and enables their fleeting moment in the sun.
The United States is no exception. Washington traded the gold of American manufacturing jobs for the silver of geopolitical power.
Washington elites weren't merely content to practice diplomacy. They grew accustomed to dictating political and military policy in Europe and Asia. They liked waging war and running the world.
To that end, Washington elites excelled at creating a vocabulary to obscure reality and justify their actions. What America's Founders called empire, Washington elites call leadership and saving the world for democracy.
Since Eisenhower's most prescient warning in his farewell speech, the military-industrial complex has swollen to 40% of U.S. manufacturing capacity.
During the Cold War, Washington looked the other way while American commercial manufacturing jobs were lost to free world allies. Washington should have conditioned its defense commitments in Europe and Japan on free markets and fair trade. Successful trade negotiations were more important to the vitality of the U.S. economy, but not in the minds of Washington elites.
U.S. military bases in Europe and Japan put Washington elites in the driver's seat. Because defense commitments were used to dictate foreign policy, allied governments were never called on the carpet for mercantilist trade practices.
When the new world order of globalization arrived, Washington's priorities didn't change. Intoxicated by geopolitics, Washington continued to downplay the threat of economic competition.
Instead of a robust commercial manufacturing sector driving the U.S. economy to a size of $20 trillion in GDP, a hollowed out manufacturing sector has stalled the largest economy in the world at $14 trillion.
Instead of a healthy middle class with rising incomes, a weakened U.S. economy has flattened our middle class with falling incomes.
Since 9/11, "security" spending has almost doubled.
Very little of this $1.2 trillion annual expenditure has anything to do with true national defense. 
Washington runs a global welfare system for Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon and other giant military contractors.
Their sales eat the largest slice of the U.S. budget and account for more than three-quarters of the global arms market.
As American foreign policy militarized, sound bites have replaced reasoned political debate and American culture has coarsened. The gargantuan villas that sprang up around Washington are the outward and visible sign of the national security state.
It is sad to contemplate the missed opportunity at the end of the Cold War. If Washington had shut down NATO and most of its thousand military bases abroad, the country would have been able to begin the process of healing the economic wounds of the Cold War.
The absence of political debate about the real war — the jobs war — made the loss of manufacturing jobs even worse when globalization hit. Rather than rehabilitate the American economy, Washington hid the true meaning of globalization from the American people through repeated military diversions.
Perversely, Washington elites act as if their job depends upon them not understanding the primacy of the U.S. economy.
They tell us our national identity is defined by the monsters they seek to destroy abroad.
They command a permanent government which peddles doses of fear. By increasing our market share in war and terrorism, Washington elites have become an existential threat from within.
Empire impoverishes us. We pay for a security umbrella which relieves our economic competitors of the burden of providing for their own defense. This hurts us not just in the money we spend and the money they don't spend, but it takes Washington's eye off the ball
Each of the 66 empires in the last 3,000 years bankrupted themselves. Will we go the same way?
Washington elites consistently put their own interests ahead of our national interest. By selling American manufacturers out to foreign governments, they mined the gold out of our economy and dumped our middle class.
Without a strong middle class, the American system of government doesn't work. When our political institutions fail, our economy fails. When our economy fails, our politics become impossible.
The world no longer listens to Washington elites. Now it's our turn to do the same.
