I think that's very true -- and I have great difficulty understanding the 'why.'I'm not even sure it's really all that "nice to have" -- perhaps in a few cases. In most, I think it delusional.I was likely too subtle on my main point:
There's no need for being able to deal with rebels in distant countries.
It's a nice-to-have for foreign policy and a feel-good bonus for the news cycle, but utterly irrelevant as a need for defence policy.True and that gaming is most often expensive and counterproductive, doing more harm than good. It also is distracting from truly necessary defense and foreign policy issues as well as to the domestic polity.Good security policy is isolationist in the framework of a defensive alliance, everything that goes beyond is petty foreign policy gaming. IMO.
Which is probably why the practice exists in spite of its obvious flaws...
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