Sometimes it takes a brave man to walk away from a fight but a particularly stupid coward refuses to back down from a fight he’s long since won.
There’s something seriously wrong with having soldiers stationed on foreign bases built by their grandfathers or even great grandfathers.
Everything you say makes sense, especially from the viewpoint of being averse to empire and being offended by the notion of empire. Problem is, we have not won the fight but abandoned it. Our enemies are very much not averse to empire. Winning the fight means stamping out the ideology behind the enemies’ aggression, ultimately. What is really killing the US right now is having leadership in DC with ideology in line with that of our enemies, and said leadership in command of our fighting forces.