While your right on most of the generalities, lets be fair. The U.S. destroyed itself with the so called "peace dividend" after the cold war. We destroyed our military by major downsizing (and of course the idiots that decided that Air Power alone would suffice) of our military and bases.
We can not begin to sustain more than a half-war now, much less the two war front we are now attempting. I place the blame and lack of foresight on those in power 20 years ago.
We could still fight the current dual wars if the public and the idiot Congress decided to, but that is way too much to hope for.
The current state of affairs leaves us in a very vulnerable position for the future. Other minor powers in the world see this are and advancing rapidly. The future looks bleak!
We could have won using "air power alone", if we were really willing to use airpower!
But really using airpower means using it to shatter the economic infrastructure of the company, making all combat operations (or government, or nutrition...) impossible. Airpower alone, continued, would have shattered Japan and Germany completely. It would have left both nations homeless, industryless and without food or supplies. Sustained, both countries would have collapsed, and there would have been about 100 million dead. You can totally destroy any nation from the air, if you drop enough bombs relentlessly enough and destroy EVERYTHING.
But that's the problem, isn't it? Airpower alone can work so long as you're willing to use conventional bombing like slow nuclear weapons, and target civilian populations and the infrastructures that allow urban survival, and intentionally destroy millions and millions of people. Any nation can be brought to its knees our outright wiped out by that strategy. You can do it in a night with nukes, or you can do it in five years with unending full-scale bombing of everything and everyone, and artillery fire at the borders.
Airpower alone can win, but it requires the willingness to commit indiscriminate genocide. Destroying trucks and bases will do nothing. You have to destroy the PEOPLE, as many as possible, and you do that by destroying their water systems, food supplies, housing, roads, electricity, hospitals, and every other standing thing.
That's the only way to win with airpower alone.
Americans have no spine for any of that.
It's too brutal.
It's illegal.
It's horriffic.
And it takes quite a long time.
Fallujah could have been reduced without a battle. Surround it, bomb it flat, and let every single human being in it perish from hunger and thirst. It would take a year or two, but casualty rates would have been 100% (provided your cordon is tight enough).
That's the trouble.
You CAN win with airpower alone, but you have to be willing to be Nazis and use genocide as your strategy. We're not.
You're right about the peace dividend.
I wouldn't have used it as you suggested, though.
When the USSR fell apart, the USA had a golden opportunity not to bolster the empire, but to dismantle it. Entangling alliances put the US at risk and cost a fortune. The only reason we really needed them was to face off against a world-threat ideology. That didn't exist anymore. Asia and Europe are both capable of providing 100% of their own defense: their economies are as large or larger than ours!
It was time to return to the pre-World War I US domestic focus. Bring the forces home, deploy what you need for border security, and largely disband the rest. We could be a reserve force for NATO, to the extent NATO is even still necessary, but in no sense whatever should we be expected to be the defense for Japan or for Europe. The EU economy is larger than ours. They should bear 100% of the cost of defending themselves. Japan's economy is second only to ours, and they can have a nuclear deterrent to China within a half-year. Taiwan is very advanced and could have a nuclear arsenal bigger than Israel's in a short time.
We should not be bearing ANY of the burden to defend these wealthy countries. They should be spending the money and burdening their economies with their own defense. The USSR is gone, and there is no country that has taken its place. We should be out of the business of defending the world, and should have had no military forces deployed West of Guam or east of Maine. Our foreign aid should have been invested in building up the Americas, specifically Mexico. Take the billions a year we pour into Israel and put it into Mexico, and the immigration tidal wave would have ended a long time ago.
At the end of World War II, we were something like 60% of the world economy, and were faced off against enemy powers who had something like 30% the rest.
Today, we're only 20% of the world economy, and declining. We cannot afford to try to be the source of defense for the world, and it is not our responsibility anyway. We should be linking the whole Western Hemisphere into a prosperous economic unit, and leave Asia to the Asians and Europe to the Europeans. If the oil resources of the Americas were bought and transported withing the Americas, we would not need to ship oil from the Middle East here.
It would have been a very different world.
But old habits die hard. Look how much money the French spend on keeping troops in places like Rwanda. Why bother?