Since WW-II, the US Navy has protected everyone else's trade, and US military presence abroad does serves as a deterrent. In spite of all the post WW-II conflics, the number of people killed per year in war has declined since roughly 1946. The US global presence is a large part of the reason for this.
This has allowed for the post WW-II global economic growth to happen. At the same time, a large part of the US does not want to get involved in world affairs. In my mind, having a dominating global presence and not wanting to get involved in foreign conflicts is a contradiction that has no simple resolution.
Respectfully, please consider the following Supreme Court clarification about who is qualified to comment about the Constitution.
“3. The Constitution was written to be understood by the voters; its words and phrases were used in their normal and ordinary as distinguished from technical meaning; where the intention is clear, there is no room for construction and no excuse for interpolation or addition.” —United States v. Sprague, 1931.
Regarding Justice Joseph Story's comment about unconstitutional foreign aid, the reason that the Constitution has not be amended to allow foreign aid for friendly nations is that the federal government's constitutinally limited powers are wrongly ignored by corrupt, "follow the money" Congress and state lawmakers imo.
“If the tax be not proposed for the common defence, or general welfare, but for other objects, wholly extraneous, (as for instance, for propagating Mahometanism among the Turks, or giving aids and subsidies to a foreign nation, to build palaces for its kings, or erect monuments to its heroes,) it would be wholly indefensible upon constitutional principles [emphases added].” — Justice Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution 2 (1833).
"In every event, I would rather construe so narrowly as to oblige the nation to amend, and thus declare what powers they would agree to yield, than too broadly, and indeed, so broadly as to enable the executive and the Senate to do things which the Constitution forbids." —Thomas Jefferson: The Anas, 1793.