How to balance the cost benefit of US unipolarity?
Unipolarity comes with soft power as well as economic benefits.
Huge benefits. However, unipolarity also facilitates sloppiness and/or incompetence.

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/end-superpower-monopoly-can-be-good-america-205590

"It is hard to conceive of now, but a year before the le Carre interview, in 1992, a businessman named Ross Perot briefly had more support in polls than either incumbent President George H.W. Bush or challenger Bill Clinton. Perot ran primarily on alarm
that the national debt had climbed to $4 trillion, or 61 percent of GDP. Today it is $30 trillion—123 percent of GDP.

A large part of the country thought that government spending and debt at the time were unsustainable and risking a national crisis. They were wrong. The size and growth of the U.S. economy and the supremacy of the U.S. dollar created a situation in which
politicians could spend and take on new foreign and domestic obligations with few consequences. When the pool of dollars is enormous, racking up new debt and having the Federal Reserve print new dollars to buy that debt has less of an impact. Whereas
high military spending as late as the Vietnam War era had, among other causes, resulted in inflation, the global pool of dollars had become so large by the late 1990s that deficit spending was less consequential.

Politicians caught on fast. During the Bush administration in the mid-2000s, a colleague complained to me that when he testified about his budget on Capitol Hill, he could not tell the difference between Democrats and Republicans. They all wanted to
spend more.

The benefits to America of this unipolar margin of error were significant. Washington financed the Global War on Terror without requiring any financial sacrifices of the population at large. Instead of a depression after the 2008 financial crisis,
Americans endured a perhaps preferable decade of economic stagnation and even then, saw a significant expansion of the welfare state. The over-financialization of the U.S. economy masked the deep social and economic dislocation being caused by the loss
of manufacturing during those decades—at least until the 2016 election when Donald Trump made it a major issue.

The unipolar margin of error also masked sloppiness in military and foreign affairs. The collapse in Afghanistan last year was only the greatest of a string of disappointments and miscalculations. Washington still allows the wealthy moochers of Europe to
shift their defense burden while imposing unfair tariffs and other trade barriers on America. Successive administrations have recognized the growing military threat from China but have not shifted resources from Europe or Middle East backwaters like
Syria to the Pacific.

However, Washington’s politicians and Federal Reserve officials have finally gone too far. Federal spending increased by more than 50 percent from 2019 to 2021. The Federal Reserve more than doubled its debt holdings when it bought mortgages and
government bonds with newly printed money. The result is inflation higher than it has been in forty years. Compounding this is a spike in energy prices—both domestic and global—caused in the short term by sanctions on Russia and over the longer term
by the globalist elite’s civic religion of climate change alarmism.

Our politicians don’t realize it yet, but they will have to start making hard choices in the coming years. Any additional spending is likely to lead to higher inflation. The end of more than a decade of effectively zero interest rates for governments
means that America’s $30 trillion in debt will be harder to service with interest payments costing much more than those due from the 2.07 percent average rate paid by the Treasury today. The defense budget will have to be cut along with domestic
spending."

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