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Across the United States, politicians routinely claim there is no money for universal healthcare, affordable housing, modern infrastructure, debt-free education or social welfare programmes needed to address poverty, unemployment and growing insecurity. Similar arguments justify austerity across much of the world. Yet, when it comes to war, resources seem virtually unlimited. “How will we pay for this?” is a question unheard of when it comes to waging wars or supplying arms to proxies.

Since 1945, the US has spent trillions of dollars on building and sustaining a global military order: funding wars, interventions, occupations, overseas bases and weapons systems on an unprecedented scale. Such spending is measured not only in dollars, but also in terms of opportunity cost. Public needs are left unmet at home while societies are shattered abroad through displacement, destruction and a systematic generation of trauma. For Americans, this opportunity cost is immense. However, for several countries on the receiving end of this military power, the damage is impossible to calculate. 

The recent US and Israeli war on Iran offers a useful starting point for examining this wider history.

According to Brown University’s “Cost of War” project, the Iran war had already cost around $29 billion in terms of missiles, bombs and personnel deployed, by May 18, 2026. On top of that, additional energy costs paid by American consumers had reached $40 billion. This massive amount of money could have been spent elsewhere on more beneficial projects, had there been a will to do so from the US state.

Although the Iran war is the most unpopular in US history, the question of military spending prompts deliberation on the overall costs of wars waged by the US, since the end of World War II. 

A permanent war economy

The US has invested trillions of dollars – in inflation-adjusted terms – since the late 1940s in military spending and the maintenance of a global military posture far exceeding any plausible requirements for national defence. From the Korean War stalemate and the catastrophe in Vietnam, through proxy conflicts across Latin America, Africa and Asia, to the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond, the record of human and financial loss is staggering. 

The “Costs of War” project estimates that post-9/11 conflicts alone cost approximately $8 trillion, when direct operations, veterans’ care, homeland security and interest on borrowed funds are taken into consideration. Broader Cold War-era elevated military outlays push the cumulative figures into the tens of trillions of dollars. 

World War II, itself, cost roughly $5 trillion, when adjusted to the current rates. Nevertheless, the subsequent architecture of militarised containment and primacy added vastly more to this number.  These resources funded not merely battles, but also an entire ecosystem of global warfare, including global bases, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and other alliances, intelligence agencies, weapons industries and the related ideological apparatuses that justified endless military engagement.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

The returns? Selective geopolitical advantages, vast profits for defence contractors and aligned elites and the consolidation of a US-led liberal international order (LIO). The costs, on the other hand, comprised millions of lives lost – primarily in the global south – with American workers and soldiers bearing disproportionate burdens, exacerbated domestic inequality and a long-term hegemonic corrosion. This imbalance raises a pressing question: What if just half these war-related resources had been redirected toward social programmes, healthcare, education, developmental aid and multilateral peace-building?

This counterfactual is an interesting as well as........

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