> there are other actors with geopolitical interests of their own who would cheerfully move in to fill the resulting vacuum
So the argument for perpetual and unwinnable warfare is - if we don't someone else will? You think that's worth the live's of US service members and the inevitable collateral damage inflicted in war zones? I feel like I'm missing part of the picture.
Personally, a better way of combating radical islam has less to do with drones and more to do with education and opportunity.
There are degrees of warfare, and the sort we are conducting at the moment is pretty mild compared to things like carpet-bombing Viet Nam ~50 years ago. I do favor a soft power strategy involving education and opportunity but civic societies are not things that come into being overnight, they can require decades or even centuries to take root. It would help, of course, if we didn't maintain alliances with semi-totalitarian states like Saudi Arabia.
On the other hand, I don't think that peace and enlightened democracy are necessarily the natural state of mankind - I favor Hobbes over Rousseau, and think the latter's glorification of primitive society rather facile, notwithstanding the fact that he meant well.
As hands off as the war is it still costs more than it's worth. The benefit is not only zero, at the end of the day we have more enemies than we started with - along with all the human collateral. Obama could literally have taken that entire operations budget, spent it on hookers and coke, and we'd still be better off.
I'm not sure what the natural state of mankind is, but the increasing flow of information is forcing us to act rationally and remember we have a public reputation that may follow us forever. Accountability is quickly becoming forced on us by the internet and smartphones so it'll be interested to see how this all turns out.
As hands off as the war is it still costs more than it's worth
That's very hard to measure. ISTM that in international relations things tend to either muddle along rather badly with gradual incremental improvements that roughly track economic growth, but when they go bad (ie resulting in war or massive political change) they tend to do so quickly and catastrophically (in the sense of a major discontinuity rather than mere badness, although more often than not it's bad).
And while I share your reservations about the US as a global hyperpower whose policing of international relations can frequently result in backlash (not unlike its internal policing culture...) I'm also inclined to look back at the era prior to the formation of the US and note that when there's no clearly dominant actor on the scene you have endemic peer conflict.
the increasing flow of information is forcing us to act rationally
I'm more pessimistic than you about this. It is easier then ever to make rational decisions thanks to all that information and accumulated insight, and I do think the US is maturing as a society. But there's an argument that irrational political behavior is rationally rewarding for voters who know they have very little influence over the political process and take their vote as an opportunity to express their disgruntlement through perversity. Bryan Caplan has a very good book about this called The Myth of the Rational Voter, if you like economics.
So the argument for perpetual and unwinnable warfare is - if we don't someone else will? You think that's worth the live's of US service members and the inevitable collateral damage inflicted in war zones? I feel like I'm missing part of the picture.
Personally, a better way of combating radical islam has less to do with drones and more to do with education and opportunity.