“What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about,” Madeleine Albright asked General Colin Powell in the 1990s, “if we can’t use it?”

Albright, then the US ambassador to the United Nations, was frustrated by Powell’s insistence that the United States only use military force when its vital interests were threatened. The US, she seemed to suggest, had to deploy the military for its own sake.

Two decades later, the US military is more overstretched than ever. It has close to eight hundred bases in more than seventy countries. It’s been in Afghanistan for sixteen years with little to show for it, and will probably be there for at least another three for little more reason than inertia. It’s drone bombing several countries, even though members of the military, including high-ranking officials, openly acknowledge that such strikes perpetuate the very terrorism they’re trying to eliminate.