I think the OP probably doesn’t have a problem with actual defense projects, but if you’ve been paying any attention over the last 70 years, you will know that the US has attacked many countries under the guise of “defense”.
You might want to read up on the "Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance". Essentially, "the rest of the Americas".
That mostly works because the set of potential aggressors is small. (Nicaragua and Panama). OK, fine, the US might want to, but they're close enough partners that they don't need to.
I think that might be the crux of what GP was getting at. There's more to it than the ability to win (and in a hopeful dreamy world, I'd wish we can all get to the state where collaboration is always the obvious better choice, but that's obviously at least a few hundred years off... something to strive for, though)
AKA -- free trade. Global free trade exists because the US wants it to. In that sense, it's currently winning/won. The size of the US military and economy (and it's close allies) are largely what enforces that world order.
Personally, I think it's better than the old model of imperialism (it's certainly way less violent and has rapidly increased living standards across the globe). But it's still a case of the big powerful countries enforcing their will on smaller countries.
The past few years have seem drastically reduced US Naval spending, particularly on the protection of commercial shipping (the shipping and military news sites are almost ready to agree that the US Navy has abandoned this part of the mission entirely). Under Obama's administration we balked at protecting the commercial fishing rights of our allies in the Philippines and it's expected that this kind of policy in reaction to Chinese aggression in SEA will continue.
Then COVID hit us and we might actually see a real unravelling or the last 60 years of global economic policy.
This means that we should probably expect more conflict rather than less.
Because of the Monroe Doctrine [1], which has been applied in some form or another for the past couple of hundred years.
I was almost-directly quoting the co-founder of Anduril.