I spent 6 years in Germany and loved it. Having troops in Europe was essential during the cold war and during the current war on terror is a good place to have troops so we can keep Russia honest and project force wherever needed. I am in favor of the host nation paying us and like the cost plus 50% proposed.

I would like us to become a secondary presence only adding to a foreign countries bases once they have leveraged all of their resources first.

I look at it this way. As a older brother I never just automatically interfered in my younger brothers fights. If it was clear from the onset that he was going to get his ass kicked and did not deserve it then I would end it before it even started. But he knew better than to just assume big brother was going to save his butt and because of this did not bite off more than he could chew.

Some of our current allies are being spoiled brats. They assume that no matter what we will step in and stomp out any fires they start.

Sometimes I feel as if we are Mongo (Blazing Saddles) "Mongo only pawn in game of life" instead of thinking about what we are actually doing when we could be Sheriff Bart.

Depends do those countries want help still, are we invited, or will they pay their own defense budgets; if no what aside from foreign presence of use troops and first strike capability do they intend to offer.
(Not military, just friends and family.)

Following are my (amatuer) thoughts, heavily influenced by the writings of several geo-strategists including Thomas Barnet, Peter Zehain, George Friedman, etc.

My take is both "yes" and "no". We need foreign bases for our own national interests, but far fewer than we have now. I have no idea what that number is.

At present, the purpose of our military is not to secure America from external threats. Nor is it to protect our supply chains and shipping routes.

It is to secure the rest of the world from itself, enabling the rest of the world to trade with itself, regardless of whether it includes or benefits America or not.

As an "island" nation, our national defensive posture is to refuse any other potential rival access to the Atlantic or Pacific. This implies the need for the world's largest navy with overseas bases. Since those giant moats also makes America really hard to land a hostile ship upon (it's been over 200 years since the boot of a hostile soldier has touched our shore), it probably suggests that we need a much smaller military overall than we have now. Much smaller.

Our current military was built to fight a Cold War that ended 30 years ago. My sense is that that world order is unraveling. Atlas is shrugging off the weight of the world. While it is noisy, messy and vulgar under Trump, the general trend was already begun under Obama and will likely continue under whomever is next. The post-WWII order is naturally ending as all eras eventually do.

Will evil, chaos and war fill that vacuum? Probably. So, wars between old rivals with long histories of competing for resources and access to trading routes will probably become the norm again (this is a return to normal, not an exception from it). That almost certainly means war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Wars between China and other Asian countries in the extremely narrow shipping lanes of the South China Sea seem likely (especially since we no longer need our own access to Middle Eastern oil thanks to fracking). Russia will want their Iron Curtain back. Etc.

But, America does not have to go decide the outcome of other people's conflicts (make no mistake, whichever side we assist will win). We can choose to stay out and just deal with whatever the world presents to us from a position of unchallengeable strength.

The post-WWII order is very peculiar in some ways. It is maintained by the one country in the world which needs it the least. The American economy is amazingly undependent upon the global order. Take away the American consumer and the large export-driven economies of the world immediately collapse (think: China, Germany, etc.). Meanwhile, there is an argument that the American economy would continue along just fine without them. We can just go back to producing what we consume ourselves.

Evil loves to move into a vacuum

I'm torn here. I know there are solid reasons to say YES. However, I am really at the point where I want to close our borders and only work on U.S.A issues. How do you help others when your own shit is so messed up?