Ahh, I see.

Well, the way I view it is like you have to view everything else nowadays: as a market.

There's deterrence supply and demand. At the moment the American supply of deterrence does not seem to be in alignment with the world's demand for deterrence, thus things are out of equilibrium creating inefficiencies.

On the deterrence supply side there are of course costs of production. Cheapest production cost deterrent products are (in order of increasing cost) finger/jaw-wagging, diplomacy, economic sanction, thermonuclear war. Each of these products demands a price of course which is generally commensurate with the cost of production but can demand on other things too like demand for that product. At the moment for example jaw wagging is really cheap to produce but demand for it is low, so no one's buying.

James.