Although I totally agree we shouldn't have spent trillions on war, I have a question about this whole "our country spent on X rather than Y"
Most of the money CIRCULATES in a country. So it's not like it's one shot and done. The money was paid to some people who then spent it back into the economy and it went round and round. So at most we diverted a certain number of hops of a huge amount of money to a thing.
I look at money as sort of wheels with cogs turning at a certain speed. When you launch some new project, it might pick up momentum by having other cogs spin it up. It can even "grow" in market cap depending on whether increased demand for it drives up the prices for it. But that price can also drop to zero later, as new things come out, eliminating vast swaths of "wealth" in a stock or cryptocurrency or whatever.
So back to my question... money isn't just a one-time resource that a country can spend and can never get back. However, from the point of view of a government, they only get so much revenue per year, so it should be said about the US government and not the country as a whole. The government taxes and diverts money to things that individuals would not do on their own. Fiat currencies allow further powers to print money — before WW2 pundits thought that military activities on such scale were simply not possible to be funded with taxes etc.
Everywhere in the world I go, I see the vast majority of people are regular folks who just want to put food on the table and laugh with their family. It’s the governments and media that whips up all this warfare and propaganda and we wind up paying for it, and people on the other side of the world wind up dying as a result. That’s what the tragedy is. The money paid to eg Blackwater mercenaries or the rest of the military industrial complex probably found its way back to the US economy in short order.