I really like the guys at Cato, but this bit of silliness needs rebuttal:

Any country does better defending itself than fighting other people’s wars. Problems arise when invading a foreign country, such as fighting on unfamiliar terrain and dealing with people who speak different languages and have very different values. A foreign country’s actions are hard for the U.S. to predict. Moreover, because
the U.S. is fighting in somebody else’s country, its adversaries know that eventually the troops are going home, and if they hold out long enough, they could prevail.

If a conflict is inevitable - and I’m not saying in any particular case that it is or isn’t - then it is far better for the US to attack people and fight the war on their soil than it is for them to fight it on ours.

The reason the US won both world wars was that the war was fought in Europe - American agriculture and industry were not under direct threat. The North won the civil war because it was mostly fought in the South, and so it was the Confederacy’s infrastructure that was destroyed.

Fighting on unfamiliar terrain, dealing with other languages and unpredictable adversaries is much better than millions of dead American Civilians, a crippled economy and a ravished landscape.

Fight the war Over There