Yeah, it gets into the whole discussion about the fact that if we don't, China will happily fill that void, and what will be the economic and other repercussions for that.
I'm oversimplifying, but when you look at the British up through the 1940s, and then our filling that void during and after WWII, both the Brits and us were not doing it solely out of some benevolent act of goodness or to prevent future wars (although that was a huge driver obviously for the US after 1945, and we used it to accumulate a lot of forward bases overseas). However, a huge driver of it was to make sure that the markets and resources in other parts of the world were open to our commercial interests. Even when you factor in the Soviets during the Cold War and discuss the political/ideological implications, at the end of the day, you could argue that having a massive Navy (and Air Force) was driven mostly by financial reasoning. We could dress it up and say it was Communism vs Democracy or whatever terms you wanted to use, but we knew that where the Soviets exerted their power, that those were markets and resources that American companies would be locked out of.
And arguably that economic access helped pay for our massive military.
The same holds true now, only with the Chinese. In that aspect, Ukraine and our tariff situation are catalysts - where we pull back, China quietly moves in - they've even made overtures to Europe in terms of the economic aspect.
But that's more for a thread on China. Us pulling back as the arsenal of democracy over the last 4 years is going to be a huge issue going forward - countries will pivot away from us and to Europe and South Korea for their defense needs. Both of those could be threads in the business/finance forum.