by all accounts those "other" advanced countries offer a better socioeconomy model for how to organize things. The (recent) US is really an outlier that makes no sense whatsoever.

But there is a weakness in this view, namely the enormous security (and energy) dependency of those "other" countries on the US. It is a coupled system, making it hard to isolate what the standalone merits of the various modelw

Well, we're not going to have double-blind controlled empirical data. However, the other countries are easily wealthy enough to fund their own militaries at this point, without significant economic impact (right after WWII, it was a different story - the US produced half of the world's economic output, IIRC).