I see some posts about money, debt, deficits, foreign aid support and NATO membership vs spending, etc.
I can offer some insight to this topic, whatever it's worth, as its not very complicated but rather unintuitive. Ultimately, this isn't the thread for this discussion, but... I'll add something here briefly hopefully to redirect energy toward the topic.
First and foremost, money is debt (but what about coinage! we can talk about coins and barley and salt as well, but for now let's stick with money today).
This means that for every unit of money, such as a digital bank deposit in your account at USAA, has a corresponding debt component. So if you have $1 in your bank account, then someone, somewhere, has a $1 liability the owe to someone as well. This is true for all financial assets. For every contract there is always an asset and liability component, and these two always sum to zero at any given point in time.
When we say that you have $100,000 in your savings account, then I must have $100,000 in liabilities, if we are the only two account holders in this example. Here is an example of a bank holding 100k in loan contracts and the associated bank deposits. You have hoarded, I have borrowed (which created the money), and the bank created that money by writing the entries on its ledger.
When we say that the Fed has X in debt, that means someone else has X in assets, typically Treasury securities. This number is not particularly relevant from the perspective of the US Gov, because it can create any amount of $USD at any time (the Fed just marks up an account holder at a Federal Reserve Bank, and likewise the recipient's bank will mark up their account holder's account [because you and I cannot be account holders at the Fed, we hold a lower tier of money known as commercial bank money]).
The US Gov's budgeting process is about allocating real resources, which are finite, and the $USD they create in order to assign these real resources to different tasks and projects is just a tool to facilitate allocation in a highly decentralized manner. In the periphery, away from direct state purchases, where we all spend most of our time acquiring and exchanging these units of money, we often misunderstand that the purpose of the currency was not and is not peripheral exchange between third parties in the state's unit of account ($USD). The purpose of the currency is to achieve objectives set out by the government.
Back to the question: when the US creates USD in a Federal Reserve Bank, for an account holder like a foreign bank and the recipient then spends those USD in a foreign market, real resources are assigned (if they were unemployed or idle) or re-assigned (lured away from existing employment or projects), and this is not directly related to the US itself--the US Gov is mobilizing real resources in a foreign territory. The US can spend any amount in foreign territories to allocate idle resources, or even 'overspend' if $USD is the predominant exchange currency and intentionally cause [classical monetary] inflation and associated disruption, for example. There is no 'trade off' between spending at home and spending on foreign aid, generally. When we say 'the US should be using that foreign aid at home'... Congress is generally ok with how income and wealth is distributed in the US, and spending more on certain people (say by spending the same amount as a given foreign aid program) would alter the distribution of income and wealth that Congress has rather carefully or clumsily sculpted, which would re-assign resources or employ people that they would prefer be unemployed.
Lastly, because money is debt, and all units are entries on bank ledgers, and the US gov controls the most important ledger (the Fed) which the rest of the world accumulates and holds as financial savings, there is no 'funding constraint' on US gov spending. That is, the US can always write numbers on its bank's ledger. What it can't do, is manifest a specific real resource upon command at a specific time. It must try to create that real resource over time by allocating resources that produce what it actually wants far ahead of time. From this perspective, the 'US National Debt' is not a particularly relevant number. And, if we want to consider this from a stability perspective, where system participants are each eager to be net savers of financial assets (because money is debt) there must be someone or something that holds the corresponding liabilities. Make sense?
