Reminds me of my own country really — Singapore. Should we still have the draft? Why maintain such huge foreign reserves? Why not dispense some as welfare? Why have a standing army? Why maintain ‘hard points’ in the circuitry even though we are a completely globalized economy?

The answer, I should think, is that we want to be a combination of cruise ship and aircraft carrier. This means some redundancy in the system. Rather than free-ride on the United States (which everyone does to some degree), we have a standing army. Rather than leave economic defence to the vagaries of international markets or whatever the IMF says to do, we have some form of bulwark against which to ride out the tempest, etc. ‘Integration’ may not be so bad if you have a secondary line of defence. I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive: your metaphor only goes so far.