In an hour-long screed to reporters, Secretary of State John Kerry railed against polls showing opposition to aggressive US military intervention abroad, dubbing it a “new isolation.”

“We are beginning to behave like a poor nation,” Kerry said of Americans’ unwillingness to support ever-larger, ever more calamitous wars the world over. He vowed that the US wouldn’t retreat anywhere in the world.

The US spends more on its military than nearly the whole rest of the world combined, and throws billions of dollars in military aid at other nations, subsidizing their own wars. Yet budget concerns have slowed the rate of growth of this spending in recent years, inconveniencing Kerry’s plans to start new wars.

Kerry insisted Americans “do not perceive the connection between US engagement abroad and the US economy, their own jobs and wider US interests.”

Indeed, most Americans have begun to notice that runaway deficit spending to pay for “US engagement abroad” has been a major drag on the economy in recent years, and that America’s checkered history of military conquest has not netted any decisive victories in decades, let alone any major economic boons.

Secretary Kerry was at the lead of an attempt to lie the American public into a war with Syria late last year, and after being rebuffed by overwhelming public opposition, has remained resentful about the prospect that the administration might conceivably not be able to launch whatever wars it wants whenever it wants.