Servii said:
Maybe it’s realistic to real-life politics that the Republic made that mistake, but I’ve never bought the idea that Star Wars was a realistic political allegory. Besides Andor.
Probably not so realistic in most cases. After the USSR collapsed, the US military just continued to expand indefinitely. (Although the number of stockpiled nukes decreased.) I actually don’t know of historical examples of intentional large-scale demilitarization (apart from cases where a country is forced to do so, e.g. Japan after WW2).
Although, real world comparisons perhaps don’t work so well because in Star Wars there’s usually just one single Galactic superpower that controls almost everything (except for some nebulous “unknown regions”), rather than multiple nation states.