Capitalists and their allies will lie, manipulate, intimidate, and coerce. This battle could span the 1990s. Military bureaucrats and defense-industry defenders will hang on longer than many people think. Ultimately, however, they will lose. Well, the military-industrial diehards will argue that we still need a military deterrence because a new threat might arise and we don't want to reduce our ability to respond.
Space travel is one possible focus.
Building rockets, space stations, and all the accompanying paraphernalia won't improve the lot of society's poor, and it is high-tech and expensive. It would be a desperate PR campaign to convince people that this must be done for the sake of science or adventure. Convincing people that we need to escape a dying planet is too implausible, even for Madison Avenue. After all, the only targets of space colonization are dead planets. Any military expenditure to deal solely with Third World countries runs into the problem that, unlike the arms race with the Soviet Union, there is no way to even claim the other side can keep up.