Hey, Conservatives: You Want Defense Cuts

So let’s get this straight: If Congress can’t agree on another $1.5 trillion in budget cuts, half the cuts will automatically come out of defense spending? “If so, let the guillotine fall,” declares Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post. This is the kind of thing “serious conservatives” should want, he says—after all, the Pentagon’s budget has climbed for an unprecedented 13 straight years, and now “contains tons of evidence of liberalism run amok that they usually decry.”

“We spend more on defense than the planet’s remaining countries put together,” Zakaria observes, and there’s “so much waste that no one bothers to defend it anymore.” Military marching band members outnumber the entire US Foreign Service. One former Reagan official has estimated that we could slice $1 trillion from defense spending over the next 10-12 years without harming national security. And we should. The current glut has produced “a warped American foreign policy,” Zakaria writes, ready to fight before it talks.