Over at Democracy in America, Roger McShane wonders aloud:

But I say the situation may be worse on the left, because if Democrats do not make the case for seriously cutting back military spending, who will?

He is speaking of course, of the so-called “cuts” to spending undertaken by the Obama administration. I put “cuts” in quotes because, well:

The cuts Barack Obama has pushed (outside of sequestration) are meager, despite what you may hear from Republicans. They are cuts to a ten-year plan that assumed annual increases. As Christopher Preble of the Cato Institute notes, “Over the next decade, the Pentagon’s annual base budget (which excludes most war costs) will average $517 billion in constant 2012 dollars, 11 percent higher than what Americans spent during the George W. Bush years.”

Jacques Delacroix seems to believe otherwise. In March of this year, he wrote:

In connection with Pres. Obama’s then-recent speech on cutting the US military budget, Paul also said clearly that those are cuts in increases to military expenditures, not absolute cuts. As one who has been reading the Wall Street Journal for the past thirty years and also for the past thirty days, I tell you that this is not true. I think it sounded good at the time so, the Congressman just said it, irresponsibly.

Dr. Delacroix is a numbers man (that’s how he earned his infamy), but with his track record on foreign policy I’d take his argument with a grain of salt.

At any rate, it’s nice to see the non-interventionists on both the Left and the Right get a shout out from the Economist (a supporter of the Second Gulf War), too:

And while the Republicans at least humour the Ron Paul-wing of their party, the Dennis Kucinich-wing of the Democratic Party has no voice in Charlotte.

Imperialism: the bane of free trade and individual liberty. Is it any wonder that Washington has so many enemies these days?