What does this mean for Obama? First, it's unlikely he'll pay any political price for the $450 billion in Pentagon cuts over the next decade mandated by Congress as part of the debt-reduction package. The public might not even balk at the additional $500 billion or so in automatic cuts triggered by the failure of the bipartisan budget panel. It's not 2004 anymore, and Democrats can no longer be mau-mau'ed on defense spending the way they have been for so long. I'm not sure, though, that the Obama administration is convinced of this. Gordon Adams, a leading Pentagon number-cruncher with the Stimson Center, says, "The president doesn't think he has political leeway, even though he does."
The fact that a Democratic administration can make deep cuts in defense spending does not, of course, mean it should. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has said that trillion-dollar cuts would have a devastating effect on national security. Three senior administration officials I've spoken to on the subject sided with Panetta -- which makes Romney's claim in the South Carolina debate that Obama favored a trillion-dollar cut a particularly brazen lie. Yet both former Republican Sen. Pete Domenici and current far-right-wing Sen. Tom Coburn have recently issued reports calling for cuts of that magnitude. So has Kori Schake, a certified hawk who served in George W. Bush's White House (and, full disclosure, is also a fellow contributor to Foreign Policy). I find their arguments convincing, and I find it odd for the Obama administration now to be standing to the right of such folk.
Of course "we live in a dangerous world," as hawks always remind us. The fact that Vinyard, the Vietnam vet, and Gregory, the state senator, don't lie awake at night worrying about Beijing's designs on the South China Sea doesn't make China any less threatening. But do we really live in a more dangerous world than we did at the height of the Cold War, when spending never rose above $580 billion in current dollars -- $120 billion less than the budget Obama inherited from Bush? A report from the Center for American Progress states, "President Obama would need to reduce the budget by about 40 percent, or close to $300 billion, to reach the budget levels established by Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Clinton."
This debate will not end with the 2012 election -- no matter who wins. But when an ultraconservative congressman from South Carolina can issue warnings about the military-industrial complex, you know you're in a different place.
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