Mark Steyn Has Some Choice Words ("Wicked," "Delusional") for U.S. Military Cuts

This is from his conversation yesterday with Hugh Hewitt:

HH:...Today, the President announced that the condition, the first condition that allows for that upward mobility in American prosperity, the American military, which defends sea lanes and allows prosperity, they are tandem. I know you’ve argued you lose your military when you lose your economy. But he’s not waiting to lose the economy, Mark Steyn. He’s going to cut tens of thousands of active duty uniformed personnel, billions more from an already skinnied-down Defense budget. It’s, I have talked today with Congressman Buck McKeon of California, who’s chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Congressman Rob Wittman, sub-committee chairman of the Armed Services Committee. It’s an outrageous assault on the American Defense posture.

MS: That’s true, but as you indicated at the beginning, in a certain sense, it’s inevitable. You can have big government at home, or you can have an assertive national defense that can project force to any corner of the planet abroad. But you can’t have both. I mean, if you look at the United Kingdom between the 1950s and the 1990s, in a sense, social spending and Defense spending sort of more or less inverted. This is, by the way, where I disagree with Ron Paul. When Ron Paul romanticizes the 19^th Century isolationist republic of the founders’ vision, he forgets that there was a global order at make on the planet then. It was called the Royal Navy. And America benefited from the fact that the Royal Navy patrolled the oceans.

HH: Yup.

MS: It was, there is no one to succeed to America’s role as America succeeded to Britain’s role. And it simply, and what I think is dangerous about this is that both on the left and the right, there are people who think that the books can be balanced on the backs of the military. And in fact, if you abolish the entire Pentagon, it doesn’t actually, it’s barely the size of the most recent debt ceiling increase requested by Obama. So it’s not going to do it. You can actually get rid of the whole Pentagon, sell off every aircraft carrier, sell the nukes to North Korea and Iran, and Sudan, and anyone else who wants them, and it still won’t solve the fiscal crisis, the fiscal abyss into which America has lower itself into.

HH: Because that is a Medicare and Social Security and Medicaid-driven abyss. That’s all…

MS: That’s right. And in fact, I mean, where I agree with, I mean, for example, by about mid-decade, U.S. taxpayers, just in the interest on the debt, are going to be covering the entire cost of the Chinese military. No nation can afford to pay both for its own military and its principal rivals. And that’s why although I think that there are certainly savings to be made in the military budget, and I certainly think an awful lot of money is wasted in the military budget, the idea of using the military as an excuse not to go after the big social spending, I think, is wicked, and delusional, both from the left and the right.