John Bolton has just issued a thoughtful statement raising “serious questions ... about the national-security implications of the proposed deal to raise the Federal debt ceiling.” Bolton calls attention to the worrisome short-term defense cuts that the deal makes likely, and to the huge medium- and long-term cuts that the deal’s triggering mechanism makes possible. In particular, he suggests that “the logic of the negotiating dynamic will mean that both sides of the Joint Committee will not concede more than they would otherwise get under the sequestration formula. That, in turn, brings us back to $500 billion in defense cuts”—which is a worrisome prospect, to say the least. The full Bolton statement is below.
I’d add one point: Whatever one’s ultimate judgment on the deal, it establishes a terrible precedent in treating defense as a pot of money to be slashed if various spending-control mechanisms don't work. It will thereby make it more difficult to have a serious discussion of the military spending that’s required for our national security needs. I assume the Republican presidential candidate in 2012 will run on a platform of re-doing this deal when he's in office to improve it considerably. Part of that improvement needs to be in the area of national defense.
Statement by Ambassador John Bolton, August 1, 2011
Serious questions remain about the national-security implications of the proposed deal to raise the Federal debt ceiling. With Members of Congress essentially being asked to vote immediately to avoid defaulting on the national debt, they are also entitled to immediate and compelling answers to the defense-related questions.
For FY 2012 and 2013, cuts in defense spending remain uncertain, with reductions as much as three percent below last year’s level still possible. Depending on the outcome of further negotiations over the size and allocation of those reductions, these cuts alone may well be quite harmful. The best that can be said is that, for these fiscal years, the issue is still unresolved.
Over the longer term, the outlook is almost certainly much more disturbing. In the deal’s second stage, the yet-to-be-named Congressional Joint Commission will have wide discretion on what to agree on, but if no agreement or only partial agreement is reached, the deal’s sequestration mechanism will be triggered. Broadly speaking, if that happens, defense spending will bear fifty percent of the total cuts, with non-defense spending bearing the remaining fifty percent, up to the amount necessary to raise the debt ceiling by the minimum $2.4 trillion required by the deal. This approach risks grave damage to our national security.
There is no strategic rationale whatsoever for cuts of this magnitude. There is, in fact, every strategic rationale to the contrary. While the appropriations process may still be able to decide which specific programs will be cut, this is no consolation. Cuts of this size are effectively indiscriminate.
Defense spending is not just another wasteful government program. Subjecting it to potentially massive, debilitating cuts is rolling the dice in perilous times internationally. Adam Smith himself wrote in The Wealth of Nations, “the first duty of the sovereign” is “protecting the society from the violence and invasion” of others.
Advocates of the deal place their reliance on the Joint Committee established by the agreement to prevent massive defense cuts. This means that the Republicans selected for membership on this Committee have the future security of this country resting on their shoulders. We can only hope that the leadership chooses representatives who understand the enormity of that responsibility.
Deal supporters argue in the alternative that the trigger mechanism, which would come into play if the Joint Committee could not reach agreement on the second tranche of spending cuts (or tax increases), need not be feared. They rest this assertion on three points.
First, they say, “Even if the committee failed to produce a single dollar in savings, Defense would be on the hook for less than $500 billion over nine years, beginning in 2013.” Unquestionably, however, cuts at this level would be catastrophic. They may not be at the $ 900 billion level of the Reid Plan, but they are debilitating nonetheless. If that is the best argument the deal’s advocates have, we are in deep trouble.
