Quite a few people are talking about Robert Kagan’s apparent inability to understand the difference between an actual cut in defense spending and the refusal to endorse the Pentagon’s entire budget request for the coming fiscal year. Some seem not to notice that Kagan is arguing against an administration position that does not exist. Defense spending, not including appropriations for the wars, is scheduled to go up 8% 2.7% (per CQ’s correction for last year’s budget) for the coming year. This is consistent with Obama’s campaign pledge to increase the Pentagon budget, which was frequently ignored or treated as an empty promise on the right during the campaign. Bizarrely, Kagan was one of the hawks who acknowledged Obama’s interventionist foreign policy views and support for increasing the size of the military, and he even attempts to portray Obama’s defense spending increase as being at odds with his earlier pledges. This last bit is the strangest things of all, because drawing attention to Obama’s campaign statements makes it all the more clear that Kagan is just making things up to repeat all of the standard “we must not lose our resolve” chatter that these types enjoy so much.

I don’t get it. Certainly it would not be difficult for someone who thinks we should be willing to mount an invasion of Pakistan to come up with a similar argument stressing the need for even more vast increases in military spending. That might require Kagan to start talking numbers, and he would be forced to say, “Only $527 billion? That’s chump change–we need at least $1 trillion!” As we all know by now, one trillion is now the bare minimum for any amount of government obligation to be counted as real money. For that matter, Kagan could play the “irresponsible pundit” role he assigns to nameless others and warn breathlessly that unless the U.S. vastly expanded its military and international role that our “decline” would be inevitable. Railing against non-existent budget cuts to mask advocacy for even larger increases is a desperate tactic, and it tells me that interventionists on the right are getting annoyed that they have been unable to paint Obama as “weak” on national security.