Neocons can’t have it 2 ways: cuts vs. war

For a neocon, fiscal restraint stops at the water’s edge.

There are several coherent ways to think about federal spending and foreign policy right now. You can address America’s fiscal crisis by calling for serious cuts both at home and abroad. That’s the libertarian path. You can deny that we’re facing a serious fiscal crisis at all. That’s what the pro-war, pro-bailout liberal hawks have been doing. And you can deny we face a serious fiscal crisis but join in the libertarians’ other arguments against the wars. That’s the liberal doves’ approach.

What you can’t coherently claim is that we need to both (a) bring our financial house in order or face fiscal ruin and (b) embark on one expensive open-ended military adventure after another.

Yet conservatives in the Kristol mold don’t seem to see a contradiction here at all.