The Daily Beast’s Peter Beinart makes a great point that the UK is leading the way on fiscal austerity, and in the process making American conservatives look like blowhards by comparison:

“The contrast with our supposed deficit-haters in the GOP could not be starker. Cameron started attacking his country’s budget problem within weeks of taking office. Republicans held the White House for eight years and did exactly the opposite. Tea Party types are quick to say it’s not just Barack Obama’s deficit spending that bothers them; they were outraged, outraged by the Bush deficits too. Really?”

As a matter of fact, the British cuts are so impressively deep that Paul Krugman, earthly emissary of John Maynard Keynes, seems to believe they’ll cause Japan-style deflation and put the British economy back in 1937 (his words, not mine).

Beinart, like many on the Left, particularly commends the British for cutting defense, the sacredest of sacred cows on the American budget. The Brits will be scaling back defense spending by 8 percent, will reduce personnel by 10 percent, scrap 40 percent of their already meager stock of tanks and artillery, and decommission the oldest of their three aircraft carriers. (Though if this video tells us anything, it’s that NATO won’t really be missing the once-mighty Royal Navy):

Krugman's famous alarmism is wrong, but Beinart also misses the mark in criticizing Americans for shying away from defense cuts. As a country which spends 4% of its GDP per year compared to Britain's 2%, it might be easy to say that we have some scaling back to do of our own. This completely ignores the cruel reality that Britain, like most other developed democracies, actually relies upon American security guarantees for a good part of its strategic planning. So unless the West and its allies are prepared to begin making major security concessions to nascent powers like China, then we have to assume that there is a fixed financial burden which they must collectively bear to make the world safe for capitalism. Britain's cuts will have to be made up for elsewhere.

History tells us that either the United States will fill the gap or nobody will. States from Poland to Japan have been free-riding on America's umbrella since the end of the Cold War, and some since the end of World War II. The British have actually been better about this than most, maintaining the world's second-foremost navy and sizeable nuclear forces to supplement the American behemoth. Most European states simply lack the political will to maintain large armed forces like the United States, something they haven't been forced to do for decades. Re-establishing that will is going to be very difficult now that entire generations of Europeans have grown up taking their American umbrella for granted, but it needs to happen. It's absolutely true that America should be spending less on defense that we do. But rather than simply ceding ground (or more likely, water) to the Chinese, we ought to pressure friendlier states like Germany and Japan to assume a greater share of the responsibility and to bring their level of spending relative to GDP more in line with our own. There is absolutely no reason why an American draw-down should endanger our interests overseas.