This clarifies something that’s been increasingly obvious for a while: The interests of right-wing tax cutters and right-wing defense hawks do not necessarily align with one another, and they will almost certainly diverge further as we go deeper into the looming age of austerity. There is simply no scenario in which the United States will close its yawning deficits exclusively with cuts to popular social programs: One can imagine such a world only by imagining the Democratic Party and all its various constituencies out of existence entirely. Conservatives will be free to argue that both tax hikes and defense cuts should be off limits, but in political reality at least one of the two will have to give. (It’s true, as John Podhoretz suggests, that even many Democratic politicians don’t really want to raise taxes or cut defense spending — but then again many Republican politicians don’t really want to cut Medicare or Social Security! Yet the numbers are the numbers …)

At the moment, the hawks are at a clear disadvantage in this debate. From Rand Paul to Grover Norquist, there’s a broad constituency within the conservative movement for shrinking the national security state, either as a compromise necessary to keep domestic spending low or as an end unto itself. But there’s no mirror-image constituency among hawks for raising tax revenue for the sake of maintaining the Pax Americana. I’m pretty sure that Bill Kristol or Charles Krauthammer would vastly prefer, say, capping the home mortgage tax deduction or closing the carried-interest loophole for hedge funds to making “massive cuts in the defense budget.” (And I bet that the great neoconservative hope, Marco Rubio, would as well.) Yet the Weekly Standard took the same line on the debt ceiling negotiations that other conservative outlets did: No revenue increases, no grand bargain, etc.