The usual Republican suspects continue to make the same unrealistic arguments for military outlays detached from America’s fiscal situation. But reality has an ugly tendency to assert itself at the most inconvenient time. According to the CBO, fiscal reality is coming, and far faster than most Washington policymakers appear to realize.

Better to start preparing for the likely financial tsunami to come. That means adopting a more cautious, realistic and even “humble” foreign policy, as George W. Bush once put it. One that better matches a democratic republic with a limited government dedicated to protecting individual liberty. And one facing greater fiscal challenges than ever before, except perhaps at its birth. A failure to act now might mean a far faster and more destabilizing retrenchment than today’s hawkish foreign-policy establishment could imagine.

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He is the author of Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire.

Image: Flickr / Jason Barron.