President Obama’s outlook on foreign and defense policy isn’t conventional. If it were, he’d be exerting himself against the sequestration cuts ravaging the defense budget.

Modeled on the game of chicken (a lá James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause”), sequestration was invented in the 2011 Budget Control Act as a mechanism for crude, large budget cuts, half of which hit the Department of Defense. The law makes the cuts automatic and annual, unless Republicans and Democrats enact responsible deficit-reduction laws.

It was widely assumed that enough officials of both parties would view sequestration as the political equivalent of driving one’s car over a cliff, and, to head it off, would swerve toward common ground. This was game theory gone wrong, however. It failed to produce mutual compromise, largely because President Obama appears not to see sequestration as a disaster. In fact, he may consider it an accomplishment...

Read the full article at the Hudson Institute: A Radical View of Defense Budget Cuts