Recently, Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA) — who had a 96 percent rating from the American Conservative Union in 2009 — sat down with Fox 5 Atlanta to talk about the upcoming election and a variety of policy issues, including his view that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans should be extended.

At one point, Fox 5′s Paul Yates asked the senator about legislation he’s pushing that would “dramatically reduce the federal budget deficit in coming years.” Yates asked Isakson which “government programs would have to be cut to make that proposal work.” Isakson responded that “there’s not a government program that shouldn’t be under scrutiny. And that begins with the Department of Defense and goes all the way through:”

YATES: You’re pushing legislation that would dramatically reduce the federal budget deficit in coming years. Which government programs would have to be cut to make that proposal work?

ISAKSON: Well first of all there’s not a government program that shouldn’t be under scrutiny. And that begins with the Department of Defense and goes all the way through. We need to be asking the American government to do what the American people have been forced do, which is sit around the kitchen table, prioritize their expenses based on income, and balance their budget.

Watch it:

Isakson’s words are laudable. After all, the United States currently spends more money on defense than the rest of the world combined, and defense spending composes a majority of non-discretionary spending. It would be difficult to imagine reining in the federal budget deficit without looking first at one of its largest sources.

Yet it should be noted that Isakson’s actions up to this point have not matched this rhetoric. When the Pentagon requested to Congress to phase out the F-22 program — meaning even the Department of Defense didn’t want to build additional fighters — Isakson fought the request. The senator defended the unneeded aircraft on the floor of the U.S. Senate and all over the media.

Unfortunately, many in Isakson’s party have failed to also grasp the need to rein in defense spending. In their much-touted “Pledge To America,” Republicans say they plan to end the nation’s “crushing debt.” Yet they explicitly exempt the Department of Defense from any spending cuts, and even promise to “fully fund missle defense” — conservatives’ long-sought pipe dream program that would use domestic missiles to intercept incoming ones, which has never proven workable.

But if Isakson or any of his congressional colleagues are really serious about including the Pentagon’s budget in a deficit-reduction effort, they can look to The Sustainable Defense Task (SDTF) report released earlier this year. Assembled by Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) and consisting of the nation’s leading defense and budget experts, the SDTF identified nearly $1 trillion in waste that can be cut from the defense budget over the next ten years simply by eliminating outdated Cold War-era programs.

When it comes to slashing the UK’s budget, David Cameron has had no qualms of sticking it to the poor. He has been praised by conservatives for his dogmatic embrace of austerity and his decisiveness in slashing government programs, no matter the human toll. Yet when it comes to cutting defense spending, Cameron’s dithering.

At issue is whether to replace and modernize Britain’s aging Trident submarine based nuclear deterrent. The problem is replacing the Trident submarine with four new ones is obscenely expensive. The UK plans to cut defense spending by 10-20 percent over the next five years, which means replacing the Trident will require taking money from the British Navy and ground forces which, just like US forces, have been ground down by a decade at war. In essence, the choice could not be starker – Cameron has to choose between a vanity weapon system or maintaining a credible British military.

However, just as Cameron’s decision-making on domestic spending has revealed his inner old-school Tory, his dithering on the Trident has similarly exposed his attachment to an entirely outdated Tory vision of national security and of Britain’s place in the world. Recall that Cameron during the campaign vigorously attacked the Liberal Democrats party candidate Nick Clegg, who is now Cameron’s Deputy Prime Minister, for calling for eliminating the Trident.

The Trident is the definition of a vanity weapon system. Its only national security purpose is to maintain the semblance of British global prestige. Claims that the Trident is needed to deter aggression by giving the UK a second strike capability belie the fact that there are no adversaries for which this deterrent is needed. And while the panic-stricken over at the Heritage Foundation may say the future is unknown, adversaries are looking everywhere – Iran! – the fact that the UK is both in the European Union and in NATO, not to mention its close relationship with the US, essentially gives it this same deterrent. Should the UK be annihilated by a nuclear first strike, the fate of that country that attacked it would be sealed, as NATO and the US would respond. In other words, the UK even without the Trident would still possess the psychological impact of a second strike nuclear deterrent even if it didn’t possess actually possess this capability. Furthermore, phasing out the Trident would not eliminate the UK’s nuclear weapons. It would still possess a strong deterrent and be considered a nuclear power.

So even if there weren’t any budgetary pressures there would be a strong case for eliminating the Trident. But there are budgetary pressures. And even if you think the Trident is a valuable system, the question is whether it is more valuable than possessing a credible British military. Pursuing a new Trident could require eliminating about 25 percent of the British army, while passing on it could enable the British to maintain the current size of their ground forces. As Colin Powell noted nuclear weapons are now militarily “useless,” since in the real world, possessing 25,000 deployable troops is much more of a deterrent than any Trident system.

This is also an issue that should deeply concern the Obama administration, as the gutting of the armed forces of its closest ally to pay for a vanity system could severely impact the special relationship. While the special relationship is based on more than just the UK’s military competency, the fact is that a Britain that both decreases its ability to project power, as well as becomes increasingly estranged from the European Union, will result over the long run in a hollowing out the “special relationship,” turning it into little more than a photo-op.

I was only partly kidding when I tweeted the other day that the point of the Iraq surge was to enable editorials like this howler from National Review:

Obama came into office determined to declare the Iraq War over and come home. We engaged in a mad rush to go from 100,000 to 50,000 troops, which drastically decreased our leverage; at the same time we had a passive ambassador on the ground who was content to let events drift. Lately Joe Biden has been more involved, but our impatience for the Iraqis to finally form a government may have overwhelmed considerations about its composition. There are obviously limits to our control of Iraqi politics, but we should be using every possible instrument of persuasion to forestall the creation of a government that could be the predicate for renewed ethnic conflict.

The sacrifice of American troops during the surge bequeathed to President Obama a winnable war in Iraq. At this rate, we’ll read in the next Woodward book all the details of how he let it slip away.

The implication here is that the Obama administration has failed to sufficiently interfere in Iraqi politics to produce an outcome that accords with American preferences, but it’s unclear what “instruments of persuasion” the editors are talking about. It’s an article of faith on the right that “more troops equals more leverage,” but it’s important to remember that even at the height of the surge, when the U.S. had over 150,000 troops in Iraq, we couldn’t get the Iraqi government to do what we wanted. Now, as then, Iraq’s politicians are behaving according to political realities as they perceive them, and we tend to vastly overestimate the extent to which we can shape those realities.

One of those realities, as we’ve seen in the last few days, is that anti-American Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr remains a powerful player in Iraq’s politics, with Nuri al-Maliki and Ayad Allawi discussing the formation of a government in which they’d both be relatively weaker and in Sadr’s debt. As I wrote in 2008, Sadr and his movement represent the Iraqi reality America confronted, one far different than the illusion we’d created for ourselves going in. Obviously, empowering anti-American Islamist groups is not an ideal outcome, but if we’re actually serious about promoting democracy in the Middle East, it’s something about which U.S. policymakers are going to have to start thinking far more creatively.

But that’s all beside the real point of the editorial, which is to pretend that Iraq was in great shape thanks thanks to President Bush’s brave decision to surge troops there, only to be screwed up by that anti-war hippie, President Obama. While the surge clearly failed to achieve its political goals in Iraq, it did achieve its political goals to a more impressive degree here in the U.S., which was to rescue the reputations of the war’s supporters and enable them to make these sorts of arguments with a straight face.