What makes this so remarkable is that the arguments for a large increase in defense spending are extraordinarily weak.

Those arguments can be divided into two types: The first is that America needs a much bigger military budget because the world has gotten much more dangerous. The second is that America needs a much bigger military budget to make up for the savage cuts of the Obama years.

Start with argument number one. The National Defense Strategy, which the Trump administration issued in January to buttress its call for higher defense spending, declares that, “We are facing increased global disorder … creating a security environment more complex and volatile than any we have experienced in recent memory.” In other words, threats are increasing. But if you look back at previous Pentagon documents you realize that threats are always increasing. The Pentagon’s 2015 National Military Strategy (not to be confused with the National Defense Strategy) begins with then-Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey declaring that, “Today’s global security environment is the most unpredictable I have seen in 40 years of service.” In 2014, the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review (which the National Defense Strategy replaces, confused yet?) warned of “a world that is growing more volatile, more unpredictable, and in some instances more threatening to the United States.” In 2010, the United States faced “a complex and uncertain security landscape in which the pace of change continues to accelerate.” In 2006, it confronted “the increasingly dangerous security challenges of the 21st century.” The world, in other words, is always getting more complicated, more uncertain, more disorderly and more frightening—and the Pentagon always needs more money to deal with it.

But has the world actually become more dangerous in ways that this boost in defense spending will remedy? For the last decade and a half, the threat that worried the Defense Department most was jihadist terrorism. For the last few years, the jihadist terrorist group that worried it most was ISIS. Yet in his State of the Union Address, Donald Trump declared himself “proud to report that the coalition to defeat ISIS has liberated almost 100 percent of the territory once held by these killers.” In other words, the organization that was most frequently blamed in recent years for making the world scarier and scarier has just lost virtually its entire base of operations. Yet the world is getting scarier nonetheless.

As if to preempt this objection, this year’s National Defense Strategy declares that, “Interstate strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security.” But if the United States is no longer as worried about terrorism and yet the world is becoming more dangerous overall because of “strategic competition” with other great powers, then those great powers—China and Russia—must have become a lot more dangerous in a short time.