John Bolton has just issued a thoughtful statement raising “serious questions … about the national-security implications of the proposed deal to raise the Federal debt ceiling.” Bolton calls attention to the worrisome short-term defense cuts that the deal makes likely, and to the huge medium- and long-term cuts that the deal’s triggering mechanism makes possible. In particular, he suggests that “the logic of the negotiating dynamic will mean that both sides of the Joint Committee will not concede more than they would otherwise get under the sequestration formula. That, in turn, brings us back to $500 billion in defense cuts”—which is a worrisome prospect, to say the least. The full Bolton statement is below.

I’d add one point: Whatever one’s ultimate judgment on the deal, it establishes a terrible precedent in treating defense as a pot of money to be slashed if various spending-control mechanisms don’t work. It will thereby make it more difficult to have a serious discussion of the military spending that’s required for our national security needs. I assume the Republican presidential candidate in 2012 will run on a platform of re-doing this deal when he’s in office to improve it considerably. Part of that improvement needs to be in the area of national defense.