History tends to puff up the reputation of those who lead their nations against military threats. Cutting down on calories is wise and healthy if you're five feet tall and weigh 250 pounds. It is dangerous and self-deluding if you're five feet tall and weigh ninety pounds. Big military spending made sense when there was a big Soviet threat to worry about. It doesn't make sense when the Soviet Union no longer exists.
Fiscal anorexia can be just as dangerous as the physical kind.
The idea that the budget should always be balanced should have gone out of fashion half a century ago. The reason that John Maynard Keynes became famous, and that Herbert Hoover became a discredited one-term President, lies in Keynes's explanation of the circumstances in which unbalanced budgets are good. When the U.S. economy suddenly slowed in 1929, after the great Stock Exchange crash, Herbert Hoover was more concerned about a mounting federal deficit than anything else. Tax and spending rates should be set to balance the budget if everyone is working. No one has challenged the elementary logic of this approach.