There's no defense for this budget: America's empire has been detailed for years in annual military spending requests. (margin notes).

WATCHING THE AMERICAN IMPERIAL MAP MOVE IN recent months from policy-wonk insinuation to boldly declaimed official policy, many folks may themselves wondering how the U.S. ever got to this unexpected moment in world history. The traumatic events of September 11 certainly altered America's historical trajectory, but there's plenty of evidence that the war on Iraq and the empire-building militarism that apparently will categorize this era of U.S. history were predetermined long before that awful date.

Many of the president's people busily carving out a place in imperial history alongside Spain, Great Britain, and the Aztecs have been dedicated to a vision of a more muscular America for more than a decade. That we've settled onto our ill-fitting imperial throne with little-to-no public debate on the moral and practical implications of empire is only one of the troubling aspects of this new political reality.

Still the new American empire probably wasn't news to everybody. Anyone capable of wading through the phone book known as the federal budget has probably known about the impending empire at least since that political nanosecond of opportunity between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the war on terror. It was on display in page after vision-blurring page of the annual defense budget.

No one who has followed its course over the past decades could have misunderstood where the ever-expanding defense spending was taking the nation. Eisenhower critiqued it; Jimmy Carter couldn't rein it in; the end of the Cold War couldn't stop it; the war on terror has propelled it further.

The United States spent more than the next 20 or so top defense spenders in the world combined last year, and we'll spend still more next year. That kind of commitment and the sacrifice of scarce federal resources it requires indisputably make the U.S. the world's mightiest military power, but it doesn't make the U.S. the world's most moral power or wise power or economically stable power.

The defense budget is the best-fed kid in a hungry house hold. The biggest problem in that house is not that the other kids--education, health care, infrastructure, secure ports and borders--go wanting. No, the real trouble begins when the family has to send this chubby brat out into the street to negotiate with the neighbors. Because so much of the federal budget is bent on defense, the U.S. has few alternative means of protecting its interests on the global commons. When all your tools are tanks and advanced strategic jet fighters at $100 million or more a pop, all your problems are "military."

Next year the federal government will spend a record $400 billion on defense, eviscerating the federal discretionary budget and perilously reducing the government's capacity to confront any number of other socio-economic challenges facing the nation. But the defense budget does more than suck the life out of the federal treasury, it contributes to a profound maldistribution of power in this waning democracy further enriching a small segment of American society represented by large and increasingly powerful corporations. Their executives oversee the defense industry but increasingly they are also assuming a guiding role in U.S. defense and foreign policy.

THIS NEXUS OF POWER INTERESTS WORRIED A LIBERAL WIMP like Dwight Eisenhower so much he got off his deathbed to warn his fellow Americans about it in 1961. In a now famous farewell speech he coined the memorable phrase "military-industrial complex" and noted with some anxiety the "conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry."

"We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes," Eisenhower said. His warning is still relevant, if sadly ignored.

What the world and the U.S. spends on defense has been described as a moral scandal by the pope. It is that, but it is also a political handcuff--a vicious, violent public-policy and diplomatic trap.

Why have we become a country projecting power at the end of a million-dollar Abrams tank barrel? It's the defense budget, stupid. And if we want to change the imperial course of this nation, casting a colder eye on the prerogatives of this bloated sacred cow makes a good place to start.

By KEVIN CLARKE, managing editor of online products at Claretian Publications in Chicago.