No this isn’t about the Obama Administration’s use of the military as a giant social experiment including its current efforts to purge Christians from the ranks. Part of Obama’s agenda of Fundamental Transformation is he insistence that the United States should be just a nation among nations. Not a leader, certainly not any better or special than any other.

To that end, Obama shrank the military.

News last month of the U.S. Army’s decision to cut 40,000 active-duty soldiers, shrinking to 450,000 by 2017, drew fusillades inside the Beltway. Sen. John McCain assailed “another dangerous consequence of budget-driven strategy.” Adam Smith, ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, fumed: “Sequestration and the Budget Control Act, which are responsible for slashing the defense budget, exist because the Republican Party held our economy hostage and threatened to default on our loans.”

These sound bites might bewilder Americans unfamiliar with the details of sequestration. […]

To start at the beginning: In 2011 Democrats controlled the White House and Senate, but Republicans promising fiscal restraint had swept the 2010 elections and controlled the House. That set up an inevitable confrontation, which culminated in the summer of 2011.

The federal government was on track to blow through its debt ceiling—the maximum amount of borrowing permitted by law—in early August. The White House needed Congress to raise the limit. Republicans demanded spending cuts in exchange. It is true, then, that the Budget Control Act of 2011 resulted from Republicans’ use of the debt ceiling as a bargaining chip.

Democrats, however, had used the same tactic with the debt ceiling in 2006. Further, sequestration—compulsory spending caps that would take effect if the two sides failed to agree on an alternative plan to reduce the deficit—was first proposed by the Obama White House.

The allocation of half the sequestration cuts to defense, at a time when it accounted for only about 20% of spending, was also President Obama’s handiwork. In his memoir “Duty,” then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates writes that in spring 2011 the president promised that military cuts would amount to perhaps one dollar for every $10 of domestic cuts. But in subsequent negotiations, Mr. Obama stipulated that half of the $1.2 trillion in sequestration cuts come from defense. […]

Throughout 2012 congressional hawks repeatedly offered legislation to do so. Mr. Obama promised to veto such legislation unless it included tax increases. Republicans said the supercommittee was charged only with identifying spending cuts, and hence it was disingenuous to hold a compromise hostage to new taxes.

Then came the “fiscal cliff.” The sequester cuts were scheduled to take effect on Jan. 2, 2013, right after the Dec. 31 expiration of tax cuts first enacted under President George W. Bush. Lawmakers feared this one-two punch could send the economy into recession. Urgent negotiations began anew.

In December the president proposed eliminating sequestration and keeping the Bush tax cuts for the lower and middle class but raising taxes on the wealthy to the tune of $680 billion over 10 years. In the final fiscal cliff deal enacted at the beginning of January, Republicans agreed to tax increases of $620 billion, close to what the president wanted. The sequester was delayed by two months, ostensibly to give negotiators more time.

Then in February 2013 as the new deadline approached, Mr. Obama floated a plan to eliminate the sequester that included another $680 billion in tax increases—a demand no Republican would consider. On March 1 across-the-board spending cuts went into effect.

Though President Obama denounced sequestration, his actions suggest that at the very least he was comfortable with its gutting of the defense budget.

Mission Accomplished.