Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard blog takes aim at this Glenn Greenwald post lamenting the fact that the U.S. spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined. In his post, Goldfarb protests that Greenwald is using a figure for Chinese defense spending that is too low and criticizes those “who act like they understand military spending but find themselves flummoxed over terms like ‘purchasing power parity.’ ”

Thankfully for all of us, Goldfarb called Globalsecurity.org’s John Pike, who was able to inform him that attempting to ascertain the exact level of Chinese military spending is a “fiendishly complex problem…[that] approaches not even being a meaningful question.”

I say thankfully, because Goldfarb must have come to his senses since he last took a crack at Chinese military spending. That time he consulted with the Heritage Foundation’s John Tkacik, who has been touting his argument that China’s military spending is roughly equivalent to U.S. defense spending. For reasons I’ve laid out in detail before here, this is not a serious argument. It’s not clear why Goldfarb has chosen to jettison Tkacik’s figure in favor of Mr. Pike’s caution, but it’s a welcome development. Still, it would be good to know whether Mr. Goldfarb now thinks he was mistaken to tout the absurd figure last March.

Then Goldfarb takes it on himself to declare that those who advocate a lower defense budget “just don’t understand the issues. And they shouldn’t pretend to.” One might say the same thing about basically everybody who wrote for the Weekly Standard about Iraq before the war, but that would be uncharitable. But the larger point is that Goldfarb’s statement isn’t even true, unless he thinks he can write, say, Richard Betts out of the debate.

Even if one accepts Goldfarb’s criticism of Greenwald’s figure for China’s defense expenditures, it doesn’t affect the finding that the U.S. spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined. Unless Goldfarb then wants to repair to Tkacik’s argument about the Chinese defense budget, which I don’t imagine he wants to. Either way, it’s odd to see someone waving his hands and advising that we be cautious with figures of Chinese defense spending when he chose to tout the most outlandish figure out there just several months back…