It goes without saying that we expect our next president can keep us out of stupid wars.

But while we might not be interested in war, war is sometimes interested in us. And that’s no doubt what South Carolina Senator and Republican presidential candidate Tim Scott was thinking about Friday when he called for an increase in military spending while noting that we need to be able to fight simultaneous wars against China, Russia, and Iran.

Said Scott: “We have to be loyal to our allies and lethal to our adversaries.”

We agree with that soundbite-friendly statement, certainly, but does anyone think we have that three-front warfighting capability right now, with our recruitment woes, and our focus on white supremacy, and our pursuit of social justice via diversity, equity, and inclusion quotas, and with our warfighting materiel supply greatly diminished due to our commitment to supply Ukraine in its ongoing war with Russia?

Of course not.

And, by the way: Just because we seem to have a fondness for exposing our warriors to drag queens doesn’t mean we’re woke — at least not according to outgoing Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley. “How many times [has] it happened?” Milley asked rhetorically during a wide-ranging interview with the woke Washington Post last Wednesday. “It happened a few. That’s true. Probably shouldn’t happen. But it did. But to say that … the entire military went woke because [of] a handful of drag queen shows that shouldn’t happen to begin with I think is an overstatement.”

Indeed, and to say that critics of our military’s poor level of readiness are blaming it all on drag queen shows is an even greater overstatement.

It’s more than just drag queens. It’s also “white colonels” who are the “biggest barriers” to our evolution as a fighting force, according to a woke white Air Force colonel named Benjamin Jonsson, who’s waiting for Joe Biden to make him a brigadier general.

Moving on.

“If we cannot engage in conflict on three different continents at the exact same time, our military isn’t prepared,” said Scott, speaking in Atlanta at The Gathering, a conference hosted by conservative commentator Erick Erickson.

As The Washington Free Beacon reports, Scott, who’s also a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, added that our current commander-in-chief, Joe Biden, has failed to explain our nation’s “vital interest in Ukraine,” which is “degrading the Russian military” at the “very high price of Ukrainian blood,” without putting U.S. soldiers on the ground.

Indeed, we’re still waiting for a good explanation as to why we’ve spent, so far, some $113 billion in Ukraine, which works out to around $900 per American family. And does anyone who’s viewed scenes of the utter devastation in Ukraine believe that we won’t ultimately be on the hook for much more when it comes time to rebuild that wrecked nation?

Speaking of money, another presidential candidate who was there at The Gathering, former VP Mike Pence, pointed out on Friday that our nation is nearly $33 trillion in debt — and that makes military readiness an even greater problem.

Pence didn’t put the two together, but he didn’t need to. Military budgeting has become an annual tug-of-war in recent years, as Republicans push for more military spending while at the same time calling for domestic spending cuts — cuts that naturally don’t go over well with the Democrats.

“I aim to limit the size and scope of the federal government by restoring to the states and to the people what was rightfully theirs,” said Pence. “We have a bloated federal government.”

He’s right about that, of course. But the devil, as always, is in the details.

And to those lawmakers in Washington who value military readiness, we’ll refer to what Joe Biden used to say way back when he actually paid attention to budgets: “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.”