Back in 2011, Obama assumed that the Republicans would not allow the sequester to go ahead because of its $55 billion projected cut in the defence budget — a staggering 8 per cent of total Pentagon spending. Yet Friday March 1 dawned and it went ahead nonetheless.

America is therefore slicing into a defence budget that has already been savagely cut by this administration, at precisely the same time that China has announced an annual increase of 10.7 per cent in its defence spending for 2013. Even the news that the sequester will mean that the United States will no longer have an aircraft carrier on both sides of the Straits of Hormuz — able to keep the waterway open regardless of Iranian provocations or even attack — has not persuaded the politicians in Washington to compromise.

 Small wonder that key countries in East Asia are now viewing the US as a waning power and China as a rising one. Indeed, with much of the money that America is spending on its federal programmes being borrowed from China in any case, any other conclusion would be bizarre.

The thing that makes the sequester so absurd is that even with it going into full effect, the federal budget for 2013 will still be $15 billion higher than in 2012 (and 10 per cent higher than it was when George W. Bush was president). So the arguments between the House Speaker, the Republican John Boehner, and President Obama over where the sequester cuts should fall are taking place against a background of inexorably rising public spending anyhow. Yet still Obama is effectively arguing that without his 2.5 cents on the taxpayer's dollar, there'll be a measles epidemic among children, condemned meat sold on supermarket shelves, al-Qaeda bombs on aircraft and murderers freed to terrorise the streets. The White House press secretary Jay Carney hasn't yet stated whether the sequester might also unleash plagues of locusts and scourges of scorpions, but it's early days yet.