The Europe We Defend

At Foreign Affairs Max Bergmann and Sophia Besch underscore a point I’ve been making:

Instead of galvanizing efforts to address deep structural problems in European defense, the war has only reinforced them. European forces are in worse shape than previously thought, and weapons stockpiles have necessarily been depleted to support Ukraine. As Europe seeks to rearm, it is finding that its defense industries aren’t fit for purpose. Efforts to coordinate European procurements are not working, with countries all going their own separate ways, adding to the general dysfunction. The United States has demonstrated its indispensability to European security and confirmed Europe’s dependence on Washington. European leaders have seemingly accepted this as the natural state of affairs, with many declaring the pursuit of European “strategic autonomy” dead and turning their backs on cooperation with other EU countries. The momentum in favor of reform and change that had built up over the last decade appears to have vanished.

Although proposals exist for addressing these problems, none offer the kind of sweeping initiative that would be necessary to fix them. In short, a broken status quo prevails.

The major European economies have not fulfilled their commitments. Their advocates here say, “Well, it takes time”. The authors continue:

The war has revealed the appalling state of European defense. Europe has underinvested in its armed forces for the past 20 years, and what little funding it did commit was focused on building forces for humanitarian, counterinsurgency, and counterterrorism missions far from the continent, such as in Afghanistan. European militaries thus lack the basics needed for conventional warfare in their own backyards. Most countries lack basic ammunition stockpiles. The German armed forces, for instance, only have stocks of ammunition for a few hours or days of combat. Tank fleets across Europe have atrophied both in numbers and readiness. Germany has 300 Leopard 2 tanks on paper, but only 130 are operational. And it is not just Germany: Spain also has more than 300 Leopard tanks, but one-third of them are no longer active and are largely in disrepair. Europeans lack sufficient quantities of artillery and are therefore heavily depleting their forces to support Ukraine. France, for instance, has sent more than one-third of its howitzers to Ukraine, while Denmark has sent practically all of its artillery. Although European states, to great acclaim, committed themselves earlier this year to sending Leopard tanks to Ukraine, it is unclear how long it will take to make them combat-ready.

What they don’t mention is that part of the reason that Europe is as defenseless as it is is that both we and the Europeans like it that way. We don’t have to worry about being threated by German armies and the Germans can spend the money they could spend on their military on other things—the Germans are much stricter on fiscal matters than we are.

source: tradingeconomics.com
I have long thought that was a feckless strategy on our part but that’s what we’ve been doing. I would think that we would give the Europeans a choice: defend themselves or pay us to defend them. For some reason or other we don’t do that.