Why Indeed?

At 1945 Doug Bandow asks a very good question: why is the United States paying for Europe’s defense?

If there is one positive to come out of Russia’s terrible attack on Ukraine, it is Europe’s recognition that it should do more than play-act when it comes to defense. Yet despite plenty of promising rhetoric from political leaders across the continent, the European public shows little interest in ending their cheap ride on the U.S. And the Biden administration seems determined to increase the burden on American taxpayers and military personnel.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s dramatic announcement – called a Zeitenwende, or “watershed moment” – that his government would up military outlays was supposed to represent a continental shift toward defense maturity and seriousness. However, since then Berlin has shown less than full enthusiasm in fulfilling its commitment.

The Wall Street Journal worried: “Hitting the 2% goal would mean annual defense spending of some €75 billion in the next fiscal year, but Mr. Scholz’s government has submitted a budget accounting for only €50 billion, roughly the same amount as before the ‘turning point.’ The plan seems to be to top up annual spending by including one-quarter of the special procurement budget.” Yet the latter will run out naturally, could be cut if the political winds change, and might leave the Bundeswehr short on manpower and maintenance funding.

The Scholz government also has resisted provisioning Kyiv with heavy weapons. Even more significant, plans to station German troops in Lithuania, which would demonstrate a willingness to defend the latter, have gone by the wayside. Reported the Financial Times: “Germany has proposed basing most of the 3,500 extra troops it plans to contribute to NATO forces on its own soil rather than in Lithuania, significantly softening its initial backing for more foreign forces to be stationed in the Baltics to deter any potential Russian aggression.”

Note that most of Germany in particular’s support for Ukraine to date has been rhetorical or, as I have put it, they write a heckuva good press release. Might they begin to live up to the promises, stated and implied, that they’ve made? They might. They might not. We’ll see. Also note that so far our European allies have done precisely what I have predicted, their pledges notwithstanding.

Back when NATO was formed its mission was famously declared to be to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and to keep Germany down. In the 72 years since then quite a bit has changed. The Soviet Union is no more and we abandoned the objective of keeping Germany down 30 years ago, mistakenly in my view. The economies of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and our other NATO allies are no longer supine. Nonetheless our posture towards Europe continues to be the same as when we were the only member of NATO with a functioning economy, the Soviet Union existed, and we were still worried about the Germans.

We need to decide where our national interests lie and commit to pursuing them. Our European allies will keep accepting support as long as we’re feckless enough to offer it at little or no cost to them. The alternatives we have are:

• We can insist that the Europeans bear the cost of their own defense in full and then some.
• We can continue to bear a disproportionate amount of the cost of maintaining Europe’s defense (the GDP’s of the U. S. and the EU are roughly the same; we spend about three times as much on defense as they do).
• We can raise our taxes to cover the cost of that spending or
• We can cut spending on social programs to be able to support that much.

At present despite the vast amounts we are spending on defense we aren’t spending enough to defend ourselves, our European allies, and our Asian allies. I think the Europeans ought to be defending themselves at this point and that the German horse has already fled the barn and it’s too late to restore the status quo ante.