by Robert Bridge, Strategic Culture:
For over a century, the United States has had one overarching goal in Europe: ensuring that the continent’s economic and military power was divided among various states by preventing the rise of a European superstate that could usurp that power for itself. Now that that goal has been achieved, will Washington admit it’s time to Europeanize NATO?
In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, the influential voice of the U.S. establishment, Justin Logan and Joshua Shifrinson fire a shot across the bows of Brussels when they repeat the Trump mantra that “it’s time for Washington to Europeanize NATO and give up responsibility for the continent’s security.”
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“The United States should recognize that it has achieved its main goal in Europe,” Logan and Shifrinson write. “Having successfully ensured that no country can dominate the continent, it should embrace a new approach to the region. Under a revised strategy, the United States would reduce its military presence on the continent, Europeanize NATO, and hand principal responsibility for European security back to its rightful owners: the Europeans.”
As half of the U.S. electorate hopes to ‘make America great again’ with the populist Trump, that opinion is quickly going mainstream.
As the soaring U.S. national debt and a souring economy become political hot-button issues in a critical election year, many Americans have come to the conclusion that Uncle Sam has been playing beat cop in Europe for far too long. In the aftermath of the Cold War, European nations made severe cuts to their military expenditures while Washington remained content to pick up the expensive slack. But as the U.S. defense budget nears $1 trillion per year, and millions of invading illegals pouring across the border from Latin America, it is becoming simply unaffordable for the U.S. taxpayer to subsidize the security of Europe any longer. After all, Europe is quite capable of handling the task.
The war in Ukraine is case in point. It boggles the mind that the 27 member states of the European Union, comprised of nearly half a billion people, should require a single American-made rifle in this regional conflict. After all, Europe is comprised of many strong and productive nations with respectable industrial centers. There is no reason why Europeans, who have been scheming about the creation of an ‘EU Army’ since the days of de Gaulle, cannot find the ways and means to handle the conflict for themselves (by comparison, Russia currently produces more than twice the number of artillery shells each month than Europe and the U.S. combined). The primary reason that Brussels has dropped the ball in Ukraine is because they have become spoiled by American largesse and have lost both the ability and the will to look after their own interests. America has been asked once again to fill the void at grave expense to its own national interests.
As JD Vance, the Republican Party’s nominee for the vice presidency, wrote in the pages of the Financial Times, “We owe it to our European partners to be honest: Americans want allies in Europe, not client states, and our generosity in Ukraine is coming to an end. Europeans should regard the conclusion of the war there as an imperative. They must keep rebuilding their industrial and military capabilities.”
It’s important to keep in mind that NATO was never planned as a permanent fixture on the European continent. As Logan and Shifrinson emphasize, the Western military bloc was “expedient to protect Western European states as they recovered from World War II, facilitate Western European efforts to balance Soviet power, and integrate West Germany into a counter-Soviet coalition that would also help civilize German power.”
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