How America enfeebled Europe

Fighting to “rebalance” NATO, American leaders now look on the old continent with dismay. Europe cannot seem to muster the physical resources — and, still more, the cultural ones — to provide for its own defense. Even American liberals now mark this down to a late social democratic decadence, or civilizational ennui. To a certain kind of Elon Musk outrider, “Europe is cooked,” or, “Europe is a museum.”

The go-to explanation is that America has spoiled these countries rotten for too long. Sheltering under Article 5 of NATO, European nations were able to run down military budgets and use the dividend to pay for generous welfare states. US overspending had allowed Europe to live in a post-historical dreamworld, but reality would have to intervene sooner or later.

But Europeans weren’t pampered out of their fighting spirit. They were compelled to give it up. Throughout the Cold War the Soviet Union and the United States agreed that the age of European military pomp should now end. As early as the Tehran Conference in 1943 Stalin and FDR spoke of detaching India from the British. The United States covertly aided anti-colonial rebels in Algeria, Angola, the Congo and Vietnam; and JFK declared openly for Algerian independence in 1957. In Washington, when anti-communism clashed with general anti-Europeanness the latter almost always won out. In 1956 the United States was perfectly willing to enter into a temporary diplomatic alliance with the USSR to force a British and French climbdown over the Suez Canal, where they had just won a dazzling victory in the field over Nasser. At the height of the Suez crisis Eisenhower threatened to call in all of Britain’s debts and crash sterling — an economic hit that certainly would have outweighed any “NATO dividend.”

The United States could always be counted on to oppose anything that might spur some revival of martial traditions in Europe. It nearly vetoed the British action to retake the Falkland Islands; and the American political classes’ sponsorship of the IRA is well-documented.

The upshot for Europe was that America would no longer permit it to have a foreign policy of its own. Why bother then with big militaries? In the three decades after World War Two there was a real attempt by the European nations to maintain the grandeur of the continent, often through force of arms. In this, they were opposed by Washington at almost every turn — sometimes secretly, mostly openly. If the Europeans then started to give up their martial habits, then this was simply them taking the hint.

As for the “security umbrella,” this was always a strange sort of protection. Just after World War Two Washington, DC could seriously consider something like the Morgenthau Plan — under which German caloric intake would be limited to reduce its population — but less than five years later it was setting up a reconstituted German Army as a sacrificial first line of defense against the Soviets. American plans for a hot war with the USSR took it almost take it for granted that Central Europe would be immediately vaporized as the continent became a giant battlefield (Can you think of anything that would engender a greater sense of cynicism and living-for-today among Europeans — the same attitudes that they’re now chided for?) Under these circumstances it was almost certainly in the self-interest of European nations to come to their own arrangements with the USSR — especially in its sleazier, less ideological post-Stalin mode.

What, then, has Washington really been asking of Europe for all these years? It has demanded that they maintain substantial militaries; but also that they put these militaries at the disposal of the United States — and never use them to pursue their own interests. This is not a tempting offer, and it isn’t a surprise that so few European nations have taken them up on it.