What would Ike say now?
General Dwight Eisenhower, NATO’s first Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, was convinced that his mission was to “put the Europeans back on their feet militarily”—not to turn American troops into permanent bodyguards for Brussels and Berlin.
“If in 10 years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States,” he said. wrote about NATO in 1951“Then this whole project will have failed.”
But as leaders of NATO allies gather in Washington on Tuesday for the alliance’s 75th anniversary, some 90,000 U.S. troops are stationed in Germany, Italy, Britain and elsewhere, representing a significant portion of NATO’s strength. 500,000 NATO troops in high readiness.
The outsized U.S. presence is not limited to sending troops. Of the $206 billion in military and non-military aid that countries around the world have provided to Ukraine, $79 billion has come from the United States, the report said. Monitoring support for Ukraine Since around 1960, the United States’ share of allied GDP has averaged about 36 percent, while its share of allied military spending has been over 61 percent, according to a Cato Institute report. The Supreme Allied Commander Europe was never a European.
It is becoming increasingly evident that Europeans need to take on more responsibility in their own defense. It is not just because Donald Trump and an isolationist wing of the Republican Party complain bitterly It’s about defending rich countries that, by the way, can afford social safety nets that America can only dream of because they don’t spend as much on their military. It’s also because American officials are increasingly focused on the challenges posed by China, which will require increasing attention and resources in the years ahead, especially given the growing cooperation between China, Russia, North Korea and Iran.
The United States simply cannot do everything everywhere at once, all by itself. The future requires well-armed and capable allies. The indispensable nation must be a little less indispensable.
Regardless of who wins the U.S. election, European leaders understand that they must contribute more, Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide told me. On his recent trip to Washington, he said Republicans had signaled that Europeans should take more responsibility for the war in Ukraine because the United States has “other fish to fry.”
This is starting to happen, but not as quickly as it should. The NATO summit will no doubt celebrate the fact that 23 NATO members are expected to devote at least 2 percent 100 of their GDP spent on defence, compared to just three members that reached that threshold a decade ago. But it is astonishing that almost a third of NATO’s 32 members still fail to meet this spending target, which was agreed in 2014. If Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Mr. Trump’s not-so-subtle threats against abandon the profiteers I haven’t convinced them to spend more on their own defense, it’s hard to imagine what will.
After all, European reliance on U.S. troops runs counter to what many Europeans and Americans say they want. Majorities of Americans, Britons, French and Germans believe that Europe should be “primarily responsible for its own defense while seeking to preserve the NATO alliance,” according to a report by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). recent survey According to the Institute for Global Affairs, only 7% of Germans and 13% of French respondents believe that the United States should be primarily responsible for Europe’s defense.
Europe’s dependence on the United States is causing growing unease on the continent. Former Finnish President Sauli Niinisto has called for a “more European NATO”, and French President Emmanuel Macron warned that “As strong as our alliance with America is, we are not a priority for her..”
So why does this addiction persist?
Part of the reason is human nature. Why would allies invest in defense if Uncle Sam always pays the bill? But another reason is structural. When NATO was created, the European allies were just emerging from devastating wars that had made them suspicious, even hostile, of one another. Someone had to keep them in check.
This is how the role of the United States in NATO evolved from temporary help to permanent protector. At first, NATO was like a policeman watching over a construction site; the alliance went hand in hand with the Marshall Plan. If the Americans wanted to help rebuild Europe, they had to make sure that Moscow did not steal their investments.
But by the 1960s, it had become clear that American troops were not going anywhere. The Soviet Union had swallowed up much of Eastern Europe, including the eastern part of Germany. So West Germany was essential to stopping the Soviets, but few people in Europe could stomach the idea of a strong German military after what had happened under the Nazi regime. So the Americans stayed behind and protected Germany with their own troops and their nuclear umbrella.
“The current system did not come about because America wanted to become some kind of empire,” Marc Trachtenberg, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has written extensively on the Cold War, told me. “The system came about because American leaders realized in 1961 that there could be no purely European solution to the problem of European security.” Americans, he explained, were stuck in Europe.
Once Washington realized it couldn’t walk away, it made the decisions. “We’re doomed to pay the price of leadership,” McGeorge Bundy, President John F. Kennedy’s national security adviser, said in 1962. “We might as well have some of its benefits.”
This has translated into lucrative defense contracts for American companies, which has become a powerful financial incentive to maintain a strong presence in Europe. This is one reason why Poland is buying American tanks too heavy to cross the Polish bridges and Romania buys fighter jets which are extremely expensive to operate and maintain. THE American military-industrial complex the benefits of addiction. About 63 percent of military equipment purchased by European Union countries in 2022-23 came from the United States.
At the end of the Cold War, Europeans tried to free themselves from American military power. In 1998, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac attempted to create a European security system capable of acting autonomously. But Secretary of State Madeleine Albright nipped the idea in the bud in 1999. a speech which warned against the diminishing role of NATO, the duplication of NATO efforts and discrimination against NATO members that were not part of the European Union.
In 2017, 23 European countries started Permanent Structured Cooperation in Security and Defence work together on concrete projects like cyber defense. This has also sparked a backlash from the Trump administration, which warned against excluding US companies.
It is no wonder that Europe today lacks the capacity to deploy the troops and equipment that NATO needs to defend its members, especially when it comes to specialized units such as air defense, intelligence, and surveillance. John R. Deni, author of New report on NATO’s readinesstold me that NATO planners routinely fail when they ask for contributions of sophisticated systems, in part because many have already been sent to Ukraine. “There’s simply not enough to go around,” he said. “There are still worrying gaps.”
Fortunately, some European leaders are treating this issue with the urgency it deserves. At the summit, NATO allies expected to approve a new defense industrial commitment to increase production of weapons and munitions. But NATO’s procurement plan relies heavily on U.S. arms manufacturers. That conflicts with new European defence industrial strategylaunched by the European Commission in March, which plans to devote half of its military procurement budget to items produced in Europe by 2030. Once again, we need to step up our efforts. It is urgent that the two institutions reach an agreement.
If so, it will be a major step forward for Europe’s ability to contribute to its own defense. In the past, the Americans may have sensed a threat to their authority and sabotaged this effort to build a European defense industry. But today, the Americans, who are also struggling to increase their own defense industrial production, need all the help they can get.
“A stronger Europe means a stronger NATO and ultimately a more equal partnership between the United States and Europe,” said Rachel Rizzo, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center. “You want a relationship of equals. You don’t want a client.”
Europeans are finally mobilizing, as General Eisenhower had dreamed. Let’s not stand in their way.
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