Europe is like a 29 year old with a graduate degree in sociology but no job. It has the skills and the ability to support itself, but it insists on working in its chosen field and refuses to take a job as a paralegal. This strategy only works as long as daddy is paying the bills.
If daddy pulls the plug all at once, Europe might have to move in with a sketchy boyfriend. We love Europe too much for that! But if daddy never pulls the plug, Europe will keep doing what it wants to do rather than learning support itself. Supporting oneself is rarely as fun as cultivated leisure.
The US should announce a three or five year time frame for leaving NATO. Europe will keep under investing in defense as long as it has US security guarantees.
You had me up until the end where you seemed to suggest complete withdrawal from Europe. A smaller footprint makes a lot of sense with rich European countries picking up the slack in personnel and technology. However I think we would always need at small but meaningful contribution, including probably our nuclear deterrent, and a seat at the table. Otherwise my bet is it loses coherence fast in the face of various inter-European squabbles.
My impression was always that the reason that the US has been reasonably easy-going as regards offering wide-ranging security guarantees to EU countries despite their poor military spending and integration is that strategically it was a brilliant way to prevent the emergence of a whole bunch of near-peer competitors. Again, the EU is *big*, especially economically. From the fall of the USSR until the recent rise of China, the core, original EU block (Germany, France, Italy, Benelux) was the only geopolitical entity that could (if it wanted to) generate a military capability that was a peer to the US. There's enough spare GDP, enough manufacturing, enough technical knowhow and enough population there to do the job, especially if, as you say, they can take along a few others (e.g. Spain, UK, Poland) with them. But they're lazy, so in return for a relatively cheap security American security guarantees they didn't even think about doing such a thing. (I would argue that the Germans upping their defense spending by $110bn in a couple of days demonstrates just how much latent financial/military capacity was there). And that meant that America maintained its cherished, and useful, 'overwhelming military number 1' position
Now as a European I think we made a terrible mistake going along with the above policy. It was lazy, cowardly and stupid, and has left us at the mercy of Donald Trump 2024, in combination with Putin. And from America's point of view the costs of this policy in terms of the metal needed to deter Russia, are going up. And now that China is becoming a near-peer competitor anyway, the chance of being indisputably number 1 are shrinking. So from both sides there's a need for change.
Come on Matt, there was a real dog that didn't bark in your essay. Not once did I see the words "nuclear weapons". It is Russia's vast nuclear arsenal and ability to use it to threaten the United States (and Europe) that makes caring about them a matter of national interest. Impossible to discuss the US's involvement in European defense without considering that. The only way for Europe to truly take up the cause of their own defense is to have France take the US's place as a credible nuclear threat to Russia. Could France "win" (or rather credibly make both sides lose) a nuclear war with Russia "on its own"? I have no idea, but that's what this pivots around, not the number of tanks or organization of troops.
“This just underscores the extent to which Obama was right all along.”
Correct me if I’m wrong but in 2012 wasn’t Obama arguing Al-Qaeda was the biggest geopolitical threat? I don’t recall anyone pre-Trump publicly describing China that way.
You make good points as usual, but I think you overstate US agency regarding Europe. National defense strategies executed by European countries reflect each country's autonomous decisions, and the US plays only a minor role. IMHO Europe has demonstrated a long and appalling disregard for the threats posed by Russia. Fortunately, this has (at least temporarily) reversed dramatically over the past week; let's hope the lesson remains.
I also think you here under-state the importance of "democratic values" as an abstract idea worth fighting for per se, though I agree with what I take as your main points (that viewing the world exclusively through the lens of "democracy good, autocracy bad" leads to problems, and that the primary long-term strategic concern of the US should be China, not Russia)
The US's role in Europe could be reduced to two main things, but could not be eliminated entirely without a lot of risk.
1. The US operates the only single-nation military on the scale of size and sophistication comparable to the future European military, so it can provide guidance on the sorts of things that the Europeans will need and act as a sort of honest broker between the European national interests (so it can say "yes, you will need big transport aircraft and AWACS and JSTARS, but no, you don't B-52s"). If the US is going to assume that the vast majority of European equipment will be built in Europe (after all, the vast majority of US equipment is built in the US), then it should be relatively easy to ensure that there isn't a rotating door between the US military and European defence contractors, and that means you have actual neutral experts available in procurement and planning.
2. The US can provide a strategic nuclear deterrent without needing European nations to build one (yes, the UK and France are nuclear powers, but they have minimal deterrents). This will mean that some US forces need to be located on the front line to reassure everyone that the US commitment to nuclear deterrence in Europe is real.
In the end, all of the small European nations are always going to want to have some infantry for ceremonial and peacekeeping duties, but there really is no reason that non-frontline states couldn't be mostly naval (an obvious role for Portugal and the Netherlands, which have strong naval traditions) or mostly focus on their air force, or any of a dozen other specialised roles.
The bigger states are going to want to have some ability for independent action - both Britain (Falklands, Sierra Leone) and France (several in Francophone Africa, for instance) have done operations in living memory where they were wholly or largely alone, and the ability to operate without needing assistance from allies is one that neither would give up. But Belgium has no meaningful independent military capacity, so why not have a few infantry that you can contribute to a UN peacekeeping operation, and then have the rest of your military budget spent on one specific role that is only meaningful as part of a larger European military?
“…because American support is truly needed in Korea and Japan and Australia and the Western Hemisphere while it’s dispensable in Europe.”
Is it though? This seems like a very weird time to make that argument.
American security guarantees in Europe work _because_ they don’t require the creation of a coordinated transnational army that’s actually capable of fighting, and because we have nuclear parity (and thus MAD) with Russia. Unless the plan includes a nuclear Germany (!) and Spain (?!) and scaling up France’s deterrent and Britain’s Trident fleet (with what money?) _and _ creating a credible trans-EU military command structure, I think the most likely outcome of pulling back American commitments here is Putin pissing himself laughing followed by immediately invading the Baltics.
In a world where we’ve actually managed to fix our relationship with Russia somehow (this probably requires Putin dying of old age)… maybe? But I’m not seeing how this works any time in the next 30 years.
And then we come to the _other_ issue, which is that a Europe where the major states all field competent and autonomous militaries is a situation we have a great deal of experience with, historically speaking. The record here is… how shall we say… not inspiring?
Seems like more discussion should have been given to the nuclear capabilities of Russia vs the EU countries. Which would've folded into the specialization point, as France is the only member that has a full Nuclear force.
I also think we're giving a bit too much easy credit to the deterrent part of the nuclear deterrent. The deterrent works by inciting fear in the potential enemy, but of course that can backfire and escalate into panic if intentions are misunderstood, which leads to the nightmare scenario of one side or the other launching to prevent the other side going first.
Matt and the other commentators seem to be talking about our nuclear umbrella as some kind of cost-free favor for the EU. But the small, but hard to quantify risk of something going very, very wrong means it's anything but costless.
I'll add two things: the Russians continue to upgrade and modernize their nuclear forces, while orientating them into more of a "war-fighting" posture and less of a strictly deterrent posture. Meanwhile our minutemen ICBMS are from 1969 and behind schedule for upgrades. And in general all our plans and responses for nuclear war seem to believe that our deterrent is sufficient and so we plan as if it can't really happen, and I'm not sure if the Russians are on the same page with that, or not. We used to put much more emphasis on a survivable chain of command, preparing the populace, and just prioritizing nuclear forces within the military in general.
Also the risks here fall the more the Russians seem to be rational and rise when they seem to be less rational. I'll leave it at that.
To respond to China's new status as a peer competitor we need to work more closely with democratic India, not retreat to a good-neighbor policy of focusing on democratic Latin America.
This is why Matt's comment the other day about "owning Cuba" was so odd. Does anyone really think that should be a priority for US foreign policy?
Ike was complaining about the Europeans not spending enough on their own defense. Somethings never change.
Why would they when they have Uncle Sucker to do it for them?
It also gives the Europeans something to cluck their tongues about because they can be First World countries without having to shoulder a lot of the responsibility so they can say, "tsk...tsk..." to the US all the time.
This glorification of Mitt Romney is getting out of hand. The man was perfectly willing to work with Trump when it suited him, and only turned against him when he didn't get a job in his administration. He refused to release his tax returns, and almost certainly cheated on his taxes. We can give him credit for not behaving as badly as some other Republicans, but that's a low bar. I expect better from someone who has had every possible advantage in life, who claims to serve his country while raking in ridiculous amounts of money through the destruction of American companies.
I'm interested to know the specific trade-offs between U.S. involvement in Europe and U.S. involvement in Asia. Is the former actually preventing the latter?
"Russia’s spending goes up with the PPP adjustment, but the PPP concept is only partially applicable to defense issues. For personnel spending, the fact that a dollar goes further in Russia than in Germany is a big deal. But for defense hardware, the market rates matter more"
This is a nitpick, but Russia has a mostly domestic arms industry, right? So wouldn't PPP be more relevant than market rates here? To my understanding Russia is building most of its weapon systems locally and not purchasing them from other countries.
On the topic of the defense-industrial complex- I think one of the quieter issues is that a future European military would be building some of its own weapons in Europe, which would lead to less sales for Boeing, Lockheed Martin, etc. So this is why the US defense industry has lobbied behind the scenes against a European Army
Before the shooting started, a good negotiated outcome would have been the US out of NATO. It's a makework program for American arms manufacturers and has not contributed to American safety in the post-Cold War. Indeed, just the opposite, as this war shows. During the Cold War, there was a credible threat of MAD for the NATO countries. Now there is no credible threat of MAD if Putin, say, hacks the Latvian election. So what exactly is the point? If we want to fight a war for Poland, we can do it without a poorly conceived treaty obligation. We have no treaty obligation to Taiwan and yet there is some semi-credible threat there, so China has avoided an invasion. That's the outcome we want!
This was a frustration of mine during the Trump years. He was mad at NATO because the Europeans weren't paying their share or whatever, but the point was that he should have been exploring ways to amicably dissolve the whole thing. Unfortunately, he's grossly incompetent so even when he was the hint of a good idea, there's no possibility of execution.
Matt doesn't really make the threat argument here in any coherent manner. I think right now it's closer between Russia and China than Matt makes out.
Sure China is larger and long term seems like a more plausible competitor, but the Putin regimes aggressiveness in the last 8 years, in which the Ukraine invasion is only the current capstone, is quite in another category, and needs to count their hybrid war conduct as well.
Even Matt's mumbled call for withdrawal from NATO wouldn't be enough to pull us out of Putin's sites unless we move to a position of true neutrality in regards to Russian attempts to expand their dominance westward and undermine liberal democracy in Europe.
I assume there's a subtext in this to stave off nuclear proliferation in Japan and South Korea, but if so it's worth actually stating.
Europe is like a 29 year old with a graduate degree in sociology but no job. It has the skills and the ability to support itself, but it insists on working in its chosen field and refuses to take a job as a paralegal. This strategy only works as long as daddy is paying the bills.
If daddy pulls the plug all at once, Europe might have to move in with a sketchy boyfriend. We love Europe too much for that! But if daddy never pulls the plug, Europe will keep doing what it wants to do rather than learning support itself. Supporting oneself is rarely as fun as cultivated leisure.
The US should announce a three or five year time frame for leaving NATO. Europe will keep under investing in defense as long as it has US security guarantees.
You had me up until the end where you seemed to suggest complete withdrawal from Europe. A smaller footprint makes a lot of sense with rich European countries picking up the slack in personnel and technology. However I think we would always need at small but meaningful contribution, including probably our nuclear deterrent, and a seat at the table. Otherwise my bet is it loses coherence fast in the face of various inter-European squabbles.
My impression was always that the reason that the US has been reasonably easy-going as regards offering wide-ranging security guarantees to EU countries despite their poor military spending and integration is that strategically it was a brilliant way to prevent the emergence of a whole bunch of near-peer competitors. Again, the EU is *big*, especially economically. From the fall of the USSR until the recent rise of China, the core, original EU block (Germany, France, Italy, Benelux) was the only geopolitical entity that could (if it wanted to) generate a military capability that was a peer to the US. There's enough spare GDP, enough manufacturing, enough technical knowhow and enough population there to do the job, especially if, as you say, they can take along a few others (e.g. Spain, UK, Poland) with them. But they're lazy, so in return for a relatively cheap security American security guarantees they didn't even think about doing such a thing. (I would argue that the Germans upping their defense spending by $110bn in a couple of days demonstrates just how much latent financial/military capacity was there). And that meant that America maintained its cherished, and useful, 'overwhelming military number 1' position
Now as a European I think we made a terrible mistake going along with the above policy. It was lazy, cowardly and stupid, and has left us at the mercy of Donald Trump 2024, in combination with Putin. And from America's point of view the costs of this policy in terms of the metal needed to deter Russia, are going up. And now that China is becoming a near-peer competitor anyway, the chance of being indisputably number 1 are shrinking. So from both sides there's a need for change.
Come on Matt, there was a real dog that didn't bark in your essay. Not once did I see the words "nuclear weapons". It is Russia's vast nuclear arsenal and ability to use it to threaten the United States (and Europe) that makes caring about them a matter of national interest. Impossible to discuss the US's involvement in European defense without considering that. The only way for Europe to truly take up the cause of their own defense is to have France take the US's place as a credible nuclear threat to Russia. Could France "win" (or rather credibly make both sides lose) a nuclear war with Russia "on its own"? I have no idea, but that's what this pivots around, not the number of tanks or organization of troops.
“This just underscores the extent to which Obama was right all along.”
Correct me if I’m wrong but in 2012 wasn’t Obama arguing Al-Qaeda was the biggest geopolitical threat? I don’t recall anyone pre-Trump publicly describing China that way.
You make good points as usual, but I think you overstate US agency regarding Europe. National defense strategies executed by European countries reflect each country's autonomous decisions, and the US plays only a minor role. IMHO Europe has demonstrated a long and appalling disregard for the threats posed by Russia. Fortunately, this has (at least temporarily) reversed dramatically over the past week; let's hope the lesson remains.
I also think you here under-state the importance of "democratic values" as an abstract idea worth fighting for per se, though I agree with what I take as your main points (that viewing the world exclusively through the lens of "democracy good, autocracy bad" leads to problems, and that the primary long-term strategic concern of the US should be China, not Russia)
The US's role in Europe could be reduced to two main things, but could not be eliminated entirely without a lot of risk.
1. The US operates the only single-nation military on the scale of size and sophistication comparable to the future European military, so it can provide guidance on the sorts of things that the Europeans will need and act as a sort of honest broker between the European national interests (so it can say "yes, you will need big transport aircraft and AWACS and JSTARS, but no, you don't B-52s"). If the US is going to assume that the vast majority of European equipment will be built in Europe (after all, the vast majority of US equipment is built in the US), then it should be relatively easy to ensure that there isn't a rotating door between the US military and European defence contractors, and that means you have actual neutral experts available in procurement and planning.
2. The US can provide a strategic nuclear deterrent without needing European nations to build one (yes, the UK and France are nuclear powers, but they have minimal deterrents). This will mean that some US forces need to be located on the front line to reassure everyone that the US commitment to nuclear deterrence in Europe is real.
In the end, all of the small European nations are always going to want to have some infantry for ceremonial and peacekeeping duties, but there really is no reason that non-frontline states couldn't be mostly naval (an obvious role for Portugal and the Netherlands, which have strong naval traditions) or mostly focus on their air force, or any of a dozen other specialised roles.
The bigger states are going to want to have some ability for independent action - both Britain (Falklands, Sierra Leone) and France (several in Francophone Africa, for instance) have done operations in living memory where they were wholly or largely alone, and the ability to operate without needing assistance from allies is one that neither would give up. But Belgium has no meaningful independent military capacity, so why not have a few infantry that you can contribute to a UN peacekeeping operation, and then have the rest of your military budget spent on one specific role that is only meaningful as part of a larger European military?
“…because American support is truly needed in Korea and Japan and Australia and the Western Hemisphere while it’s dispensable in Europe.”
Is it though? This seems like a very weird time to make that argument.
American security guarantees in Europe work _because_ they don’t require the creation of a coordinated transnational army that’s actually capable of fighting, and because we have nuclear parity (and thus MAD) with Russia. Unless the plan includes a nuclear Germany (!) and Spain (?!) and scaling up France’s deterrent and Britain’s Trident fleet (with what money?) _and _ creating a credible trans-EU military command structure, I think the most likely outcome of pulling back American commitments here is Putin pissing himself laughing followed by immediately invading the Baltics.
In a world where we’ve actually managed to fix our relationship with Russia somehow (this probably requires Putin dying of old age)… maybe? But I’m not seeing how this works any time in the next 30 years.
And then we come to the _other_ issue, which is that a Europe where the major states all field competent and autonomous militaries is a situation we have a great deal of experience with, historically speaking. The record here is… how shall we say… not inspiring?
Seems like more discussion should have been given to the nuclear capabilities of Russia vs the EU countries. Which would've folded into the specialization point, as France is the only member that has a full Nuclear force.
I also think we're giving a bit too much easy credit to the deterrent part of the nuclear deterrent. The deterrent works by inciting fear in the potential enemy, but of course that can backfire and escalate into panic if intentions are misunderstood, which leads to the nightmare scenario of one side or the other launching to prevent the other side going first.
Matt and the other commentators seem to be talking about our nuclear umbrella as some kind of cost-free favor for the EU. But the small, but hard to quantify risk of something going very, very wrong means it's anything but costless.
I'll add two things: the Russians continue to upgrade and modernize their nuclear forces, while orientating them into more of a "war-fighting" posture and less of a strictly deterrent posture. Meanwhile our minutemen ICBMS are from 1969 and behind schedule for upgrades. And in general all our plans and responses for nuclear war seem to believe that our deterrent is sufficient and so we plan as if it can't really happen, and I'm not sure if the Russians are on the same page with that, or not. We used to put much more emphasis on a survivable chain of command, preparing the populace, and just prioritizing nuclear forces within the military in general.
Also the risks here fall the more the Russians seem to be rational and rise when they seem to be less rational. I'll leave it at that.
To respond to China's new status as a peer competitor we need to work more closely with democratic India, not retreat to a good-neighbor policy of focusing on democratic Latin America.
This is why Matt's comment the other day about "owning Cuba" was so odd. Does anyone really think that should be a priority for US foreign policy?
Ike was complaining about the Europeans not spending enough on their own defense. Somethings never change.
Why would they when they have Uncle Sucker to do it for them?
It also gives the Europeans something to cluck their tongues about because they can be First World countries without having to shoulder a lot of the responsibility so they can say, "tsk...tsk..." to the US all the time.
This glorification of Mitt Romney is getting out of hand. The man was perfectly willing to work with Trump when it suited him, and only turned against him when he didn't get a job in his administration. He refused to release his tax returns, and almost certainly cheated on his taxes. We can give him credit for not behaving as badly as some other Republicans, but that's a low bar. I expect better from someone who has had every possible advantage in life, who claims to serve his country while raking in ridiculous amounts of money through the destruction of American companies.
I'm interested to know the specific trade-offs between U.S. involvement in Europe and U.S. involvement in Asia. Is the former actually preventing the latter?
"Russia’s spending goes up with the PPP adjustment, but the PPP concept is only partially applicable to defense issues. For personnel spending, the fact that a dollar goes further in Russia than in Germany is a big deal. But for defense hardware, the market rates matter more"
This is a nitpick, but Russia has a mostly domestic arms industry, right? So wouldn't PPP be more relevant than market rates here? To my understanding Russia is building most of its weapon systems locally and not purchasing them from other countries.
On the topic of the defense-industrial complex- I think one of the quieter issues is that a future European military would be building some of its own weapons in Europe, which would lead to less sales for Boeing, Lockheed Martin, etc. So this is why the US defense industry has lobbied behind the scenes against a European Army
Before the shooting started, a good negotiated outcome would have been the US out of NATO. It's a makework program for American arms manufacturers and has not contributed to American safety in the post-Cold War. Indeed, just the opposite, as this war shows. During the Cold War, there was a credible threat of MAD for the NATO countries. Now there is no credible threat of MAD if Putin, say, hacks the Latvian election. So what exactly is the point? If we want to fight a war for Poland, we can do it without a poorly conceived treaty obligation. We have no treaty obligation to Taiwan and yet there is some semi-credible threat there, so China has avoided an invasion. That's the outcome we want!
This was a frustration of mine during the Trump years. He was mad at NATO because the Europeans weren't paying their share or whatever, but the point was that he should have been exploring ways to amicably dissolve the whole thing. Unfortunately, he's grossly incompetent so even when he was the hint of a good idea, there's no possibility of execution.
Matt doesn't really make the threat argument here in any coherent manner. I think right now it's closer between Russia and China than Matt makes out.
Sure China is larger and long term seems like a more plausible competitor, but the Putin regimes aggressiveness in the last 8 years, in which the Ukraine invasion is only the current capstone, is quite in another category, and needs to count their hybrid war conduct as well.
Even Matt's mumbled call for withdrawal from NATO wouldn't be enough to pull us out of Putin's sites unless we move to a position of true neutrality in regards to Russian attempts to expand their dominance westward and undermine liberal democracy in Europe.
I assume there's a subtext in this to stave off nuclear proliferation in Japan and South Korea, but if so it's worth actually stating.