The United States has provided a blanket of security to Europe for far too long. In the aftermath of the cold war, European nations made deep and lasting cuts to their defence budgets. Estimates suggest the continent would have spent an additional $8.6tn on defence over 30 years had they maintained cold war levels of military expenditure. As the American defence budget nears $1tn per year, we ought to view the money Europe hasn’t spent on defence for what it really is: an implied tax on the American people to allow for the security of Europe.
Nothing in recent memory demonstrates this more clearly than the war in Ukraine. There is frankly no good reason that aid from the US should be needed. Europe is made up of many great nations with productive economies. They ought to have the capacity to handle the conflict, but over decades they have become far too weak. America has been asked to fill the void at tremendous expense to its own citizens.
Behind the price tag, this conflict has revealed the shocking weakness of the defence industrial base on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe and America, fragmented defence industries make limited quantities of the most advanced weapons on Earth, but struggle to produce heavy weaponry at the speed and scale needed to win a major conflict. For all the talk about who spends the most on defence by percentage of gross domestic product, Russia currently makes more than twice the amount of artillery shells each month than Europe and the US combined.