A New Tonic for Europe’s Defense Dyspepsia

At the Cato Institute, Justin Logan explains that European leaders are “in an understandable state of dyspepsia” over Americans’ recent exhortations that the continent pony up for its own defense. Trump or not Trump, Logan explains, Europe will be forced to do more for itself. He concludes:

If a U.S. president wants to pass responsibility for Europe’s security to Europeans, he cannot wait for Europe to ask for it. He cannot wait for the think tanks to draw up plans for how to do so. He must create new facts on the ground. At the end of Donald Trump’s administration, he proposed withdrawing around 12,000 U.S. troops from Germany, leaving open the possibility of moving them further east to Poland. Restarting that withdrawal—without leaving them elsewhere in Europe—would be a good first step.

There is a growing resignation in Europe that, Trump or no Trump, resource constraints are beginning to bite in the United States and structural pressures in the international system are pulling Uncle Sam’s attention away from Europe. The shock of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has created space for discussion of European remilitarization and cooperation on security issues. There is unlikely to be a more propitious moment for a U.S. president to lessen Europe’s dependency on the United States, without placing core U.S. interests there at risk. The next president should seize this opportunity to make good on the efforts of previous presidents dating back to Dwight Eisenhower.

Read more here.