Trump’s Plan To End Europe’s Free Ride on Defense Is Working

President Trump has a plan to save Europe, and the results of Sunday’s election in Germany show it’s working.The center-right Christian Democrats won the most seats in the Bundestag, and the party’s leader, Friedrich Merz, pledges that once he becomes chancellor, “My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA.” The legislature’s largest opposition party, the hard-right Alternative for Germany, might not agree with Mr. Merz’s support for Ukraine — it’s often accused of favoring Russia — but it too wants Germany to have more military independence and will pressure Mr. Merz to live up to his words.Surely this means disaster for NATO — and won’t that be catastrophic for Europe? Actually, a Germany with greater strength of its own is exactly what NATO needs.Responsibility for defending Europe was shared more fairly between America and European allies during the Cold War, when West Germany, the U.K., and others maintained significant military establishments of their own.Yet in the decades since the Soviet Union’s implosion, Europe’s most advanced nations have let their capabilities atrophy.More than 500,000 West Germans were serving in the military when the Berlin Wall was torn down.Today the number of citizens on active duty in a united Germany is about 180,000 — even as Europe’s largest war since 1945 rages in Ukraine. These paltry service numbers are not only an indication of military unreadiness, they’re a symptom of widespread European unwillingness to fight. Gallup International polling last year found less than a third of adults in European Union member states would agree to take up arms in defense of their homelands. Worldwide, according to Gallup, the places citizens are “least willing” to fight for their country “are Italy at 78 percent, Austria at 62 percent, Germany at 57 percent, Nigeria at 54 percent, and Spain at 53 percent” — one developing African state and four rich European ones, three of them NATO members. As Mr. Trump sees it, America is getting ripped off by NATO allies with the money and men to provide for more of their own defense, but which choose to have America provide it instead.They’re getting a free ride, or at least a heavily subsidized one, off America’s taxpayers.Political elites throughout Europe aren’t just selfish, however. They’re scared: Their fear is that if they have to spend more on defense, their nations’ already unsustainable welfare systems will collapse, and furious voters will throw them out of power for good.The irony is that by making Americans shoulder a hugely disproportionate share of the cost for defending Europe, the continent’s leaders actually helped foster conditions for a populist backlash in America — which is why Europe now has to deal with Mr. Trump.Yet if Europe’s leaders dare learn the tough lesson Mr. Trump is teaching, Europe and NATO will both grow stronger. That’s not just because NATO will have more troops and its European members will have to recommit to standing up for their own borders as well as their neighbors’.It’s also because rebuilding Europe’s armed forces will in fact have the opposite of the effect the elites dread.Far from destabilizing Germany and other states where voters are increasingly unhappy about economic conditions, more military spending will restore national cohesion — which prosperity alone is never enough to sustain.Since the Cold War ended, European elites have seen their countries as little more than administrative zones where a desire for an easy life is the one thing uniting everybody.The truth is nations are built on readiness to share in sacrifice, not prosperity. To the extent greater military preparedness regenerates patriotism, it will help restore social solidarity within Europe’s nations.As well, military service can integrate citizens across class divides and regional differences — the American experience shows this.And an elite whose members put their lives on the line earns popular respect that a merely financial and intellectual elite can never command.Such an elite becomes invested in the rest of society by serving alongside men and women from other classes — it’s a source of noblesse oblige. Germany urgently needs a board-based national institution to unite its still economically and culturally divided east and west: the alienation of the former East Germany from the West is what supplies AfD its electoral base. Of course, an elite, and a whole society, ready to take greater responsibility for its national borders in a military context is more likely to be serious about protecting them in the context of migration as well. Eight decades after World War II, Europe faces danger not from German militarism but from an inadequate moral, as well as material, investment in defense.Europe needs a renewed spirit of self-reliance, not necessarily as a replacement for NATO but as the very thing that makes such an alliance possible.Creators.com

Trump’s Plan To End Europe’s Free Ride on Defense Is Working

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