Europe's Own Wars

Updating a US-Europe Relationship Frozen in 1949

President Trump’s announcement, which followed a dramatic live confrontation in the White House on Feb 28, 2025 with Ukrainian Prime Minister Vladimir Zelenskyy, that the American President would suspend all aid to Ukraine, caused shock waves around the world.

This was followed by President Trump’s declaration that the United States would no longer pay disproportionately for Europe’s defense in NATO, and that he would not defend his NATO allies if they did not pay their fair share. “‘"It's common sense, right," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. "If they don't pay, I'm not going to defend them. No, I'm not going to defend them."‘

The President’s supporters, especially those in the United States, cheered these moves. They object to what looks at times like a global shell game that enriches all who collude with it, with this collusion coming at the cost, as the President pointed out, of two thousand Russian and Ukrainian soldiers’ lives a week. These Americans see our refusal to overpay for our role in NATO as being a long-overdue stop to a multi-billion-dollar, decades-long gravy train that has sustained, since 1949, what are in fact, now, wealthy societies.

NATO’s founding origins in the misery, fear and rubble of post-World War II Europe, made sense at that time. How did the agreement start?

“The result of these extensive [1949] negotiations was the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949. In this agreement, the United States, Canada, Belgium, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United Kingdom agreed to consider attack against one an attack against all, along with consultations about threats and defense matters. This collective defense arrangement only formally applied to attacks against the signatories that occurred in Europe or North America; it did not include conflicts in colonial territories. … Later in 1949, President Truman proposed a military assistance program, and the Mutual Defense Assistance Program passed the U.S. Congress in October, appropriating some $1.4 billion dollars for the purpose of building Western European defenses.”

But that was then.

The conditions that led us to consider it useful to join forces with Europe, and to agree for us to defend one another, still apply, in a world full of threats and anti-Western sentiment. But I’ll argue that the conditions that led the US to assume a disproportionate share of the financial burden, do not exist any longer, and that President Trump is right to course-correct on our disproportionate payments to Europe.

President Trump says that the US has spent $300-350 billion dollars on defense of Ukraine. The BBC argues that it is much less — $119.7 billion. But still, the outsize amount that America has provided is stunning to consider, in relation to Europe’s far more limited contributions. The BBC’s chart below shows that our $119.7 billion contrasts sharply with France’s $5.1 billion and the EU’s $51.3 billion. Add to this disparity the fact that the vast majority of Europe’s funds heading to Ukraine, arrive in the form of loans, not grants, as opposed to the outright wealth transfers made by the United States. In other words, in theory at least, the money with which Europe is parting, is not meant to be lost to European lender nations forever.

European elites, of course, see these moves on the part of President Trump very differently than do President Trump’s supporters, as does European media. European elites and press commentators are, at the very thought that the disproportionate US money spigot for NATO, and for Ukraine in particular, may be turned off, sustaining an existential crisis. I was in Europe as much of this started to play out, and the expressions of shock — but, more significantly, entitled shock — were audible everywhere one turned.

The reaction was not an adult one: “Well, that’s over; it’s time to figure out how we will manage without the outsized commitment of the United States.” One dis not even hear many mature, thoughtful arguments aimed at America, that this withdrawal is bad for all of us.

One heard, rather, a range of crude coping mechanisms from European thought leaders: they mocked the President and his decisions, or they expressed flustered outrage. Some actually suggest that the President acts as he does because Prime Minister Vladimir Putin “has something on him.” The hostility was unremitting.

I am not a psychologist, but this reaction is fascinating to me because it is so defensive, irrational and so, well, adolescent. These howls were emitted in the tone of people against whom a crime is being committed.

This reaction begs the question: why?

Did Europe think that the status quo — an unaccountable American money spigot, paying for the defense of Europe — would last forever? Did Europe’s elites and media imagine that American Presidents would change but that the policy related to our paying for European defense, one initiated under one US President decades ago, would stay the same throughout all time under every President?

Did the leaders of these nations, and their spokespeople and media, never have, or even imagine, a Plan B?

Some commentators slowly started dealing with the fact that Europe will have to step up in its own defense:

“The message is clear – an ‘electroshock’, as French President Emmanuel Macron called it: European countries will have to step up defence spending if they intend to protect themselves from Russian aggression.”

As European leaders come to terms with the new reality, the incredible military emasculation of Europe that has been allowed to develop during 75 years of reliance on the US for defense, grows painfully clear.

Britain has not quite three days’ worth of ammo: Chatham House.org, otherwise known as The Royal Institute of International Affairs, a UK foreign policy think tank, warns that Europe may simply be unable to close the gap opened by the withdrawal of the United States: “Lord Robertson’s review of UK defence is expected to make clear how strained British armed forces are; it is thought to say that the entire UK forces have less than three days’ worth of ammunition.” ChathamHouse.org warns that for Europe to defend itself without help from the US, the task would absorb almost all of the UK’s military power:

“It remains to be seen if Europe’s leaders can unify to shore up defence, at a time of political uncertainty in France and Germany. Even if they can, it is far from clear that will be enough to deter an aggressive, badly mauled Russia, absent the might of the United States.”

While Europe cries aloud at being forced to come up with funds if President Trump follows through on his threat — it’s not that Europe does not have the money at all. It is, rather, that in scraping together the funds, European nations would have to cut into their more politically popular expenditures, and also perhaps go into debt.

President Trump asked Europe to spend 5% of its GDP on defense, which would double the amount it currently spends:

“To [raise the money], European countries may have to consider loosening the fiscal rules that have governed their borrowing for more than a decade.

Beyond that, they face unpalatable political choices: whether to pare back welfare, health and pension benefits to pay for defence – a hard message to give to voters.

For the UK, the choice is similar. Politicians of all parties have been steadfast behind Ukraine. But now they have to work out how to step up defence spending. The government has pledged to commit 2.5 per cent of GDP, up from the current 2.3 per cent – but not said by when.”

The bottom line is that Europe and Britain have standards of living that are now higher than Americans,’ in many metrics. This is possible because European countries don’t spend 5% of their GDP on defense.

Europeans live better, in many ways, these days, than do Americans — we who pay for 40% of the defense spending around the world, though our population is just 4.22 of the total world’s population.

I learned while I was in Europe, that European elites’ sense of what America is, vis a vis Europe, is out of date, and unrealistic. It was clear to me that the emotional, the conceptual, relationship, between Europe and the US, is oddly frozen in time.

To Europe, in relation to America, it is always 1949.

John Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn imagines a scenario in which lovers are frozen in time; in which time has stood still: “Forever wilt though love, and she be fair!” Historical consciousness seems to have frozen in a similar way for European-American relations. Forever, America is seen by the older nations as the bouncing, thoughtless, insanely wealthy young nation of the end of the war, and the start of the post-World War 2 period: America always will have so much more money than Europe, and Europe will always desperately need America’s money. Europe’s sense of America is stuck in a moment when Italy and Germany were reduced to rubble, and starving; when France was struggling with black-market scarcity; and when British cities were blown to bits and the population reduced to grey austerity.

Desperate Europeans postwar saw then, in film reels, Hollywood stars and starlets emerging in furs from limousines; they saw American tables laden with every kind of abundance; they saw golden sunbathers in Malibu and dashing skiiers in Maine; and endless Leavittowns, complete with ample one-parent incomes. They saw teenagers with rec rooms in basements, middle-class homes with swimming pools and two cars, and modern appliances in every kitchen. Add to that a Socialist influence on the continent, that combines a sense of entitlement to wealth redistribution: because America is so rich, therefore Europe is entitled to her funding in perpetuity.

Well, that sense of who Europe is vis a vis America, is just no longer accurate. President Trump, in my view, is trying to adjust our foreign policy to suit our actual fiscal and social reality in 2025, and Europe does not want to come along into the present.

America is broke. We can’t pay for our existing debt. We are no longer the robust, wealthy adolescent nation of the 1950s, in contrast to desperate, starveling late 1940s Europe. America’s middle class is not expanding, as in the postwar period, but contracting.

Europeans are trapped in a media bubble that does not allow them to update their sense of what America is. They see American TV and movies. Many studies confirm that those families represented by Hollywood, are far more affluent than are average Americans. They watch CNN. CNN does not usually cover desperate Americans still living in tents, exposed to winter, months after the floods in North Carolina and Western Virginia. Europeans don’t see much coverage of American cities, from San Francisco to Los Angeles to New York, made dangerous and miserable by homelessness. They don’t read stories of US college students living in their cars, or of children whose only hot meal is lunch at school. They don’t see stories of middle and even upper-middle class Americans ruined by chronic illnesses or accidents, or by a long hospital stay. Most Europeans have no idea how much Americans are suffering economically.

They certainly don’t consider deeply that many Americans are driven by these extreme economic pressures to enlist in the military, as that is the only way that many young men and women from working class or lower middle class (or even middle class) backgrounds can afford a college education, or professional training; and that as a result American society is filled, relative to European societies, with soldiers on active duty, who may be put in harm’s way if a war claims their service, and with veterans, many of them injured or psychologically broken by older wars that Europeans in comparable numbers did not have to fight.

I was in Holland earlier this Spring; and more recently we passed through Belgium, stayed for a week in Vilnius, Lithuania, passed again through Copenhagen, then transited through London for a week in Oxford, UK.

I was in cities, so perhaps that skewed my impressions, as poverty in Europe and Britain, as in the US, is often rural.

But still — compared to crowds in America? Europeans — yes, this is impressionistic and yes, there are surely exceptions — are better fed, better clothed, better housed, healthier, and far more visibly cheerful than are average crowds of Americans.

European crowds in cities — and to a slightly lesser extent, British crowds in cities — are engaged very visibly in all the kinds of things that make life worth living: they are eating well in restaurants; they are drinking wine and beer, or taking coffee and tea, with groups of friends, in cafes; they are visiting museums to see classical and modern art exhibits, and heading to traditional and innovative theatrical performances, with many of these cultural events subsidized by the state. The EU spends $74.9 billion Euros a year, or nearly one per cent of its government expenditure, on “cultural services”.

Europeans are engaging — and not just the rich, but the solidly middle-class and even working people — in sporting activities; hiking, biking, skating, even skiing. They are playing with their kids. The maternity leave in the EU ranges from 60 to 100 days, with 40 extra to be assigned at will to “parental leave”, meaning dad can enjoy bonding time at home with baby as well. In many countries, this leave is 100 per cent paid, as if the new parents were still at work:

Europeans, compared to Americans, are planning lengthy holidays. The EU mandates at least 4 weeks’ annual vacation to its 27 member nations, and some countries give workers 6 weeks off a year.

On weekends, from what I saw anyway, Europeans, in contrast to Americans, are retail shopping as if there is no tomorrow.

American crowds these days? They look tense, withdrawn and worried. You rarely see parents playing with their kids, because parents are exhausted on weekends. New moms and dads do not get paid parental leave to be with a new baby. Restaurants with high-quality food, are for the wealthy. A night at a bar with friends can wipe out a working- or lower-middle-class worker’s day’s income.

Museums, concerts, plays, dance performances and festival tickets in the US are the prerogatives of the upper middle class or of the wealthy. There is little luxury or recreational shopping being done by Americans in the local malls or on Main Street; retail sales plunged 0.9% in January of 2025.

In the US, most people these days restrict their shopping to apprehensively watching the cashier add up their week’s groceries; they anxiously watch the reading of the gas pump. Half of Americans surveyed by Bank of America say that they live paycheck to paycheck.

Europeans score higher than we in the US do in terms of all of the key issues that determine quality of life. They have cheaper access to universities. Six European countries offer students an entirely free college education. Europeans now have lower infant mortality rates than does the United States. The US ranks 51st in infant survival, behind Croatia, and lower than four European countries. Europeans have much higher literacy rates: 98.7%. 43 million Americans have “low literacy.” Of course, most European nations have free universal health care. In contrast, Americans spend an average of $13,493 a year out of their household budgets, on health care.

I would argue that Europe can afford all of this art and culture and education and health care and festivity and family time, and more, in large part because they are not paying their fair share for their own defense.

Why would you not howl, if faced with what it would actually mean in terms of daily quality of life in Europe and Britain, to pay one’s own fair share for defense, and build up one’s own army?

The extraordinary, even magical, perks of being European would soon erode or even vanish. Our stress, our two-and three-job homes, our families bankrupted by a single health emergency, our veterans living on the street, our latchkey kids who rarely see, let alone play with or read with or eat real meals with, their parents — are paying for Europe’s and Britain’s relatively high levels of culture, relaxation and luxury.

This is an anomaly historically. European nations and entities have been fighting their own battles for the duration of Europe’s recorded history, from the Trojan War in the 12th C BCE to the Norman Invasion in 1066, to the Hundred Years’ War starting in 1337 and the War of the Roses in 1455, to Cromwell’s wars of 1654-1660, to the Sewven Years’ War in 1756, to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, and onward and onward up til 1949; dozens and dozens of conflicts and wars in every stage of its history, right up until the postwar period, have been fought by European nations’ and European entities’ own armies.

Lounging around on the subsidy of the US defense dollars, is a complete historical anomaly for Europe.

After the relationship between Europe and the US froze in 1949, that led to 75 years of Europe behaving in a historically un-European way. In another essay I will explain how those years of relative army-lessness allowed Europeans to lose agency, democracy, and healthy balances of power of citizens in relation to the State.

But for now, we miust look to America and indeed, put America first. It is time for an update in our relationship with our allies.

We here in the US are broke, overworked, desperate and miserable, while European life is relatively luxurious.

Enough is enough.

I think it is well past time for Europe to revise to accord with reality, its sense of America, and also to have some compassion for our human suffering.

It is well past time for Europe and the UK to form what I hope will be a healthy partnership with the United States, and in the process, leave behind in the mists of the past, a grossly outdated, and ultimately parasitic, dependency.