End Europe’s Security Welfare Check

[Kamaji]

End Europe’s Security Welfare Check

It is past time for a rebalancing that reflects American interests.

Phillip Linderman
Jan 18, 2023

In a recent opinion piece for The American Conservative, Senator Marco Rubio wrote:

In the 21st century, Europe must take the lead in Europe. Germany, France, and the United Kingdom are more than capable of managing their relationship with the nuclear-armed belligerent to their east. But they’ll never take ownership so long as they can rely on America. If this were a welfare policy debate, conservatives would be calling for work requirements. We need something similar for Europe, encouraging our allies to take ownership of their future, security, and prosperity.

The senator’s counsel is right on the mark. This is probably the hardest reset in all of U.S. foreign policy. Nostalgia about the role the transatlantic alliance played in the defeat of Soviet communism, even now more than three decades after the fact, has hard-wired the current partnership for many U.S. policymakers. Too many senior American foreign affairs leaders, as well as career diplomats, military officers, academics, and consultants—including some otherwise reliable U.S. conservatives—are all trained and invested in maintaining the status quo in the transatlantic security framework. 

But it is past time for a rebalancing. It must reflect an updated view of U.S. national interests in Europe that accounts for the economic power of both continents. And that reckoning should not be postponed because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Yet without some imaginative thinking from the America First community, rebalancing seems unlikely.

While restructuring obviously cannot happen overnight, we need to push towards several obtainable goals. These include imposing consequences on European countries that fail to increase their national defense spending; demanding that Berlin pay the military-basing costs for U.S. troops in Germany; fostering Poland’s emergence as a major new conventional military force; encouraging European home-grown nascent initiatives to develop security capacity outside of NATO; and handing off secondary conflicts, such as those in the Western Balkans, thereby transforming them into fully owned European projects.

Let us examine these all in more detail.

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Source:  https://www.theamericanconservative.com/end-europes-security-welfare-check/

[DefiantMassRINO]

Europe is incapable of maintaining its own security.

The continent is full of waxing and waning powers that conspire amongst themselves to screw each other and everyone else.

It's best America keeps an eye and a check on those scheming European powers.  America usually gets sucked in because Britain or France owes the US money.

Look at how Britain had the US backfill security for its former colonial possessions and spheres of influence.  Does America really need the Middle East for anything other than playing a real-world game of Risk?

[Free Vulcan]

It's time to cut them loose.

[Right_in_Virginia]

Europe is incapable of maintaining its own security.

The continent is full of waxing and waning powers that conspire amongst themselves to screw each other and everyone else.

President George Washington
Farewell Address --- 1796

So, likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.

The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop.

Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes

Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. If we remain one people, under an efficient government, the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.

Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice?


https://usa.usembassy.de/etexts/democrac/49.htm

[Right_in_Virginia]

It's time to cut them loose.

And us!