End Europe’s Security Welfare CheckIt 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/