Secretary of Defense Robert Gates amused the American military and political establishments a few months ago by declaring in a speech at West Point that any president who sends soldiers to fight another land war in the Middle East should have his head examined.
Well, he shocked the daylights out of the European military and political establishments on Friday by declaring the following in a speech in Brussels on the future of NATO:
The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress, and in the American body politic writ large, to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense…
[European] nations [are] apparently willing and eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in European defense budgets… The mightiest military alliance in history is only 11 weeks into an operation against a poorly armed regime in a sparsely populated country [namely Libya]. Yet many allies are beginning to run short of munitions, requiring the U.S., once more, to make up the difference
What I’ve sketched out is the real possibility for a dim if not dismal future for the trans-Atlantic alliance.
(Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2011)
No doubt most Americans are heartened by this in-your-face rebuke of Europeans whose parasitic ways are surpassed only by their congenitally self-righteous and resentful criticisms of almost everything American. But it’s a little belated for those of us who have been blasting these free-loaders for years.
Here, for my part, is what I wrote almost two years ago in a commentary decrying Obama’s decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan:
[I]t seems more than a little disingenuous for him to declare that he will begin withdrawing troops in July 2011. After all, even if he does, it could still take years after that date to reduce the number of troops deployed there to today’s level … or lower.
But this was not nearly as disingenuous as his touting NATO participation in this surge. For, having criticized President Bush for making a similar claim, he knows full well that the vast majority of those NATO troops will serve as nothing more than political window dressing. Hell, the Italians have become a laughing stock for their jingoistic refusal to even leave their cloistered and heavily fortified base; similar ‘combat caveats’ limit German participation to ‘gardening’; and the French, well, plus ça change.
(Obama escalates war in Afghanistan…, The iPINIONS Journal, December 2, 2009)
Apropos of this, it might be helpful to know that, according a June 10 report by the Associated Press:
The U.S. defense budget of nearly $700 billion accounts for nearly 75 percent of the total defense spending by NATO members. The combined military spending of all 26 European members is just above $220 billion.
There are clearly many areas of the Pentagon’s bloated budget that can, and should, be cut. And Gates’s speech leaves no doubt that its spending on NATO is one of them.
In fact, a good measure of what the U.S. defense budget should be is for it to be capped at two times that of all other NATO members combined. Which means that it should be $440 billion instead of $700 billion. How’s that?
Related commentaries:
Sec. Gates: invading Afghanistan and Iraq was insane