Most of the disasters in U.S. foreign policy have long fuses. There is a lot of time between the moment the match is set and the detonation. This makes it hard to provide actionable criticism, as we know policymakers’ time horizons are short and they are often uninterested in the long term.

But the joint NATO-EU declaration today, previewed in the Financial Times by European diplomatic correspondent Henry Foy, is one of those disasters. As Foy notes, it is “pretty painful reading for those who want less America in European defence” because it declares that “NATO remains the foundation of collective defence for its allies and essential for Euro Atlantic security.”

If you want to make sense of the latter sentence, replace “NATO” with “the United States.”

The declaration is a triumph for countries like Poland, who do not trust their European neighbors and instead want the United States to remain at the center of European security forever. It is a defeat for the American people. Washington should be handing European security off to the Europeans, not asking another generation of American taxpayers to foot the bill themselves.

The U.S. foreign policy elite has long opposed European security cooperation. The late Secretary of State Madeleine Albright administered a poison pill to European efforts in 1998 when she declared that any European security effort

must avoid preempting Alliance decision-making by de-linking [itself] from NATO, avoid duplicating existing efforts, and avoid discriminating against non-EU members.

In other words, Washington would oppose any efforts that sought to take control of European security away from the United States. Since her speech, interest in European security cooperation has been cultivated by European capitals, namely Paris, but always withered and died in the shadow of NATO and the United States.

Early in the Biden administration, Jake Sullivan grudgingly admitted that “key European countries working to develop enhanced capabilities that are interoperable and can be deployed in service of a larger common mission… is fundamentally a positive thing from the United States’ perspective,” but that he did not appreciate terms like “strategic autonomy,” which suggested… strategic autonomy. By December 2021 when French Ambassador Philippe Étienne spoke on the subject at Cato, “strategic autonomy” had already fallen out of vogue.

But Europe should be strategically autonomous. The alternative is for Washington to keep European countries on the dole forever. This approach amounts to a transfer payment from American taxpayers to European ones. And it is a pretty big transfer payment: a very conservative estimate from MIT’s Barry Posen put the figure on the order of $70–80 billion per year, even retaining the U.S. nuclear umbrella and intelligence assistance. So the next time you travel to Europe and marvel at effective infrastructure, beautiful architecture, general joie de vivre, or any other aspect of European life, pat yourself on the back: you helped pay for it.

During a 1949 Senate hearing on U.S. accession to the North Atlantic Treaty, Secretary of State Dean Acheson was asked whether the U.S. role would involve “substantial numbers of troops over there as a more or less permanent contribution to the development of these countries’ capacity to resist?” Acheson responded indignantly that “the answer to that question, Senator, is a clear and absolute NO!” In the year of Our Lord 2023, the U.S. role in Europe involves substantial numbers of troops over there as a more or less permanent contribution to the development of these countries’ capacity to resist.

The historical U.S. commitment to Europe shambles on at a time when the balance of power in Asia is shifting and the United States is still allegedly trying to “pivot to Asia.” If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. Russia does not pose a threat to Europe that implicates U.S. security. Europe can contribute little of value to efforts to deal with China. For those reasons, the American people should not be subsidizing European security. The Biden administration’s failure to hand European security off to the Europeans just consigned another generation of taxpayers to foot the bill for the U.S. project in Europe.