Josef Joffe famously referred to the U.S. presence in Western Europe as “Europe’s pacifier.” The idea was that you stick the American pacifier in there and the *cough* recurring problem emanating from Europe goes away.
After the Cold War ended, and the official reason for the NATO alliance blew away as if in the wind, we never considered letting the alliance go with it. That tells you something. Instead of coming home, we pushed NATO “out of area” rather than allowing it to go “out of business.” Christopher Layne argues that this was all by design. U.S. policymakers never intended to allow Europe to establish its autonomy and worked diligently to ensure that efforts at autonomous European defense would fail. They succeeded.
In February, Defense Secretary Robert Gates was whining about the “demilitarization of Europe” and how the Europeans have grown “averse to military force.” I responded by pointing out that this was dumb. Mancur Olson’s logic and the history of American policy on the European continent that Layne documents show that we were as much to blame for this state of affairs as the Euros themselves.
And now here’s the Wall Street Journal pointing out that the Euros are slashing their defense budgets further still.