In U.S. foreign policy debates, Europe gets short shrift. Not without justification, the continent is seen as mostly at peace, a place where people in well-tailored suits and dresses can convene various boring panels about bureaucracy and cooperation in beautiful buildings. To be sure, Russia gnaws away here or there at parts of Ukraine or Georgia, but the large industrialized democracies of Western Europe are wealthy, strong, and at peace. It is understandable that the Middle East and Asia-Pacific win more attention in Washington.

At the same time, the United States maintains large, costly commitments to Europe decades after the Cold War. Why?

One answer Cato scholars have been giving for decades is that Washington used its leadership of NATO to smother European security cooperation because it wanted to maintain outsized influence over decisions involving European security. This was viewed, to the extent it was considered at all, as a fringey, revisionist opinion.

So let me welcome to the fringe the authors of the most recent report from the Center for American Progress’ national security team, titled “The Case for EU Defense.” In it, the authors don’t just call for more EU defense cooperation, but admit that “Since the 1990s, the United States has typically used its effective veto power to block the defense ambitions of the European Union.”

But how can this be? After all, aren’t American officials constantly complaining about low and inadequate European defense spending? Don’t American officials want more European defense capability, not less?

Of course they do, until the Europeans look like they might get their act together, at which point we make clear to the Europeans that if they “duplicate,” “diminish” or “discriminate” against NATO capabilities, they jeopardize the future of NATO. When the Europeans looked like they might be getting their act together in the early 2000s, for example, the US sent Ambassador to NATO Nicholas Burns to make clear that European cooperation that didn’t include the United States would pose “one of the greatest dangers to the transatlantic relationship.” Not to NATO, mind you—to the transatlantic relationship. Washington wasn’t in the mood to devolve European security to Europe. 

Keeping the United States in charge of European security is foolish for a number of reasons. First, they can defend themselves from external dangers. Russia has an economy less than one-ninth the size of Europe’s, and a population less than a third of Europe’s. There is a scholarly debate about how well Europe could defend itself, but the fact that it’s at least plausible they could do so today after decades of ineffectual efforts and American subversion suggests with a minimum of effort, they could bring themselves together quite nicely.

There is also no internal threat to Europe. The first secretary-general of NATO, the British General Lionel “Pug” Ismay, famously pronounced that NATO’s purpose was to “keep the Soviets out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” The problems today are an increasingly impotent Germany and an overburdened United States. Nobody should be trying to keep the Germans down, and the only people who should want the Americans in are taxpayers in European countries.

The CAP report emphasizes it still sees NATO as the lodestar of European security, and EU cooperation as a vehicle for burden-sharing, not ending the alliance. Baby steps.

But next week as the NATO summit tells you about how NATO is going to deal with China, or that its “door remains open” to Georgia and Ukraine, or some other whimsical fantasy, remind yourself: if the United States stopped discouraging them, the Europeans could defend Europe. In international politics, it is better to set an achievable goal you can attain than dream big and fall short.