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President Donald Trump recently announced that he was reducing U.S. military presence in Germany by at least 5,000 troops, with plans to “cut way down” the 70,000 active-duty military personnel in Europe.
The move comes on the heels of Western European nations rejecting Trump’s request for help in opening the Strait of Hormuz after the Iranian regime threatened the busy shipping lane.
French President Emmanuel Macron and German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius both told the media that it wasn’t “our war.” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz added that the United States, which has demolished much of Iran’s military capabilities and economy, was being “humiliated” by the clerics.
NATO was conceived as an intergovernmental military alliance meant to thwart Soviet ambitions. It now has 30 member countries, all of them reliant on the U.S., and few of them facing any genuine military threats.
Need it be said, if the U.S. hadn’t taken responsibility for the protection of Western Europe after World War II, the continent would have likely descended into yet another bloodbath — as had been the case every few decades stretching back centuries. Instead, we allowed humiliated nations such as Germany, France, and Italy to focus on building world-class economies.
Even after the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. propped up the alliance, militarily and financially. And virtually the entire time, we’ve been engaged in a one-way relationship.
Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, for instance, only nine NATO nations even bothered meeting the organization’s military spending criteria: the U.S., as always, Greece, Estonia, Britain, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland. Not exactly the all-star team.
Seven NATO nations spent a larger percentage of their GDP on defense than Germany, the fourth-largest economy in the world. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Germany has increased its military spending to meet the promised NATO threshold. Even now, however, the U.S. spends 13%-14% of its budget on defense, while Germany spends 2.4%.
Despite all of this, European nations exhibit a haughty detachment from American interests, demanding help but rarely offering any.
When “Arab Spring” rebellions broke out across the Middle East, France and Britain pressured the U.S. into intervening in the Libyan civil war. We helped. Was that conflict “our war?” No. The North African nation is now a transit hub for Islamic refugees heading into Europe.
Was the Serbian conflict in the 1990s, in which NATO ultimately carved out a Muslim-majority nation of Kosovo in the middle of Europe, ”our war?” Hardly. Whatever your position is on the value of those military interventions, neither was conducted under the stated mission of the alliance.
A moral responsibility to stop unfolding humanitarian disasters was the rationale for both conflicts. Well, the Iranian regime, which funds and operates destabilizing extremist groups within Europe, has created numerous humanitarian disasters by funding Hamas in Gaza to arming Hezbollah in Lebanon and extremists in Yemen and Sudan. None of that is to even mention the slaughter of tens of thousands of its own innocent civilians.
It was only when Trump threatened to hit European car companies with an extra 25% tariff that Merz dramatically changed his tone on the matter, noting that the U.S. and Germany shared a common goal: “Iran must not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons.”
As far as we know, Trump never asked the Germans or other European nations to participate in the military phase of the conflict. Israel, a nation that has always backed the U.S., has a highly advanced military that puts most European nations to shame.
Why not assist in efforts to open the Strait of Hormuz? After reducing Russian oil and gas imports and shutting down its own successful nuclear energy program, Europe relies on it more heavily on the than the U.S.
Not only has NATO been unhelpful, but it’s also been actively undermining the American mission. Spain, France, and Italy have all restricted American military presence in airspace or ports during the war against the regime.
Whenever I’m critical of the lopsided relationship we have with NATO, its defenders point out that member states lost soldiers in Afghanistan after invoking Article 5, which states that any attack on a member state is an attack on all. But it’s also worth remembering that Europe was a victim of al Qaeda, whose affiliates had either carried out or tried to carry out numerous major terrorist attacks on the continent, including the Strasbourg Cathedral plot, the Air France Flight 8969 Hijacking, and the 1998 World Cup plot. The war against Europe continued over the next decade, with the 2004 Madrid train bombings and the January 2015 Ile-de-France attacks.
Moreover, this isn’t the same in Europe. Prompted by Germany, the European Union opened its borders to millions of new Islamic refugees in the years following Sept. 11. There are around 50 million Muslims on the continent now, nearly 10% of the population in countries like France, Germany, and Sweden.
Appeasing that highly volatile population is surely one of the reasons these nations are reluctant to help the U.S. It’s highly unlikely that Britain’s hapless prime minister, Keir Starmer, or Spain’s Marxist Pedro Sanchez would ever send anyone to fight with the U.S. anywhere else in the Islamic world.
GERMANY AND JAPAN ARE REARMING. TRUMP DESERVES CREDIT
NATO defenders will also point out that the alliance offers us better global reach, acts as a deterrent, gives us forward operating bases, and allows us to build relationships and joint operations with our allies.
True. Still, right now, the relationship is far more beneficial for Europe. The U.S. can build relationships and bases elsewhere in the world. Perhaps with nations less weak-kneed. Or maybe even nations that are still willing to do the minimum to defend Western civilization.