The Trump Presidency Is an Unmitigated Catastrophe for Ukraine
The stark reality was that ever since the end of the Cold War, almost all the major and the minor European NATO powers (Turkey is obviously a special case), most catastrophically the United Kingdom, have hollowed out their militaries, to the point that the entire strength of Britain’s land forces is only 72,000, which makes it smaller than U.S. special operations, which comprise only about 2 percent of America’s land forces. The situation in France, the Netherlands, and Germany is not all that much better. The only exceptions are Poland and the Baltic countries, which, with Russia as their neighbor, never fell prey to the European (or at least Eurocratic) dream of Europe becoming what German philosopher Jürgen Habermas called the world’s first “post-national constellation.”
In fairness, it is not only Donald Trump who has been demanding that Europe rearm. To the contrary, both Democratic and Republican policymakers have been saying for more than two decades that in the long run, the situation in which the United States shouldered the costs of the Western alliance’s military burden and Europe focused on soft power was unsustainable. In 2010, President Barack Obama’s secretary of defense, Robert Gates, warned a NATO meeting in Washington, “In Europe, large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it.” That had been a good thing initially, Gates conceded. But now it had “gone from being a blessing in the twentieth century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the twenty-first.” A year later, Gates was even more explicit. At a security conference in Brussels in 2011, he called out Europe’s apparent unwillingness “to devote the necessary resources to make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in the own defense.”
At the time, European leaders politely dismissed the suggestion, operating in what with hindsight was the tragic mistake of believing that there would be in the future no existential military threats they would need to defend against, focusing instead on real or potential non-military existential threats such as climate change, migration, and the transformation of the world economy. And to the extent that European NATO powers invested in their militaries at all, leaving aside Britain and France’s nuclear forces, it was largely with the idea that if Europe fought at all, it would be in wars of choice such as Afghanistan or the Sahelian countries of central Africa—that is, in warfighting that precisely did not require the weapons, munitions, logistics, and industrial base for a conventional war between roughly peer armies.
