When the history of this era is written, one of the major storylines may well be how the re-election of President Donald Trump saved Europe from itself.
For years, American taxpayers have been subsidizing the defense of Europe, even as our wealthy “allies” pour money into socialist welfare programs that have been disastrous for their economies and cultures. This has provided just the opening Communist China needed to expand its influence in the West. But now, with President Trump continuing his first-term policy of forcing America’s allies to pay their fair share for their own defense, Europe may have a renewed opportunity to break out of its economic and cultural malaise and become the ally the American people deserve.
During the 2024 campaign, President Trump so frequently pledged he would stop American taxpayers from “footing the bill” for Europe’s defense that Bloomberg News described it as “a major talking point in the US presidential campaign.” But as recently as February, critics called convincing NATO members to raise their military spending “mission impossible.”
Well, try to picture the president’s signature coiffure on Tom Cruise.
After a White House meeting in late April, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte announced that dramatically increasing members’ defense budgets is “necessary.” NATO will finalize the new amount, probably a specific percentage of GDP, in June. Rutte even echoed the America-First president’s rhetoric, saying raising Europe’s contribution to the West’s defense spending would create “a NATO which is stronger, which is fairer, which is also more lethal in terms of being able to defend NATO territory” (emphasis added).
Were that not enough, on March 4 European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen also debuted a five-point plan to “ReArm Europe” by boosting defense spending by $840 billion. “This is Europe’s moment, and we must live up to it,” she said.
Aside from formal government funding, Politico reported that finance officials from six European nations held a secret meeting to consider forming “a supranational bank specifically for the purpose of jointly buying weapons” around the same time.
Trump has regularly clarified that he wants Europe to meet its own needs because America’s resources are needed elsewhere. Trump told a 2023 rally in Iowa he would begin to secure our borders by “moving thousands of troops currently stationed overseas” home. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth reiterated this in Brussels in February, saying “directly and unambiguously” that “stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe,” since we will begin “focusing on [the] security of our own borders.”
Rather than promising to send Ukraine “whatever it takes” as Joe Biden did, Hegseth promised in January to rush “whatever is needed” to the U.S. border, where approximately 10,000 service members are now stationed.
To make this permanent, in April the Pentagon began considering a Trump administration proposal to remove up to 10,000 U.S. soldiers stationed in Europe. That would still represent an increaseinAmerica’s military presence over Trump’s first term, since Joe Biden shipped 20,000 additional U.S. troops as close to the Ukrainian hostilities as possible, raising America’s military European footprint to an estimated 80,000 troops.
President Trump is pressing our NATO allies to invest five percent of their GDP on defense. But just 3.5 percent of GDP would let Europe replace America’s military involvement on the continent completely, according to a study from Bruegel and the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. (Also noteworthy, when it comes to Ukraine, according to the study “the numbers are small enough for Europe to replace the US fully” now.)
America’s commitment to furnish Europe’s defense is a Cold War relic Europe does not need and American taxpayers can no longer afford. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk recently highlighted the absurdity of the present arrangement: “500 million Europeans ask 300 million Americans to protect them from 140 million Russians.”
Yet liberals such as the Soros-funded Center for American Progress denounced Trump’s high-pressure tactics as an alleged “abdication of global leadership.” As usual, they are wrong.
President Trump’s threats to remove America’s military “security blankets have had a remarkable impact” on European leaders, according to Foreign Policy, not exactly a pro-Trump publication. European nations had been moving toward collective defense, but the president’s ultimatum galvanized “the speed and urgency of making things happen,” admitted Vaidotas Urbelis, defense policy director at Lithuania’s Ministry of Defense.
In fact, EU-wide military defense spending began a strong and sustained increase shortly after President Trump threatened to withdraw the United States from NATO and to slap higher tariffs against key NATO members during his first term. The legacy media didn’t give him any credit then, either, although Rutte’s predecessor, Jens Stoltenberg, confessed Trump’s “clear message… has helped, is having a real impact.”
America’s insistence on providing for Europe’s defense nearly four decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall has distorted both U.S. and European economies. As America’s national debt crests $36 trillion, our present defense challenges emanate from China and narcoterrorist criminal syndicates crossing our southern border. Yet the postwar consensus effectively forces middle-class Americans to underwrite ungrateful Europeans’ welfare state programs.
Meanwhile, European nations can divert military funding to feeding the continent’s sprawling welfare state. The EU spent 19 percent of its collective GDP on “social protection benefits” in 2023 — a 6.1 percent jump that does not include numerous single-payer healthcare systems, according to the European Union’s official statistical office, Eurostat.
“Expenditure on ‘social protection’ remained by far the most important” budget item “in 2023 in the EU and in all reporting EU countries,” reported Eurostat in March. “This reflects government’s core function to redistribute income and wealth, financed by compulsory payments.” It’s slouching toward socialism, plain and simple – and it’s only possible because Americans are paying for the defense of every European welfare state.
But are wealth redistribution and compulsory taxation really “government’s core function” – and perhaps more importantly, do they reflect American values? John Locke, the philosopher most quoted by America’s Founding Fathers, wrote in his massively influential Second Treatise on Government, “God hath certainly appointed government to restrain the partiality and violence of men.” The far less liberty-minded World Economic Forum concurred, “The oldest and simplest justification for government is… protecting citizens from violence.”
European leaders, comfortably snuggled inside a blanket of perpetual American military protection, forgot this lesson of nature and nature’s God for the last three decades. President Trump’s pressure may now allow the state of nature to return and priorities to adjust.
As a result, our European allies may soon discover not just a lost ability of self-defense, but also a more robust economy and stronger culture as well.
Rev. Ben Johnson is an Eastern Orthodox priest and editor at the Family Research Council’s news website, The Washington Stand. His views are his own.
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