Stardate 20020925.1709

(On Screen): I begin to understand why it is that whenever I use the term "European" in a way which obviously includes the UK, I get letters from British writers to the effect that the UK isn't really part of Europe. It's not just the physical separation of the channel, it's also apparently quite a separation culturally, politically and militarily.

Jane Galt made a comment about the military capability of Germany within the context of a discussion of the effect that an American military pullout from Germany might have. One of her points was that it would affect Germany economically because they'd be forced to increase defense spending quite a lot to offset the loss on a military level. In response, she received angry letters from German readers claiming that their military in its current form was more than capable of defending the nation without American help from any plausible threat for the forseeable future.

I myself think that an American pullout would cause economic damage to Germany, but not for that reason, and in fact I doubt that there would be a significant increase in German defense spending as a result of an American pull-out. On the contrary, it's really quite unlikely.

During the Cold War, there was a joke around that the purpose of NATO was to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down. One of the dirty little secrets about the Cold War which a lot of people know but few like to talk about is that part of the reason our troops were there was to prevent yet another resurgence of German militarism. After WWI, certain treaties had supposedly restricted Germany's ability to produce a military force, and yet twenty years later, there Germany was yet again starting another major war which cost yet more millions of lives and devastated most of Europe. Part of the reason for the American occupation was to keep that from happening again.

And even the Germans recognized this, and to some extent were glad. Because of the American occupation, it meant that Germany's neighbors didn't need to feel quite so afraid, and over the course of fifty years you had progressively greater cross investment and cultural mixing and ultimately the seeds of the EU, and all of that because all Germany's neighbors (especially France) knew that if Germany began yet again to get hostile and pugnacious, that the Americans were right there, ready to stomp on them.

That's the reason why, when the Cold War ended, we didn't bring our troops home. They no longer were needed to stop the Warsaw Pact, but they were still needed to reassure Germany's neighbors that we would prevent any new pugnaciousness.

The Germans benefited from this, too, and when you hear German rhetoric about how important American friendship has been for the last fifty years, it's ironic that a great deal of that was Germany's need, politically, to keep being militarily occupied by America.

If the US truly does pull out of that area, not merely by moving its units into neighboring nations who are more inclined to cooperate (e.g. Poland and the Czech Republic) but actually pull them out of Europe entirely, then the result of a German military buildup would be a political double whammy: The Americans would be gone, not available to crunch a resurgence of German militarism, and the Germans would have built back up and would have the military force in place in case of a negative political turn in Germany back towards nationalism and hostility to neighbors.

Germany's leaders certainly know this, so a significant increase in German military spending and a buildup of German military power is extremely unlikely in the event of a substantial American withdrawal. Ironically, what that would actually force would be a French buildup, to replace the offsetting force that the Americans would no longer be providing. And it would also have the overall effect of putting a small amount of sand in nearly all the intra-European diplomatic gears, because of a new, subliminal, resurgent fear of Germany.

I may as well say that I think that the chance of such resurgence in Germany is low, but it isn't zero, and the consequences of it would be profound. It isn't something that leaders in other European nations could just ignore in hopes that it would just go away.

This at a time when Europe (not counting the UK) overall has been making massive reductions in military spending for years, mostly so that the money could be shifted into social spending. In the event of an American military withdrawal from Europe, would Europe overall have to increase its own military spending (not counting issues related to nervousness about Germany)?

Not in the sense of needing a force to oppose an invasion. For the moment and for the forseeable future (i.e. about the next ten years) I don't see any credible threat of major ground offensive from outside against Western Europe which would actually require more of a military capability than they already have. But there are longer range issues which I believe do mean that Europe does need to substantially increase its military spending.

First, there is the issue of expansion of the EU to the east, with nations as far away as Romania and Georgia expressing interest in joining. Those nations want to join the EU in part because they hope that it would result in economic expansion, but also in part because they are trying for as much entanglement with Western Europe as possible so as to deter any possibility