|
Steyn on US troop pullouts from Europe
A little more than half the original article...In the largest military realignment in years, Washington plans to withdraw 70,000 troops plus 100,000 family members and support personnel from overseas US bases. That means, for the most part, from Europe. This will undoubtedly be welcome news to the likes of Goran Persson, the Swedish prime minister, who famously declared that the purpose of the European Union is that "it's one of the few institutions we can develop as a balance to US world domination". It must surely be awfully embarrassing to be the first superpower in history to be permanently garrisoned by your principal rival superpower. But it's also grand news for those of us who've long argued that America's six-decade security guarantee to Europe has been a massive strategic error. The basic flaw in the Atlantic "alliance" is that, for almost all its participants, the free world is a free lunch: a defence pact of wealthy nations in which only one guy picks up the tab. I said as much in a Canadian column I wrote on 9/11, and a few weeks later the dominion's deputy prime minister, John Manley, conceded that his country was dining in the best restaurants without paying its way: as he put it, "You can't just sit at the G8 table and then, when the bill comes, go to the washroom." But in Nato, for generations, whenever the bill's come, there's been a stampede to the washroom, not just from the Canadians but the Continentals, too. Like any other form of welfare, defence welfare is a hard habit to break and profoundly damaging to the recipient. The peculiarly obnoxious character of modern Europe is a logical consequence of Washington's willingness to absolve it of responsibility for its own security. Our Defence Editor, John Keegan, once wrote that "without armed forces a state does not exist". That's true in a certain sense. But, in another, for wealthy nations who've found a sugar daddy, it's marvellously liberating. You're able to preen and pose on the world stage secure in the knowledge that nobody expects you to do anything about it. Posted by: Bulldog 2004-08-17 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=40808 |