We Europeans owe our cushy, cosseted lifestyle to US workers. By Matthew Syed in The London Times.
Take the period from 2010 to 2025, when both Russia and China pretty much tripled defence spending in real terms, a stunning period of rearmament.
America could see with absolute clarity the risks on the near horizon and desperately sought to persuade European nations to take care of an area they dominated in economic terms, while watching military spending wither away and welfare states continue their inexorable growth. It’s an unprecedented anomaly that our continent is menaced by a nation — Russia — with just 10 per cent of its GDP. …
Our welfare states have effectively been subsidised by American taxpayers — some of the hardest-working and most productive in the world — for so long that we’ve come to believe we deserve them.
As one Labour backbencher put it: “Welfare is a human right.” I almost hesitate to break it to such people, but there are no human rights without the military power to resist those who would destroy them, a truth absolutely grasped in Washington but not at all in London, Paris, Brussels, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the state bureaucracies and much of the judiciary. …
Australia, like Europe, is completely dependent on global trade and therefore the US Navy:
Unlike America, China and Russia, whose economies have a modicum of self-sufficiency, Europe is utterly beholden to the global free trade that powered the postwar boom. Without intricate supply chains to furnish it with parts, electronics and chemicals, Sweden (for example) would face economic collapse, turning its generous welfare state into a joke.
Yet global free trade doesn’t happen by magic (or because of the human rights convention); it happens because hard power is employed to patrol shipping lanes, protect freedom of navigation and deter piracy. [Like in the Straits of Hormuz.]
And who has borne this cost? Pre-eminently America and its huge naval fleet, first deployed by Jefferson in 1801 when the frigates President, Philadelphia and Essex were sent under the command of Commodore Richard Dale to tackle the Barbary corsairs off Tripoli. …
Sweden would have no welfare state, indeed no state at all, without the implicit American military umbrella. …
Generous welfare states are testaments not to European socialism but to the American capitalism that funded them, without thanks or even acknowledgment.
Europeans are not happy about the Trump administration’s insistence that they take primary responsibility for their own defense, but to my knowledge, not a single prominent European politician says Trump is wrong. On the contrary, they admit that he is right. …
America’s military prowess has enabled and subsidized Europe’s welfare states. Which is too bad: the welfare state isn’t just unaffordable, it is corrosive of civilized values. …
Some European countries, like Poland, seem to be avoiding the downward spiral into which Britain, France and Germany, among others, have fallen.