Faulty reasoning signals

• Confirmation Bias - 13% (179 hits)
• Anchoring Bias - 0%
• Availability Heuristic - 0%
• Representativeness Heuristic - 0%
• Hindsight Bias - 0%
• Overconfidence Bias - 8.8% (121 hits)
• Framing Effect - 7.1% (98 hits)
• Loss Aversion - 2.4% (33 hits)
• Status Quo Bias - 0%
• Sunk Cost Effect - 0%
• Optimism Bias - 1.8% (25 hits)
• Pessimism Bias - 0%

Article text

European Rearmament Is a Trap

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that a plan by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to announce sweeping troop cuts in Europe had been blocked.

Per the WSJ:

The U.S., [Hegseth] planned to say, was preparing additional cuts to its forces in Europe that would go beyond the canceled deployment of an armored brigade to Poland and the earlier withdrawal of an infantry brigade from Romania...

But Hegseth’s proposal was nixed after it was shared with Marco Rubio—President Trump’s national-security adviser—and other senior officials.

To the European leaders now gathered in Ankara, Turkey for the annual NATO summit, this must have come as welcome news.

Ever since November 2024, the continent has been going into conniptions over the prospect of an American withdrawal.

Flattering and cajoling Trump has become a full-time job for Mark Rutte, NATO’s ingratiating secretary general who made headlines last year for literally calling our president “daddy.”

But sycophancy is not the Europeans’ only strategy.

Over the past several years, they have made a determined effort to leverage rearmament as a means of keeping us over there.

This was the goal of last year’s summit in The Hague, which culminated in a pledge to meet ambitious defense spending targets set by Washington: By 2035, every NATO member is supposed to spend 3.5 percent of its annual GDP on “core defense requirements,” and an additional 1.5 percent on a more ambiguous set of defense-adjacent priorities.

Much of the Ankara summit will be devoted to demonstrating the reality of this commitment, which Rutte has characterized as nothing less than a European “defense industrial revolution.”

Billions of dollars in new contracts are set to be announced, and progress toward the 5 percent benchmark will surely be touted (according to NATO, non-U.S. members collectively boosted defense spending last year by some $90 billion).

There is a domestic purpose in all this, of course.

In European capitals, rearmament is being sold as the realization of strategic autonomy, the Europeanization of NATO, and a prudent future-proofing of the continent’s security against an increasingly capricious and erratic United States.

Yet at the same time, it is the linchpin of a very deliberate effort to shore up the U.S. commitment to NATO.

This was Rutte’s pitch on his visit here last month.

(He even threw in a pocketbook argument, claiming that European defense orders were keeping nearly 200,000 Americans employed.)

And it is the reason he and other NATO leaders have very consciously attributed to Trump all of the credit for the 5 percent pledge.

Whether this ploy will work is still unclear.

Before jetting off to Turkey for the summit, President Donald Trump lambasted the alliance on Truth Social: “The United States spends more money on NATO than any other country, by far, to protect them, without getting any benefit from so doing.”

Nor does his fury over Europe’s failure to enter the Iran imbroglio appear fully spent.

But as the kiboshing of the Hegseth plan shows, Atlanticism still has a constituency in the White House.

And European rearmament is its ace in the hole.

That this should be so is largely the consequence of the dominance of what might be called the “freeriding” critique of NATO.

On this view, the problem isn’t so much the project of the alliance as its execution: Europeans haven’t been paying their fair share.

We Americans have been getting ripped off, sending our sons and daughters on extended deployments and burning hundreds of billions on exquisite weapons systems, while they enjoy 30-hour workweeks and lavish welfare states.

Trump, with his dealmaker’s instinct, has tended to make this his focus—a move that more than a few hawks in the cabinet, Congress, and even the Old World have welcomed.

For bundled into this critique are two assumptions about the conventional defense of Europe against Russia: 1) It is critical to U.S. national security; and 2) it is woefully under-resourced.

And as long as Europe will commit to the requisite spending, the U.S. will remain in some form (NATO 3.0 is the current branding).

Over the long haul, of course, some proponents of this position—Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby, for example—would like to pair it with a major drawdown (and, to Colby’s credit, his shop is doing what it can to make this happen).

Europe will spend more, and we can spend less.

Eventually, maybe, they can do it all.

Others—one suspects Marco Rubio is in this camp—may see European rearmament as a way of laundering an indefinite U.S. presence.

But either way, we are conditioning our strategy on European action.

Hence the need for the second, stronger objection—which is that keeping 80,000 American troops in Europe is not in the national interest.

The two arguments are not mutually exclusive.

But by giving too much weight to the freeriding critique, we risk losing sight of the more fundamental problem.

For the plain truth is that the U.S. military presence is not necessary to keep the Cossacks from waltzing into Warsaw, let alone Berlin or Paris.

This would be the case even in the absence of the current rearmament push, and even if Russia had demonstrable designs on European territory beyond Ukraine.

The non-U.S. members of NATO have a collective GDP that is over 10 times that of Russia.

There are over 600 million Europeans to about 140 million Russians.

Although its militaries are short on what the heads call “strategic enablers,” there is little doubt that they would make a conventional conflict with Russia so painful as to deter its commencement.

And indeed, when it comes to Russia, America’s aim should be to avoid conflict—not provoke it.

Our overarching interest, as last year’s National Security Strategy laid out, is to end the bloodletting in Ukraine and re-establish “strategic stability.”

A modus vivendi remains possible; even the prospect of a reverse Sino-Soviet split can still be discerned if one squints hard enough at the horizon.

But a massive American military presence in Europe is a stumbling block.

It reinforces Moscow’s paranoia regarding encirclement.

It bolsters the view that we cannot broker a lasting peace in Ukraine or a broader condominium in Eurasia.

It emboldens European hawks (especially those east of the Oder), on whose decision-making our own destiny becomes to some degree dependent.

It exposes American servicemembers to unnecessary dangers (there is, after all, a war on).

And it consumes scarce manpower and resources that could be put to better use elsewhere.

There is even a case to be made that juicing up European defense spending works against long term American interests.

Much of realist IR theory is preoccupied with something known as the security dilemma—essentially, the notion that efforts by one state or bloc to provide for its own security tend to trigger corresponding moves from rivals, fueling a cycle that leaves all participants feeling less secure and makes conflict more likely.

It is this dynamic, in fact, that best explains the outbreak of the Ukraine War.

So if we are truly interested in achieving “strategic stability,” encouraging a massive program of rearmament seems like precisely the wrong way to go about it.

Ultimately, though, the question of how the Europeans choose to divvy up their budgets is ancillary to the disposition of America’s conventional forces.

The thing to do is exactly what Hegseth reportedly proposed (and Rubio reportedly quashed).

Unilateral, unconditioned cuts to the U.S. military presence in Europe—ideally with an eye toward getting out entirely.

In Ankara this week, Trump and his team should therefore be wary of efforts to use rearmament as a carrot to keep us on the continent.

And in the hazy afterglow of America’s 250th, I would commend to them the imperishable wisdom of Thomas Jefferson.

“I have ever deemed it fundamental,” he wrote in an 1823 letter to James Monroe, “for the US never to take active part in the quarrels of Europe.

Their political interests are entirely distinct from ours.

Their mutual jealousies, their balance of power, their complicated alliances, their forms and principles of government, are all foreign to us.

They are nations of eternal war.”

If Europeans want to cut short their holiday from history—if they want to become again “nations of eternal war”—that’s their affair.

But kindly leave us out of it.