From Welfare to Warfare

The leaders of NATO admit that they must pay for their own military defence but seem reluctant to put their commitments into practice. By John Lloyd.

NATO’s new Secretary General Mark Rutte and outgoing NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg during a handover ceremony at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium on 1 October 2024. Shutterstock.

Presidents of the United States have been generally kind to Western Europe since the end of World War II. They have been especially kind to the United Kingdom: partly because it was mainly from the UK’s loins that the US sprang and partly because of their common participation in the 20th century’s wars against a belligerent and imperialist Germany. (Winston Churchill remains an American hero.) In the post-war period, other European states and leaders—even the often anti-American General Charles de Gaulle—also at least tacitly acknowledged the primacy of the US within a West united by fear of the Soviet Union.

Within that commonality, the US was not only first among non-equals, but the only state with a large military budget and efficient armed forces. The UK and France had and retain nuclear weapons but have since shrunk their conventional forces even further. By 2017, soon after President Emmanuel Macron first took office, then-Chief of General Staff General Pierre de Villiers was warning that “he could not guarantee the sustainability of the defence model that could ensure the security of France.” In the years since, the once extensive French military presence in Francophone Africa has also been radically downsized—a shift which the British had already made.