Europe’s Own Wars
President Trump’s announcement, which followed a dramatic live confrontation in the White House on Feb 28, 2025 with Ukrainian Prime Minister Vladimir Zelenskyy, that the American President would suspend all aid to Ukraine, caused shock waves around the world.
This was followed by President Trump’s declaration that the United States would no longer pay disproportionately for Europe’s defense in NATO, and that he would not defend his NATO allies if they did not pay their fair share. “‘”It’s common sense, right,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “If they don’t pay, I’m not going to defend them. No, I’m not going to defend them.”‘
The President’s supporters, especially those in the United States, cheered these moves. They object to what looks at times like a global shell game that enriches all who collude with it, with this collusion coming at the cost, as the President pointed out, of two thousand Russian and Ukrainian soldiers’ lives a week. These Americans see our refusal to overpay for our role in NATO as being a long-overdue stop to a multi-billion-dollar, decades-long gravy train that has sustained, since 1949, what are in fact, now, wealthy societies.
NATO’s founding origins in the misery, fear and rubble of post-World War II Europe, made sense at that time. How did the agreement start?
“The result of these extensive [1949] negotiations was the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949. In this agreement, the United States, Canada, Belgium, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United Kingdom agreed to consider attack against one an attack against all, along with consultations about threats and defense matters. This collective defense arrangement only formally applied to attacks against the signatories that occurred in Europe or North America; it did not include conflicts in colonial territories. … Later in 1949, President Truman proposed a military assistance program, and the Mutual Defense Assistance Program passed the U.S. Congress in October, appropriating some $1.4 billion dollars for the purpose of building Western European defenses.”
But that was then.
The conditions that led us to consider it useful to join forces with Europe, and to agree for us to defend one another, still apply, in a world full of threats and anti-Western sentiment. But I’ll argue that the conditions that led the US to assume a disproportionate share of the financial burden, do not exist any longer, and that President Trump is right to course-correct on our disproportionate payments to Europe.
President Trump says that the US has spent $300-350 billion dollars on defense of Ukraine. The BBC argues that it is much less — $119.7 billion. But still, the outsize amount that America has provided is stunning to consider, in relation to Europe’s far more limited contributions. The BBC’s chart below shows that our $119.7 billion contrasts sharply with France’s $5.1 billion and the EU’s $51.3 billion. Add to this disparity the fact that the vast majority of Europe’s funds heading to Ukraine, arrive in the form of loans, not grants, as opposed to the outright wealth transfers made by the United States. In other words, in theory at least, the money with which Europe is parting, is not meant to be lost to European lender nations forever.
European elites, of course, see these moves on the part of President Trump
Article from LewRockwell
LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
