Breaking With an Outdated Status Quo

There is no good reason why wealthy European allies shouldn’t shoulder more responsibility, and the only way that the U.S. can goad them into doing that is by making itself relatively scarce.

Stephen Wertheim, Josh Shifrinson, and Emma Ashford respond to Mike Mazarr’s Foreign Affairs essay on why America supposedly “needs” Europe:

In reality, countries on both sides of the Atlantic would benefit from transferring most of the responsibility for defending Europe to Europeans themselves, allowing the United States to shift to a supporting role. The result is more likely to be a balanced and sustainable transatlantic partnership than a transatlantic divorce. The alternative, meanwhile, is to stick with a deteriorating status quo that suppresses Europe’s defense capabilities and asks ever more of Washington.

The core of the disagreement between Mazarr and his critics is that they think burden-sharing in Europe is very important and long overdue and he sees no reason to bother with it. For whatever it’s worth, I think the critics make the far stronger case, and they don’t have to fall back on invoking credibility to do it. Of course, I am more likely to sympathize with pro-restraint arguments, but that is because these arguments are trying to grapple with a changing world in an imaginative and constructive way instead of remaining wedded to ideas that were already outdated thirty years ago.