I was catching up on podcast listening this morning and heard John Cochrane, on a recent episode of GoodFellows (from the Hoover Institution), talking about Europe’s reaction to Trump’s foreign policy moves.
Cochrane said that Europeans were talking about strategic autonomy but noted that he who pays picks the restaurant. “And we may one day look back fondly on when we were the world’s policeman for just 3 percent of GDP,” he said.
Cochrane is right that if Europe really does pick up more of its own defense bill, it will have more say in how it’s used. But the continent’s underinvestment is so acute that even a decade of massive defense-spending hikes across Europe may only raise Europe to the child-seat level of NATO partnership. It matters greatly how much of this military spending is effective in giving Europe battlefield capacity; much of it could be wasted on making the European military green, or making it woke.
But let’s say they do it. The fact is that 3 percent of GDP is no longer sufficient to act as the world’s policeman, even if that were desirable. In 1960 the U.S. accounted for 40 percent of global GDP. That dropped to 21 percent by 2012 and has recovered only to 26 percent since then. In the medium term — while China’s peaceful rise hopefully turns into a demographically driven peaceful fall — we need others to pick up the costs of global security.