Relying on the US for military protection allowed many European countries to save billions of their own money for years. Undoing this going to be very, very expensive and there is no good understanding where all this money is supposed come from, the main idea right now seems to be massive amounts of debt, which can get very ugly in the long run. It absolutely needs to happen, but I can clearly see why many politicians are not thrilled about the whole thing
Looking at defense spending, I do not think it saved so much money. It mostly ensured that the US would be the only major nuclear power in the West - so the "military protection" was more something like a moat for the nuclear monopoly.
And monopolies are something the US loves (think of big tech, Comcast, etc.) and the EU dislikes ;-)
With the US stepping away from its monopoly, it is only a matter of time until more European states will enter the nuclear protection market.
> the main idea right now seems to be massive amounts of debt, which can get very ugly in the long run
The economy, unlike one's personal finances, is a circle. Unless the Europeans buy abroad, all that money is going to stay in Europe, circulating and stimulating the economy.
Even if it's "only" arms, spending it to maintain industry is way better than many alternatives. Manufacturing infrastructure and lots of skilled jobs and workers, sounds good to me to have.
"Debt" is just a number, and if you are in a strong enough position you can always change policies around the purely virtual "money".
Finance/money is supposed to be the virtual control system, and the real world thing it is supposed to help to steer is everything real and what we actually care about. In all other areas we would never accept that the control system becomes the target!! The target is always the real thing, and we will adjust the control system to achieve the desired outcomes.
Not so with finance! It has taken on a life of its own, and the vast majority of people will gladly and unthinkingly subordinate the real world to its whims. Something that makes at least a little bit of sense for the individual makes no sense for the economy though.
We have people in charge who know all and care about the control system first of all, the real world outcomes be damned. If the control system says we need high unemployment and homelessness and less high paying jobs there is nothing we can do, because the purely virtual human-invented finance system is the god. But hey, religion has been on the decline for a long time at least in the modern world, right (/s)?
> which can get very ugly in the long run
Only when the people in charge think like described.
>Even if it's "only" arms, spending it to maintain industry is way better than many alternatives. Manufacturing infrastructure and lots of skilled jobs and workers, sounds good to me to have.
As Eisenhower warned, every Euro spent turning steel into an artillery shell is one NOT spent turning steel into high-speed rail. Every worker in a factory building armored vehicles is a worker NOT being re-trained to be an elder caregiver for Europe's aging demographics. There are immense trade-offs that come with dumping capital, both human and material, into making Europe's war machine rise from the grave.
>"Debt" is just a number, and if you are in a strong enough position you can always change policies around the purely virtual "money".
Key phrase there is "if you are in a strong enough position"....and Europe isn't. Because it cut itself off from cheap Russian energy imports, the entire industrial sector is no longer cost-competitive. With the exception of highly-specialized difficult-to-copy stuff like ASML or maybe Carl Zeiss optics, etc... the European economy writ large is in a really weak position compared to the cost efficiency of China or compared to the still-large (but diminishing) political-military leverage of the US. Also, Europe looks like it is getting closer and closer to handing over the frozen Russian assets in Euroclear to Ukraine. You can expect a massive capital flight from Chinese, Mid-East, or Global South investors if that ever happens.
That's exactly the same reasoning we heard during Covid, injecting massive amounts of money into the economy was supposed to be perfectly safe and even a good thing. Definitely not supposed to lead to any inflation. Guess what happened next.
The argument during COVID wasn't that it was "perfectly safe", but that it was better than the alternative of leaving all the people living paycheck to paycheck get laid off and starve.
People just have short memories and see the bad outcome we did get (high inflation) and not the bad outcomes we avoided (unmitigated COVID, economic collapse).
