Americans and our allies need to grapple with the reality: We don't and won't have a military big enough to increase commitments in Europe *and* have a chance of restoring our edge in Asia against China. We *must* prioritize. Arguments that don't reckon with that are misleading.
We should look for ways to deter Russian aggression into Ukraine. But reflexive calls for bigger US military commitment to NATO can't be part of it. We know we're on a losing trajectory in Asia unless we sharply focus there. The solution: Europeans taking up their own defense.
The fact is that 1) Asia is much more important than Europe. Asia will be 50%+ of global GDP. Europe will be 10% within 20 years. 2) China is a *much* bigger challenge than Russia. PRC is 1/5-1/4 of global GDP. Russia a fraction of that.
There's absolutely no good reason why Europeans - above all Germans - shouldn't provide the bulk of their own conventional defense. They're fully capable of it. European NATO dwarfs Russia in GDP. And it was what Eisenhower and Marshall envisioned when creating NATO.
Right now we have a situation that is both strategically untenable and inequitable, in which the US is expected to shoulder the main burden of European NATO defense. Can't go on. And if something can't go on, it probably eventually won't.
Either we'll shift gracefully toward Asia, giving Europe a soft landing (maybe too late for that). Or there'll be a shock in Asia and we will have an East of Suez moment, when we'll have to dramatically cut other commitments to prioritize Asia.
jstor.org/stable/43209559
jstor.org/stable/43209559
This shows that where the US *really* needs creative strategies is in Europe and the Middle East. We can't go on auto-pilot but we also can't just ignore them. We need strategies that fully account for constraints but have a plausible way to meet our (more modest) objectives.
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