Source: Eunomia
by Daniel Larison
“Reassurance kills burden-sharing. An ally that is fully confident that the U.S. will bail it out is an ally that is not going to devote more resources to protecting itself. American politicians can whine about Germany as much as they want, as J.D. Vance was doing this week, but unless they are prepared to demand significantly lower military spending and U.S. troop withdrawals from Europe they had better get used to allies that don’t do much more for their own security. You cannot enable security dependence for decades and then blame the dependents for the situation that your policies created. Allies aren’t going to ‘step up’ if the U.S. is always elbowing them out of the way to ‘lead.'” (03/07/23)
https://daniellarison.substack.com/p/its-time-to-stop-enabling-allied