Posted by Dan Ewert : 5/04/2003 08:56:00 PM (Archive Link)
Jacques Chirac and company are quite clearly aiming for a new cold war. It’s really rather stunning. Says Chirac, “Quite naturally a multi-polar world is being created, whether one likes it or not. It's inevitable. For balance to exist, there will have to be a strong Europe. Relations between the European Union and the United States will have to be a partnership between equals.” If Europe doesn’t want to follow America’s lead on everything, that’s perfectly alright and it’s unlikely you’ll hear many people complaining. Chirac, however, is very purposely trying to set up Europe as a counter-weight to the U.S. Counter-weights oppose each other. The last big counter-weight to American power was the Soviet Union. Is that the sort of relationship he’s aiming for?

While Chirac has already enacted his plans of actively opposing the United States diplomatically, he is moving on to bigger, more concrete methods of opposition. He discovered that blustering in the UN didn’t stop America from taking on Iraq and he now wants to improve Europe’s military (first by forming an actual European military) to the point that it could actually cause the U.S. to think twice before taking actions it thinks are appropriate. This can only end badly. On the plus side, only France, German, Belgium, and Luxembourg are buying into the concept.

Even if more join, however, it remains to be seen just how effective the European Army can be. For the past 50 years, western Europe has primarily relied on the U.S. for its protection. This allowed the countries (other than the UK) to spend relatively little on national defense. As the socialist mentality took a greater hold over Europe, though, they started using the extra money to create nanny states with cradle to grave welfare, increasingly shorter work weeks, and a variety of other programs that consume tax money. Now that these policies are in place, they can hardly be cut down or cut altogether. No decent bureaucratic government program, especially one relating to public welfare (no matter how tenuously) can ever be done away with once it’s created. Because so much money is put towards these many projects, there’s simply not much left over for defense spending. This means that Europe as a whole will never be able to produce an appreciable military that is comparable to that of the United States, especially not to the point that it would be a viable challenger to the U.S. If the EU under France’s leadership was really interested in developing world-class armed forces, they’d have to stop expending so much of their resources on farm subsidies… and that’s not likely to happen too soon.