U.S. President Barack Obama has come under fire from Atlanticists for supposedly abandoning America's allies, such as those in Europe. He is criticized for not doing enough to stand up to Russia's Vladimir Putin. This criticism comes too easy; it is Europe itself that isn't doing enough, and Obama is right to push it along.
In his famous Long Telegram of 1946 to the U.S. State Department, George Kennan painted a dark picture of the Russian-led Soviet Union. In an 8,000-word missive that can be read here, Kennan wrote that the Russian people have always been surrounded by enemies -- or considered themselves to be -- a condition that over the centuries led them to believe that disagreements will ultimately be settled by conflict.
Whether Kennan's observations from 1946 still describe today's Russia is up for debate, but there is no question that former Soviet territories and satellites remain in complete agreement. Eastern European nations such as Poland and the Baltic States have increased their defense spending. These nations have either already gone beyond the NATO directive that members should spend at last 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense, or be on their way to achieving that goalpost.
How different the story is in Western Europe, which comprises those nations that in name are the closest friends of the United States within NATO. In a number of these nations, defense spending has actually dropped or has stayed flat since the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis, in which Moscow used unorthodox tactics to annex Crimea and wreak havoc in Eastern Ukraine.
These nations pay lip service to countering Vladimir Putin's brutal power plays, but they seem unwilling to actually put their money where their mouth is. Instead, the French, German, British, and Dutch governments heed their voters, who seem more concerned with the economy, and with the upkeep of their health care and social systems. Although Russia's armed interventions have made defense spending a little less unpopular, polls show that no serious party in a Western European country would today win elections on a platform of higher defense spending.
This irks Washington. For years the U.S. government has been lobbying its friends to increase their spending on defense. Washington wants these countries to take up more of NATO's tasks while the United States pivots to Asia, where it is quite rightly worried about Chinese adventurism. But it appears the capitals of Western Europe aren't convinced by talk. So maybe they need to be confronted by facts.
Obama materially showing that the United States will no longer simply come to Europe's rescue may finally convince Western European governments that they need to do more to strengthen their defense - especially now that their Eastern European allies are upping their game, despite financial difficulties of their own.
If Putin and his cronies are the kind of conflict-prone Russians Kennan described in his Long Telegram -- and Putin's actions so far seem to point in this direction -- then Europe needs to be able to bare its own teeth in response.
(AP photo)
