'Less unpleasant but not fundamentally different': Transatlantic divides after Biden win

[Klaralven]

After Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda exposed longstanding strains in US-Europe relations, Joe Biden’s victory has prompted a Franco-German row over Emmanuel Macron’s vision of “strategic autonomy” – while transatlantic tensions simmer over tech taxes and extraterritorial US law.

The US president excoriated European countries’ failure to pay for its own defence in stark terms: “We cannot continue to pay for the military protection of Europe while the NATO states are not paying their fair share and living off the fat of the land,” he said. “We have been very generous to Europe and it is now time for us to look out for ourselves.”

This was not Donald Trump but John F. Kennedy, speaking privately at a National Security Council meeting in January 1963. American chagrin about low European defence spending goes back to the Cold War. But the US restrained its vexation while the USSR posed an existential threat and its Iron Curtain hung over the old continent.

In 2011, then US Defence Secretary Robert Gates warned that ties to Europe risked fading along with memories of the Cold War, as his boss, former US president Barack Obama, pivoted to Asia. “If current trends in the decline of European defence capabilities are not halted and reversed, future US political leaders – those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me – may not consider the return on America's investment in NATO worth the cost,” Gates said.

Obama pilloried European “free riders” in a 2016 interview with The Atlantic. He singled out former French president Nicolas Sarkozy and former British prime minister David Cameron for relying on the US in the 2011 Libya intervention. “I had more faith in the Europeans, given Libya’s proximity, being invested in the follow-up,” Obama said.

In this context, Trump’s insults, tariffs and troop withdrawal from Germany can be seen as a lurid culmination of friction between the US and Europe.

https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20201201-less-unpleasant-but-not-fundamentally-different-transatlantic-divides-after-biden-win

[thucythucy]

1. An argument could be made that Europeans

are being strategic, and rational, in how they spend their tax dollars, whereas the US has a grotesquely inflated "defense" budget that bears no relation to our actual military needs.

I forget the exact figure now, but we spend more on the military than the next half dozen nations combined. And most of those are our allies.

Perhaps American resentment wouldn't be such an issue if we cut back our military spending to a more reasonable figure.