Unmighty Europe

From New York to Munich this week, Europeans griped about American "unilateralism" in the war on terror. We heard it constantly ourselves at the World Economic Forum. In reply, we'd ask U.S. allies to ponder this fact: The $48 billion increase in annual military spending that President Bush proposed yesterday is twice the entire German defense budget.

The cries of "unilateralist" were especially pained at this weekend's Wehrkunde conference, the annual confab of global defense ministers in Munich. Many European participants took exception to Deputy U.S. Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz's comments that in the wars of the future "there will not be a single coalition but rather different coalitions for different missions." What about NATO, many wondered? Does it still matter?

The answer, alas, is that NATO matters less and less, as the war in Afghanistan has shown. With the exception of the Brits and the Turks, Europeans have been less relevant to waging that war than the Uzbeks and the Kazaks and the Pakistanis. But a main reason is that Europeans themselves don't want to spend what it takes to be relevant. Instead they delegate their security to U.S. aircraft and resources, as they did in Bosnia, all the while griping that the Yanks aren't consulting them enough. Sorry, friends, you can't have it both ways.

PARTNER OR PYGMY? 2001 defense spending as a % of GDP Belgium 1.3% Canada 1.1% Denmark 1.5% France 2.6% Germany 1.5% Italy 1.9% Netherlands 1.6% Spain 1.2% United Kingdom 2.4% United States* 3.5% *2003 (proposed) Source: NATO

We don't mean to single out the Germans. They're actually big spenders compared with other Europeans. As the nearby table shows, just about every European country spends less than 2% of GDP on defense. Britain and France both spend more. But compare that with the U.S., where Mr. Bush's proposal for Fiscal Year 2003 would devote 3.5% of its GDP to defense. In simple dollar terms, the U.S. spent twice as much on defense last year as every other NATO member combined.

With the exception of the British, Europe's military forces are antique, often unable to communicate with their American counterparts, much less fight with them. They lack such essentials of modern warfare as smart bombs and stealth aircraft. And don't even think about the Predator drones and Global Hawk aircraft that were so successful in seeing targets from the skies of Afghanistan.

Europe has been pledging to modernize its military for more than a decade, but it never seems to happen. The 1999 NATO Defense Capabilities Initiative went nowhere. The European "rapid reaction" force, which was supposed to be operational next year, remains a pipe dream. A military cargo plane planned by eight European nations is having a hard time getting off the drawing board. In short, the capabilities gulf is growing wider.

No less an authority than NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson has been making the rounds of capitals warning about Europe's dangerously low spending on defense. "Mighty Europe," he warned in a speech in London last month, "remains a military pygmy." "Unless the Europeans do better militarily in NATO and the EU, their influence in the Euro-Atlantic area and more widely will remain limited."

Mr. Bush's proposed increase is easier politically because he has a domestic consensus to fight the war on terrorism. But that also stems in part from the U.S. President's willingness to lead. His budget (see editorial) proposes a tradeoff between domestic and defense spending that European elites refuse to even bring up with their electorates, much less propose. Until they do, they lack the standing to fret about "unilateral" America.

Updated February 5, 2002 12:01 a.m. EST