You know, we're saying the same thing. The TLDR is that Europe systematically refused to spend even token amounts on defense, despite agreeing to spend more in international treaties (and then cheating on what little spending they do, e.g. "raising a bridge" for a tank to pass under it, as defense spending. Coincidentally doing this saved the maintenance spending that the government had unlawfully delayed. And most countries raised more bridges "for tanks" than they had tanks in the first place, and widened them to boot. This then was the promised defense spending ...)

They have such beautiful names for this: "The end of history". Yes, really. "The peace dividend". "The unipolar moment". "Military-to-civilian conversion".

The idea of all these is slightly different, but boils down to that because first the cold war ended and then communism "died" with the Soviet union, democracy would just win everywhere without any effort from anyone (or at least, no effort from anyone but the US). Because of this wars and militaries and ... would just end. Because why would you have these between trade-based democracy? Let's just leave some military rescue units in place and get rid of the rest!

In reality it was progress that ended. Or, at least, a lot of technological progress ended with the end of defense spending. For example, the EU (technically France), was the first nation with a starlink-like satellite network. Of course it was version 0.01beta of starlink, not remotely close to the capabilities of the current version, but it did do packet transmission over very long distances). I have helped write software to make it's use more tolerable. They let it wither and die, just like everyone since.