Your social programs aren't worth a damn if you don't have the ability to defend yourself.
Arguing that the US wouldn't let it happen is stupid. Last time the US saved us it took 5 years for it to make that decision (for which we are eternally grateful) and in those 5 years the agressor had killed almost an entire subculture of our society in gas chambers and put us through one of the worst food shortages in our history.
I'm not saying we should make an effort to go all Israel and build an army worthy of Mordor, but there's no shame in simply admitting we are weak and depend on our diplomacy to survive.
The social programs really are worth a damn though. From my perspective (easy as a Dutch person) countries like The Netherlands is what we're fighting for. It's simply civilization, a world where we don't have to behave like animals to get what we need. Take away your social structure, and you take away civilization from the less wealthy. And the result is obvious, only the hyenas and vultures make it out, and they'll be the ones perfect for a job as Congress man/woman.
Take back your insult to Israelis! Mordor lost.
>there's no shame in simply admitting we are weak and depend on our diplomacy to survive.
Not true. You're an American protectorate.
It's not an insult. Mordor only lost because they depended on the power of the ring to unite their armies. Only when it was destroyed their armies fell into chaos. If it were up to the military power of Mordor Middle-Earth would surely have fallen.
> Not true. You're an American protectorate.
The whole idea of being a protectorate is that you're weak and are depending on your allies to survive, which is exactly what I'm saying.
Fair enough.
>It's not an insult. Mordor only lost because they depended on the power of the ring to unite their armies. Only when it was destroyed their armies fell into chaos. If it were up to the military power of Mordor Middle-Earth would surely have fallen.
There's also the fact that Mordor was evil.
You're saying Israel's military is not good enough for an evil power? I didn't know alignments had strength requirements.
It's funny talking to Europeans about this though, because when we rush to the rescue of other countries, like South Vietnam, you call us warmongers.
But that's of course not what it's for. It's for bullying the entire world and to provide massive opportunities for lobbying and pork barrel politics.
Not something to be proud of, really.
1. Protect the United States
2. Provide mutual defense to Canada, the entire continent of Europe, and South Korea.
3. Defend counties like Japan and Iceland, which are treaty-bound not to have militaries of their own.
By tradition and policy, but not necessarily binding treaty or law, the US military also has the following missions:
4. Protect the entire Western Hemisphere from foreign aggression (the Monroe Doctrine).
5. Protect the economic supply chain of the developed world, particularly the oil supply.
6. Occasionally intervene, militarily, in humanitarian crises (this goes back and forth; yes in Somalia, no in Rwanda, yes in Yugoslavia).
7. Provide purely humanitarian assistance in case of natural disasters (the military has tons of logistical ability that's occasionally repurposed to provide food and water to e.g. Haiti whenever it gets hit by a hurricane).
8. Keep the world's sea lanes open for shipping (this is kind of a shared responsibility with every major naval power, but we're practically the only one left).
Also, there are non-functional requirements to the US military, driven by purely political forces that almost no potential US enemy has:
9. Minimize friendly casualties. Spare no expense to accomplish this.
10. Minimize civilian casualties.
11. Maintain good PR so they don't look like bullies.
In other words, the US has to bear the bulk of the entire world's military requirements, and not just be able to win wars, but win them in absolute routs that are nearly unprecedented in world history. If anything, the US military is undersized for its current requirements. It's oversized if you're looking at requirement #1, but that's a ridiculous understatement of the actual requirements, or any realistic set of requirements, for the US military.
Picture zero national debt.
If the goal is simply "defend ourselves", a strong navy is all the US needs, plus a few nukes to stay in the nuke club. Any aggressor with a large enough army and navy to take on the US would, again, be seen coming a mile away.
A constant investment in technical capabilities and human capabilities is needed to defend against future threats from aggressive actors.
Those investments require money from tax payers.
Congress is more interested in "investing" in tanks the Army doesn't want[1] than flying vehicles and nanotechnology.
[1] http://www.military.com/daily-news/2014/12/18/congress-again...
The global military environment is dynamic and evolving and our defense plans need to reflect that reality.
We end having to protect Europe because we are the only ones who understand defense of one's liberty should be the first priority.
And since then the US has mostly abused that position of powers with silly wars in Vietnam, or in Iraq fighting the guy twice that they funded and armed, as well as all the support for dictators like Pinochet or the overthrow of democratic secular governments in say Iran, anyway the list goes on and on I'm sure you're familiar.
I'm certainly glad the US came and helped 70 years ago, but this notion that the US is the world's moral police force and we all live in safety because of it good will is bit myopic. It's a much more contextualized story than that.
It's partially true, absolutely, no denying that US hegemony keeps others from employing military opportunism. But that has more to do with US interests in keeping geopolitical control for its own benefit than US sacrifice out of benevolence.
And so the notion then, that the US commands global power and Europe doesn't try to fight it or compete with it by investing in a military that wouldn't make us any safer, but SPENDS MONEY ON THE QUALIFY OF PEOPLES LIVES is hard to respect, while cooperating with the US in NATO and supporting the US in legitimate wars (say when Iraq invaded Kuwait, or say fighting the Taliban (that the US funded and armed in the first place, by the way) in Afghanistan), is ridiculous. Yeah I put that in caps because you didn't seen to grasp how this is basically the best thing you can do, spending money on your own people.
I mean, what do you want, for the EU to pay some kind of tithe to the US for protection? The US military isn't that big because it's so kind, it's big because being the world superpower is extremely beneficial. There's no country that large that's anywhere close as rich. It has little to do with liberty.
And yeah I'm content with the US having that power and wealth, and to spend my tax euros on improving the lives of me and my peers.
> We end having to protect Europe because we are the only ones who understand defense of one's liberty should be the first priority.
That's why Snowden is such a hero in the US right? Especially with the military who just want to bring liberty to all, those guys must love the way he showed of this massive three letter organisation that makes constant attacks on all our liberties. Give me a break with the 'liberty' rhetoric already.
In short, yes we Europeans value liberty, no we're not the world superpower we were in the colonial era and spend more on our citizens than on being a superpower, and yes that has put western europe at the top when it comes to rankings and metrics for standard of life (including metrics of liberty, say freedom of the press? My country ranks 2nd, the US? 46. Have fun with your liberty. Similar story for say civil liberties or corruption, you don't score anywhere near the top 10 on liberty metrics) And we're generally quite content about that.
In the language of my previous post, you largely seem to be saying, "yes Europe gets some benefit by defecting against the US in a farmer's dilemma, but it's not like the US is cooperating out of benevolence!" Of course it isn't. The one farmer doesn't irrigate to help the other, she does so because she wants her crops not to die.
"And the US is doing such a bad job of irrigation! Sometimes it digs ditches that make no sense, and one time it flooded our fields and we had to step in and help fix it!" Sure, that's a valid criticism of the US, but it's hardly a defense of defection.
(You might argue that the US doesn't need to spend that much on military. But you didn't argue that. You argued that Europe doesn't need to spend as much on military as the US, because the US does.)
[1] I could have sworn the farmer's dilemma was a standard term, but I can't find it on google. If two farmers have fields next to each other, and one of them irrigates, then both of them benefit. They can split the work, or one can say "I'm not going to bother. What are you going to do, let your crops die, just to spite me?" So the second one irrigates.
Then people look at the first farmer and see that he runs a successful farm without working as hard as the second, and they assume that she must be doing something wrong.