Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy blasted his European allies Thursday for what he portrayed as the continent’s slow, fragmented and inadequate response to Russia’s invasion nearly four years ago and its continued international aggression.
Addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Zelenskyy listed a litany of grievances and criticisms of Europe that he said have left Ukraine at the mercy of Russian President Vladimir Putin amid an ongoing U.S. push for a peace settlement.
You are not getting the full picture. NATO by design used to exist to keep Europe small militarily under US supervision, because the US wanted to avoid another Nazi-like regime from taking hold in Europe. That was the deal post WW2. The EU doesn’t grow their armies to the point they could reasonably threaten the US, and they provide that necessary protection instead. So the US inherently didn’t want the EU to have too much defense spending, and to follow their lead so they could keep control. And with how weak Europe was after WW2, they could not really refuse nor reject that.
In return, EU specialized in trade and manufacturing, something the US wanted. Hence why they are such big trading partners still. It’s not like the US was just snoozing at the wheel for more than two decades as defense spending went down. There was always caution (and honestly, the EU shouldn’t have ignored this) that more defense was going to be needed, but the status quo was always by mutual consent, as the US also benefited from essentially it’s own continent wide production factory while it could do what it does best at home (it’s military). And until Russia invaded Ukraine, nobody could even begin to sell the idea of more defense spending to the people, as that would too have increased prices for the US. And the US could have escalated if more defense spending was a dealbreaker to them, but they did not until Trump, because it would have just been a bad change without the hindsight of 2021.
Frankly, this notion that the EU took advantage of the US is really just MAGA propaganda. The same way Trump is now making the despicable claim that EU soldiers didn’t die enough for when the US, the single country that ever invoked NATO’s article 5, invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. When the US under Trump realized they could just not uphold their part of the system in place, as Trump does not understand diplomacy and soft power, that’s what he did, and defense spending was just the easy excuse if you ignore all that historical context.