What we support and defend

[Fuchs]

The world is not made safer by having a large standing peacetime Army, but it has enabled our allies to invest in their own economies while we subsidize their collective defense.

That's a popular myth among Americans.


Fact is that the U.S. military is so suboptimal for defence of U.S. allies an, so wasteful and so oversized that only a fraction of your military budget is really relevant to the security of U.S. allies.


Furthermore, implicit assumption that Allies would spend more if the U.S. spent less is in stark contrast with the demonstrated irrationality of military spending dimensioning in the world.
Greece has recently cut its military budget by much. I have no idea what threat disappeared, so I have to assume that the budget was irrationally oversized previously.

Governments appear to design the military budget in order to maximize it up to a certain pain threshold in most situations. Economy tanks? Pain threshold goes down, military spending goes down. no relation whatsoever with threats or allies. And so on.

The only area where the U.S. really substituted for its allies' military power is in regard to former axis great powers' (Germany, Italy, Japan) nuclear weapons. I am strongly assuming that this price was one that the U.S. paid happily and fully in its own interest.



Last but not least: The U.S. Army, three quarters of the U.S. Navy plus the last quarter of its amphibious warfare ships, two thirds of the U.S. Air Force, all U.S.Marines and even 90% of U.S. nukes could disappear today and the security situation of the European allies would not have changed substantially. It's all surplus.