Europe Is A ‘Free Rider’ On Defense

The Secretary General of NATO touched on one of the more sensitive aspects of the ongoing crisis in Ukraine during a speech at a security conference in Slovakia today. Because Europe has been fairly peaceful in recent decades, and because European NATO states are under the American defense umbrella, they don’t need to dedicate all that much of their resources to their own security. This is partly a legacy of the Cold War period, when the U.S. subsidized the defense of European “frontline states” that were potentially threatened by Soviet aggression…

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