America’s power and worldwide influence depend largely on its military capacity to protect sea routes, support its allies and maintain regional balances. To accomplish this role over the past decade, America has reduced social services and expanded military capabilities to a far greater extent than has Europe. The old continent, on the other hand, built an over-the-top wealth-redistribution system while cutting back on military outlays, trusting that U.S. security policy would pull everyone else’s chestnuts out of the fire as it did in the Balkans.
Both sides of the Atlantic must now find a new balance. In view of a crumbling American infrastructure and an enormous accumulation of debt, Americans no longer understand why they must pay 75 percent of NATO’s costs and supply the majority of troops to foreign lands when Europe has a larger population.
The Libyan mission emphatically emphasized that imbalance once again. The European nations with the most ambitious foreign policies, i.e. France and Great Britain, have already reached the limit of their capabilities and are running out of ammunition after just a few months against a far weaker enemy. The current Europe is only able to fight its own battles on a limited scale — and that will have to change.
In the heyday of trans-Atlantic wrangling over the Iraq war, France’s President Chirac and Germany’s Chancellor Schröder wanted a multipolar world with a less powerful United States. As the old saying goes, “Be careful what you wish for.” A world in which American oversight influence is on the decline will be a far less friendly place. And it will be a place where Europe will have to either pay a steeper price to protect its interests or risk a precipitous decline and relegation to insignificance.
For more: Watching America : » America, the Exhausted Empire
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