It’s not the handout recipients who are addicted that are the problem, although their addiction is tragic in its own right. It’s the government men and women who are addicted to giving handouts who are the problem. The former are individual problems, even though those problems aggregate. Government men and women, though, are inflicting their nation-level addiction on the nations over which they reign, and their addiction is a national security threat approaching existential as they render their nations helpless against aggressor nations. That is immoral enough, as those government betray the same people they’re charged with protecting.
The immorality extends, though, when it comes to Europe’s NATO member nations. European NATO governments provide canonical examples of both immoralities.
When the Cold War ended, European governments slashed their military budgets and spent a windfall of several trillion dollars on social programs—a popular policy with voters when Europe faced few external threats and enjoyed the security protection of the US.
Now, European nations are finding it difficult to give up those peacetime benefits, even as the war in Ukraine has revived Cold War-era tensions and the US tries to shift its focus to China. Most are failing to get their armies in fighting shape.
The German army, in particular has been shrunk to a paltry 180,000 men and women, a large fraction of whom are in non-combat jobs, and not even combat-supporting jobs at that. The German army has only a couple hundred tanks, a large fraction of which are not operational. The army, by Government politician conscious decision, is not capable of defending itself, even as it trickles out arms to Ukraine. The decision to not defend gets worse [emphasis added].
During negotiations for Germany’s 2025 budget earlier this year, Finance Minister Christian Lindner wanted to free up money for defense by freezing social spending for three years—letting it lag inflation. The move was rebuffed by other parties in the governing coalition…. Spending on military aid for Ukraine was cut to €4 billion, about half this year’s level.
What the coalition parties did agree on was a €108-a-year increase over two years in Kindergeld—an annual €3,000 payment per child to all families, regardless of income. Today, that benefit alone, payable for offspring up to age 25, costs more than €50 billion a year, as much as Berlin’s annual Defense Ministry budget.
Economic Affairs Minister Robert Habeck articulated very clearly the addiction and its immorality, although he didn’t recognize it.
The idea—we are dismantling the welfare state because we need more money for the military—I would find fatal.
Social spending is necessary to keep the country together.
Leave aside the foolishness of that claimed threat of dissolution from any lack of socialism. Even such a one as Habeck can recognize that an intact nation that has been conquered and occupied through its government’s refusal to defend that nation has been functionally dissolved.
The lesson: it was easy to swap guns for butter; reversing the trend is far more challenging.
Any rational person—even a government politician—knows it’s far easier to get addicted than it is to break the addiction.
Nor is Germany alone in these immoralities. Here are just a few of the one-third of NATO members whose government men have chosen not to enable their nations to defend themselves or to come to the aid of their fellow members.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has refused to put a date on [any increase in defense spending relative to GDP]. Military spending in Italy and Spain, meanwhile, sits under 1.5%.
The immoralities and the betrayals are done deliberately, as these men and women refuse even to try to curb, much less to control, their addiction.
The immorality extends one more time: those government men still refuse to prepare their governments and to enable their defense establishments to defend the nations over which they rule, and with that failure, they betray their fellow NATO members by rendering themselves incapable of aiding their fellows against an invasion. Instead, they create their nations as dependent on the treasure, and especially the blood, of their fellows should they be the target of attack.
These conscious and continuing moral betrayals by NATO member nations render NATO a waste of American money, and blood.
That’s the price of addiction—it even prevents those responsible for it from resisting it.
