Back in 2008, Orrin Judd wrote:
The point at which Europe could have been saved was immediately after WWII, when it couldn’t afford its cradle-to-grave welfare systems and faced a threat from the USSR. But America–to what degree consciously is a subject for argument–chose to enervate Europe instead, sending Marshall Plan money to prop up their socialist states and taking over their defense. In effect, after getting drawn into three European wars we put them out of our misery.
Or as Victorino Matus writes at the Weekly Standard today, quoting Rainer Stinner, FDP member and chairman of the NATO Partnership Committee within the Bundestag regarding Germany’s dithering in Afghanistan:
Stinner acknowledged that the Germans “need to do their fair share” but that the cultural hurdles to greater German military involvement were great. “Germans are the most risk-averse people in the world,” he says. And they are not so easily inclined to go to war, following 60 years of social reengineering: “You wanted to have peaceful Germans. Now you have them. Don’t complain.”
Heh. Considering the alternative, that sounds like a more than acceptable trade-off.
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