There is no inherent weakness of Europe. It has far more people than the US. All that welfare state makes it far more efficient too in many matters.

A little "Military Keynesianism" would, frankly, be really good for solving Europe's problems of higher unemployement and whatnot too. I am generally against such things, but the welfare states make the risk of runway jobs guarantees and military industrial complexes less bad.

In general, Europe missed out on Keynesianism it seems (the military or non military varieties). 70+ years of welfware states is being undone by stupid austerity. They figure out how to be good to the poor (unlike US) and not do austerity (like the US, despite what you may think), and they should leap ahaed of us.

The "US-lead world order" is Europe's choice.

If you go back to the decades in which the US became the world hegemon (post-war era) the difference is way more stark. It's not that the EU resigned - it's that the US muscled them out!

One theory is that in Europe in the 1980s, workers became so much more empowered that the private sector lost the will to invest. Start with https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf for the basic concept here, but there are many more examples.

A VAT-funded balanced budget welfare state is a purely redistributional mechanism which, while great, is not sufficient to undo this sort of thing.

Direct government spending like the military sort is a way around this. Maybe the workers are militant, but will the democracy just allow itself to decline military because you don't feel like dealing with that?

Workers vote too, so I don't think so.

I think the US is a very weird state - it's probably the most consistently old-school liberal state in the world, it has negligible worker activism, colossal natural resources, and its position as world hegemon gives it all sorts of non-imitable economic advantages. I don't think you can copy the US if you're not the US - the closest in terms of economic policy is the UK, and the UK economy is kind of like a corpse in a bin bag.

The EU is barely a confederation, let alone a federal state.

Is how a military industrial complex starts. Then it seeks to justify its existence by either meddling everywhere.

If people simply don't need jobs as much, on the margins, it's much easier to have healthy conversations about what investment is actually good, vs what is just make-work or worse.

How so? The Suez invasion didn't fail because the British (or the French) didn't have the logistics to supply their forces. It failed because the US wasn't OK with it happening.

The point is, France could build whatever expeditionary force it could fit within its national budget, and it would still be completely useless for national strategic interests, because you could only really use it if the Americans agree you could use it. Thus, it would just end up doing stuff that fits in with American strategic imperatives.

Yeah, I was kind of glossing that over. I don't know if French military involvement in Africa has been particularly helpful to France, and it seems less likely still that it has been helpful to Africans (with a few exceptions, Jean-Bedel Bokassa comes to mind).

I think you're underselling the effectiveness: there have been many post-colonial interventions by european forces that have ended in the european's favour. Sri Lanka's genocidal suppression of the Tamils, for example, or the propping up of Bahrain.

The broader point is, at no point do these actions run against US interests.

A number of African countries continue to store their reserves in France and work with the CFA Franc, which makes it worth it.

> there have been many post-colonial interventions by european forces that have ended in the european's favour

Yeah, but they are all in the past. It's today's news that the French failed in Mali. The combination of increasingly-difficult asymmetrical warfare (with guerrilla becoming more and more effective) and practical cuts to national budgets make such interventions increasingly ineffective. If even the superpowers cannot pacify medium-sized nation-states anymore, individual states have no realistic chance to achieve anything alone.

My sort of uninformed reading of the problem in Mali / Sahel desert insurgencies is just that the French didn't do a very good job at a strategic level, which isn't really the military's fault.

It strikes me that most of the western debacles have been essentially down to a pretty thin understanding of how to discover and support regional partners. There's no quantity of bombs or boots that would make the Afghan kleptocratic torture state command a plurality of support, and worse, the Americans were temperamentally incapable of building bridges with the kind of people that could form a stable government.

My feeling is that resources aren't the problem: the problem is that (for a number of reasons) western policy making elites are just making the wrong decisions, both in terms of how ambitious their projects are (the post-invasion Iraq project was insane), and in terms of who they choose to work with.

If you take Iraq for example, the US chose to marginalize Iran early on, despite the fact they would have been (practically speaking) a great partner, who were more than willing to involve themselves in Iraqi regime change.

You have that exactly backwards. The French expeditionary force can only be deployed with American approval because it requires American logistics. If this were not the case, you would have something approximating Russian expeditionary capabilities.

No, my point is that the Suez crisis proves that even if you do have logistical independence, it doesn't matter, because the US can crash your economy and excoriate you in the UN if you do something they don't like.

At no point in either the french nor the british military operations do you see either tactical defeats or supply issues.

That has been intentional. Deploying forces outside your borders is what empires do. It's out of scope for the military forces of ordinary countries.

Most military forces only exist to defend their own territory. For most West European countries in the past 20-25 years, the only realistic threats were their neighbors and the US. Because all of those were allies, the primary purpose of the military was maintaining the readiness to scale up in case the world becomes more dangerous again.

It will be interesting to see what will become of Europe now that Germany has decided they are allowed to act like an empire once again.

Yes, the US can take over countries like Iraq or Afghanistan. And then what? Is there any net gain for the US? On the other hand, NATO bombings in former Yoguslavia led to a situation that is still more or less stable today.

Russia quickly took over Crimea, which has strategic value and has support of the local population. But now they are stuck with a nasty and costly war in Ukraine.

So it is not clear where in the world Germany would play 'empire'.

I wonder to what extend an army can maintain an effective defence if there no need for any defence for many decades. Many western European countries have not been attacked since the end of WWII.

What you're describing is taught to us as the difference between an occupying force and an expeditionary force. Occupying forces don't really need to be trained on seizing forward air bases because someone else does that. That kind of army functions a lot more like well-armed police. The Marines has a different decree, which holds most units at a high level of unit readiness because the president has the capacity to deploy them for 30 days at any given time. We operated most battlefield functions as internal jobs, aside from ships logistics, and cross-training is heavily emphasized to combat cost. Interestingly enough, the Marines is the smallest and least funded branch in the armed forces - so it would appear the difference is primarily in culture, logistics, and tactics.

Edit:

All this said, we operated and trained with British, Korean, Aussie, and Dutch military components that had and trained on these capabilities.

I guess that depends on what you consider to be logistical independence, but at the theater scale, the answer is "no". Physically moving personnel and materiel to Africa, say, is almost always handled by the U.S. Air Force to a very large degree. See for example, Operation Serval.

Could you unpack that? I don’t know what you mean, but it sounds interesting.

My MOS was a 2844, which was a Ground Radio Technician. I could repair and operate every radio the USMC had at an advanced level. I then received courses on how to provide EMT-level care on the battlefield, machine gunners school, vehicle operations (command, gunning, operation, egress, maneuvers), basic generator troubleshooting, vehicle maintenance training, artillery/medevac coordination, advanced SatComm training, etc... This is specifically so that teams are a) self-sustaining (one team can accomplish many jobs outside of their primary job) and b) to reduce the number of on-hand resources the USMC requires to function.