No, where I live (Germany) you usually have a legal insurance to cover this. The costs are around 30€ per month in my case.

I live next door and have some legal insurance, but you need to pay attention to what coverage you get, because you need to select what categories you want coverage for; vehicles (e.g. if someone who caused an accident refuses to cooperate with you), consumer/housing disputes, work and salary, taxes / stocks, family issues like inheritances, second homes / real estate, etc etc etc. And of course, you can't take out insurance for an ongoing issue, it doesn't cover criminal cases (when you did a bad), business cases, etc.

Corporate liability insurance in the US, which is also a very common thing to get, often does not cover your defense against "intentional torts" such as defamation or fraud. It usually covers things like slips and falls, product-related liability, etc. I would be surprised if your German version covers defamation.

Germany also regulates legal fees, so self-insurance is quite reasonable. I've now been involved in two cases (once as plaintiff, once as defendant) and it seems the amount I paid is approximately the same as I would have paid in legal insurance.

In Europe, the losing party of a lawsuit generally has to pay for the winner's legal expenses ("English rule"). Never had to go to court so I don't know what you do about the expenses in the meanwhile, but at least there's light at the end of the tunnel when someone sues you just for the heck of it.

Europe may be too wide a categorization, I am pretty sure that different countries have different ways to deal with the matter.

My (thankfully very little) experience in Italy is for civil litigations at least (where it is rare that one of the two parties get 100% reason) expenses are usually compensated (i.e. every party pays their own ones), in the more rare case where all expenses are paid by the succumbing party, what is liquidated is not really what has been paid, but rather what the expenses would be along some sort of tariff.

If your solicitor/lawyer is a famous (presumably very good as you won) one, it is likely that the amount you spend is much higher than what the judge condemned the other party to reimburse you.

In the US, you can ask for fee-shifting if you have been sued frivolously or there has otherwise been some wrongdoing on the part of the other side. These guys may be able to motion for fee-shifting given that the case was dismissed at this early stage.

State defamation cases usually apply anti-SLAPP laws that automatically create fee-shifting in this exact circumstance, but this seems to be a federal case.