EU: Say, Maybe We Should Invest In Our Own Defense After All

And not just in defense, as J.D. Vance scolded today in Munich, but we’ll get back to that point later. Now that Donald Trump has returned to office to pursue his America First foreign-policy objectives, the EU suddenly realizes that America will no longer prioritize Eurozone security to the historical norm. That message came through loudly and clearly in remarks by Vance and Pete Hegseth relating to Ukraine, which the new administration makes very clear will be an EU security challenge and not an American security challenge. 

And that means that the days of America indirectly subsidizing EU’s welfare states are over. EU Commission chair Ursula con der Leyen tacitly admitted that when proposing to create an emergency exception to debt levels in order to right-size European common defense — a step that Europe should have taken decades earlier:

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, von der Leyen said she wanted to trigger an emergency clause that would allow governments greater leeway so that military expenditure would not show up in the tightly controlled budget deficit limits.

“I will propose to activate the escape clause for defense investments,” she said. “This will allow member states to substantially increase their defense expenditure.”

The idea would allow governments to increase their defense spending substantially without violating the EU’s budget rules.

Highly indebted European countries, such as Italy and Greece, have supported this option, arguing that it would allow them to significantly increase defense spending without making other budget cuts.

During Trump’s first term, he fought constantly with NATO and EU members to force them to meet their commitments under the terms of the charter. Trump threatened to withhold funds and even suggested that the failure to meet their obligations could trigger a US withdrawal from Article V, the cornerstone of Western defense. That was a dangerous tactic, but it did work at least nominally, as the other nations pledged to increase defense spending. 

This time, Trump and his team aren’t threatening Article V as much as they are insisting that US troops will not be employed to enforce EU policies. That’s especially aimed at their attempts to get Ukraine into the EU and NATO, the latter of which puts the US at risk of a war with Russia that the rest of the EU isn’t prepared to fight. And they know it, which is why con der Leyen has to relax their debt-to-GDP ratios to allow for more investment. 

But that’s not the only way to free up budget space in the EU. Like the US, the EU spends wildly through all sorts of opaque bureaucracies to keep the welfare state not just afloat but also in power. A huge amount of spending goes toward the mass migration that the open-borders Left in the EU over the past two decades, especially after the joint EU-US war on Moammar Qaddafi left Libya as a failed state controlled by terrorist warlords. If the EU wants to find money to invest in its common defence, they could always invite Elon Musk and his DOGE team to spend a summer in Brussels.

Vance got more directly to the point on mass migration. Not one voter in the EU approved their open-borders policies, but they’re beginning to vote out the radicals that imposed it. That should be a signal, Vance warned, to start addressing the myriad ills of mass migration, including the example on the streets of Munich itself:

VP Vance: Out of all the pressing challenges the nations represented here face, I believe there is nothing more urgent than mass migration…We saw the horrors wrought by these decisions yesterday in this very city…No voter on this continent went to that ballot box to open the… pic.twitter.com/EafdZYK4c0

— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) February 14, 2025

Apparently this surprised Vance’s audience, which expected more focus on technical issues of mutual defense:

U.S. Vice President JD Vance launched a blistering attack on European governments on Friday, chastising them for ignoring the will of their people, who he insisted were being censored and repressed from expressing their populist views and practicing their faiths.

The remarks were a surprising departure from the normal defense-related speeches at the annual Munich Security Conference.

Vance’s comments brought the event to a standstill.

Well, they shouldn’t be too surprised. If they don’t see the reckless mass-migration policies of the past few decades as a security and defense risk, then we really should rethink our commitment to Europe’s common defense. And if they think that we will blithely spend blood and treasure defending governments that increasingly see free speech as a threat to be stamped out, Europe really needs to start thinking about going it alone. That was the point that Vance made, and it’s especially acute now as European governments threaten American speech platforms unless they submit to European censorship.

I say this as generally a supporter and believer in NATO: It is not Trump calling its value into question but the European Union. If Europe no longer stands for Western values of liberty and free speech, then the value of that partnership suffers to the point of abandonment. We didn’t spend our blood and treasure in Europe defending the West against the Soviet Union just to have our allies drop their own commissar system on the West, including us. 

At any rate, it’s way past time for Europe to carry their part of the NATO load. Regardless of whether they recover their senses and values, we need to stop the freeloading ASAP.