OPINION:
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About 70% of Irish voters rejected two amendments to their constitution this month. One would have essentially erased marriage from the nation’s constitution, while the other would have erased motherhood from the constitution. In the aftermath of the defeat, Ireland’s three main parties remained convinced that the amendments should have won, with Sinn Fein’s leader saying the real problem was that they had not gone far enough.
For Americans, the responses to the defeat by the leaders of Ireland should lead us to wonder what kind of people these are. Why are we allies with them?
It should also lead to larger questions about our treaty obligations across Europe. The truth is that the leaders of Ireland are not that different from other Europeans on the left. At what point do we begin to assess our treaty obligations not just on the basis of whether our allies could be useful in a fight, but on whether they are the sort of people on whose behalf we are willing to send our young people to die?
Former President Donald Trump, in his own way, has raised this question through the perspective of whether our nominal allies have met their financial obligations to NATO.
Our treaty counterparties are abysmal as measured by that metric. Last year, fewer than half of our NATO allies met the required annual commitment to spend 2% of gross domestic product on defense. In total, their defense budgets amounted to less than $400 billion. By comparison, annual U.S. defense spending is more than $900 billion.
Everyone in the alliance simply assumes — and has for some time assumed — that the United States will honor its treaty obligations in the event anything really goes wrong, and so they are free to spend their cash elsewhere. The Europeans have obviously concluded that being an American protectorate is perfectly acceptable; there’s no real need to move out of their parents’ basement.
The question we should ask ourselves, however, is whether Europe — as it exists now, not as Americans have recreated it from memories of their ancestors, or movies, or trips to highly curated tourist sites — is worth protecting.
The Irish constitutional amendments are simply the latest in a long line of examples of how the Europeans have drifted away from the rest of the world. They have larger and more active central governments than most other nations. They have limited tolerance for freedom of expression. They almost uniformly preclude the right to self-defense through the use of weapons. They have limited respect for intellectual property.
Every nation on the continent is dying, with birthrates substantially below replacement rates. They attend church services much less frequently than in other nations. They are more likely to tolerate assisted suicide.
It is also unclear who we are protecting Europe from. Each other? Russia? If that’s the answer, why can’t the Germans or the French or the British defend their own continent? Their economies are much larger, and their military forces are much more competent than the Russian economy or the Russian military.
The uncomfortable truth is that American participation in NATO is driven mostly by nostalgia and muscle memory. It is no accident that the biggest supporters of an endless war in Ukraine are the old men — Republicans and Democrats — who run the Senate and the White House.
An objective assessment almost certainly would conclude that the causes that compelled the creation of NATO almost 80 years ago are no longer present. The Russians — unable to win or even make progress in a war against what is essentially a former province — are not a legitimate military threat.
More importantly, the Europeans and the Americans have become very different people with very different goals and very different capabilities and responsibilities.
It is time to set aside the nostalgia and take an uncompromising look at our European allies and decide whether they are still the sort of people we want to defend. It is time to end the protectorate, kick the kids out of the house, and compel the Europeans to make their way in the world as best they can.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times and a co-host of the podcast “The Unregulated.”
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