The Drunk Diplomat

After browsing through this interesting Wikipedia list of countries by military expenditure then comparing that list to a list of countries by GDP (nominal) I find myself asking a lot of questions about the size of military expenditures and why the European expenditures are so low. From my reading of history, after World War II the United States continued to enlarge it’s global military presence to A) Contain and match the Soviet Union and B) to guarantee Western European and Eastern Asian security so they could rebuild their economies. This plan worked perfectly for a long time and Western ideals of democratic freedom and market capitalism beat Soviet Communism and Authoritarian rule. However, I look at these lists:

EU Military Expenditures: $312.259 billion
U.S. Military Expenditures: $651.163 billion
NATO Military Expenditures: $1.049 trillion
World Military Expenditures: $1.470 trillion

EU GDP: ~$18.342 trillion
US GDP: ~ $14.002 trillion
World GDP: ~ $54.863 trillion

The first thing I take away from this is the crazy amount of money NATO countries spend on their military’s compared with the rest of the world, about 70% of the entire world’s military expenditures come from NATO countries. However, it is actually BIGGER, consider these other American non-NATO allies: Japan, Australia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and Israel. If we add their military expenditures to NATO, the total NATO and U.S. Allied military budget is a WHOPPING 1.1942 trillion or 81% of the entire world’s military expenditures. These totals do not even count allies such as Mexico, Pakistan, Columbia, Singapore and more, nor does it include countries that we will probably never have a conflict with such as Brazil and India.
But here is the question. Now that the Soviet threat has been removed and most likely not coming back anytime soon, nor have the Chinese expressed any interest in spreading an ideology such as Communism like the Soviets, but seem rather introverted. Why is the United States still footing the bill for Western European Security?
I assume that the Europeans would be just as affected, if not more so due to geography from terrorist threats coming out of Central Asia, East Africa, or the Middle East, or pirate activity around the straits of Malacca, or instability in the Balkans, Africa, the Middle East, East Asia, etc. The Europeans are the largest trading partner of China, therefore, any conflict on the Korean peninsula would have a major affect on their economies just like it would to the U.S., but we are the U.S. is footing the bill for security in East Asia.
Where do the Europeans spend the money that the U.S. is spending on the military? They spend it on their generous social welfare state, and agricultural and industrial subsidies that give their businesses undue advantages in the world economy and provide a better social safety net for their citizens.
I was extremely disappointed that the Europeans did not offer any more troops for the Afghanistan mission, nor increase their economic aid to at least pay for some American military expenditures. Past grievances aside, any major deterioration in the Middle East or Central Asia will cause serious geopolitical, energy, and economic damage to the United States and Europe.
A major European argument for this imbalance is their major contributions to educational, health, and infrastructure in the third world through foreign aid. I will discuss this more in a later post.