we need to get rid of US military bases across Europe.
Basically, if the US bases go, the capabilities of much of the European military forces go bye-bye. They're optimized for using American logistical support, (because they have no reason to develop their own) and all of that comes through American bases in the region. I'm sure that some political parties in Europe would be completely okay with losing that capability, but most people agree that there is one thing worse than a strong military, and that's a weak military that costs the same amount of money as a strong military.
Just to provide some numbers - the USAF's budget is $170 billion per year. For comparison, that's about the cost of Britain's entire NHS. A very large amount of that goes to airlift capability - plenty of money is spent on air superiority, but the USAF's primary mission in this era of asymmetric warfare is logistical support.
Basically, the attitude of most European governments is "If the US is willing to pay for it, why should we reject their help?"
The Europeans would have to cut their own social programs if they wanted to do any peacekeeping / humanitarian aid operations - all of that is contingent on American logistical support. Hell, my guess is that they would castigate a more leftist, benign American government; it would make things a hell of a lot harder for a lot of people.
I'm a liberal, and I'd take massive cuts at the war department even without re spending it all on entitlements.
And we don't need such a huge military for humanitarian work either.
Is the cost for that 4.5 x higher than Delta Air Lines annual revenue? ($37.7 billion 2013)
I'm sure most of the cost of USAF is on other things...
The Strategic Airlift Capability has 3 C-17s.
The SAC is, frankly, a symbolic gesture to say, "Yes, we're going to include everyone." The bulk of the heavy lifting is done by standard USAF planes.
Probably not that much. We need defense force, we don't need to "police" the world (which really means imperialism). We don't need nuclear capabilities.
Also, the relation between defense and social spending is tenuous at best. Both scale linearly with the size of the economy. Defense spending can actually be beneficial in creating jobs and improving technology.
It's not us you'll have to convince of this, it's your government. They tend to be a bit prickly about such things, no matter how enlightened the general populace is.
Do you have any opinion polls to back that up?
I think it is important not to say "Most of Europe would not be ok with that" when what one means is "European governments would publicly object to that". The US government, for instance, does many things that the public at large disapproves of, and public governmental statements are not necessarily representative of what the government is actually advocating behind closed doors.
In otherwords, without public opinion polls, we are at least two levels removed from knowing whether "Most of Europe would not be ok with that."
The problem is not that the US has planes in Europe. The problem is that most European countries would not hesitate to aid the US in capturing Snowden.
What we need is the European Union to grow strong enough so it can push back and have enough breath to spare so that it can spend energy on secondary concerns like freedom and integrity.
What would stop the CIA from sending over the Gulfstream jet and paramilitary team using civilian airports?
How would the owners and operators of those fighter jets know which flights were CIA flights?
We could do something that would be considered an act of war in order to kidnap somebody explicitly protected by the target country. But these things have been known to go poorly.
I don't disagree with that. However, the US sometimes takes military actions that cause frustration and anger from other nations that we are not explicitly at war with. Some that come to mind are the OBL raid, Iran Air 655, attacking that Doctors Without Borders hospital, and destroying that Sudanese pharmaceutical factory.
Is Snowden "explicitly protected" by countries other than Russia right now?
So it doesn't count when FVEY attacks[1] another country's communication infrastructure - possibly just to have relay boxen so that infrastructure can be commandeered whenever it is useful?
[1] (one example) https://theintercept.com/2014/09/14/nsa-stellar/