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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

It is of course far better for a country to spend money on social programs than on weapons, but I don't think it's true that the Pax Americana subsidised it. The US started its social programs before WW2, and continued during and after WW2 when it was also spending a lot on weapons. All NATO countries spent a lot on weapons during the Cold War while also funding social programs.

So if you see the Cold War as the Pax Americana, then they did go together, but I don't see how one subsidised the other. And plenty of countries that stayed out of the Cold War had similar strong social programs.

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Frankly, this is a luxury Western Europe enjoys solely because of their alliances with the United States. The Soviet Union would have continued to push westward had the United States and the NATO alliance not held them in check with the threat of superior military might.

There are no European nations in the top ten military rankings by really any measure that matters…

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/military-...

This is fine, it is just different priorities of governmental spending, but it is absolutely supported by American military hegemony.

France and Britain also had nukes throughout the Cold War. I don't think the Soviets would have just rolled through Western Europe.

Especially with the deployment of nuclear land mines

I wonder where they got those nukes from? Also, what about the remainder of Europe that did not have nuclear armaments?

Communism is an ideology that demands world conquest and the extinction of Capitalism. The Soviets expanded as far as they could and absolutely would not have hesitated to conquer more of Europe without the threat of the United States military and NATO.

France and the UK got their own nukes. The rest of NATO got American nukes.

And many NATO countries have pretty advanced militaries. Not large ones in absolute numbers, because they're not large countries, but absolutely more advanced than most non-NATO countries with very few exceptions (like Sweden).

My point, however, is about your claim that all of this somehow subsidised social programs. Those social programs exist independently from US protection. Nobody denies that the US guaranteed the freedom of western Europe (and many other countries around the world). But that and social programs are two completely separate things.

In America they are definitely NOT separate. Our outsized military spending is a direct syphon of social spending. We even have common phrases like, "that will happen when teachers get all the money they need and the airforce has to hold a fundraiser bake-sale" meaning "when hell freezes over".

And yet the military expenditure is also used as social spending. Much of military spending is about job creation. It's the one field of manufacturing that never left the country.

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