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Comment by pelorat | Hacker News Reader

In the case of the military I'd say the real reason is political. After the fall of the Berlin wall, Europe collectively agreed (knowingly or not) that war is now a thing of the past and the goal should be the complete dismantling of militaries worldwide, starting with Europe. Lead by example, etc.

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It's subtler than that. Europe was just constantly reminded by its big brother not to duplicate NATO structures, which are dependent on the US.

This.

Plus, of course, each European country has to support their own defense industry, so each one of them needs to have their own howitzer/tank/whatever and they can't agree on common approach that would actually allow for the economy of scale.

They agreed that war was a thing of the past, but still continued to push for NATO to allow new members anyway, ironically causing Russia (and China and everyone who is NOT in NATO) to suspect that war was NOT a thing of the past and therefore never quite abandoning their military completely. Unpopular opinion: the West should either NEVER have abandoned its military production (so as to maintain NATO actual preparedness for war, given that's the only reason for its existence) OR it should just have dismantled NATO and announced to the world that it strongly believes war is a thing of the past, and that other countries are advised to follow suit. But we actually chose the easy, halfway path: keep NATO, keep our militaries "looking strong" (which gives the signal our rivals should also do the same, obviously), but not actually be ready for any sort of major war and as the article points out, even lose actual capacity to become ready for war within any realistic timeframe. The worst possible outcome :(.

USA had no part in that push?

Perhaps but the US was pushing NATO to invest more in war for years suggesting they didn't believe war was in the past

That's because they have more to gain from that.

Correction: The US was pushing NATO to invest more in US gear.

That was the hope but nothing stopped the EU from making their own stuff.

Nothing, only the gentle hand of US influence over their internal affairs, and the typical nationalistic bickering among themselves.

Those are impediments for sure, but they are not blockers, and if they had the will, they would have overcome that. Most, probably all NATO countries do have their own military industrial complex of some sort and the US is buying from them. Although, it certainly is the case that the US is the largest supplier of military equipment and so, yes, the US would benefit most from efforts to increase military spending.

I agree, the will was never there.

We will see whether the new realities of the war in Ukraine and Trump's approach to Europe will substantially change that.

The whole economic and societal tensions in the west make things tougher...

This is not true, since the 1990 the us was strongly opposed on the eu building or relying more on own defense industry and more closely aligned defence policy, even threatening end of NATO. Lookup the "three Ds" articulated later by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: No Duplication of NATO assets, No Decoupling of European security from the US, and No Discrimination against NATO members who were not in the EU.

NATO expansion was pretty controversial in the US

https://time.com/archive/6731121/how-clinton-decided-on-nato...

Clinton was the president of the USA, I think you're proving I was correct. I never stated each and every USA citizen was pushing for it.

It could be matching theory for outcome though. The unpopular opinion may still be wrong too. Russia was quite different in 1999, or better in 1992, to the point of joining NATO, and China was nowhere the threat of today, and it could be different reasons- not keeping NATO - which caused today's standup. So, basically, the situation seem to be more complex.

After the USSR fell, they left behind many countries abused by Russia that didn't believe it would leave them alone. Those countries wanted defense guarantees in case of future Russian aggression.

NATO wanted to be deliberate and slow about admitting any new members, but countries that wanted to join felt that anyone who didn't join might get attacked or face hybrid measures from Russia to prevent them from joining next. So they grouped up and 7 countries joined NATO simultaneously. NATO was never begging them to join, they wanted to join NATO.

People push this vision of NATO being some hungry bastard that can't get enough, but it's largely outside pressures pushing countries to want to join it.

Sure enough they were right. Russia invaded both Georgia and Ukraine, which wanted to join already because Russia kept interfering in their societies.

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