This European vacation is funded by American workers. If the Europeans had to spend in defense what the Americans give them, they would be forced to work more and give up theirs extended vacations and culture of “summers off”.
This might be overstating it a bit, but Europeans get salty when you note that their generous social safety net is subsidized in part by the fact that most NATO nations don't spend the mandated 2% of gdp on defense.
I often wonder what we could accomplish with even half of the ~ 700B / yr we spend on defense if we actually put it towards the public good. The US has two friendly neighbors and thousands of miles of blue water between us and peer adversaries which have no real ability to project power far from their shores. We could make do with less, but then of course the rest of the world would have to step up responsibility for their defense and not hide behind our coat tails
The problem is those 'benefits' are largely going to the rich vs the average man, and voters are starting to wake up to that fact. You can expect the US to shift more isolationist in the future, even with, or maybe because of the troubles of the world
The US defense industry is a public-private wealth transfer mechanism (or "jobs program", if you don't wish to put so fine a point on it) to force taxpayers (and cash-holders, via inflation) to pay billions of dollars, every day, to the military-industrial complex (and implicitly to transfer value to its shareholders).
It has nothing to do with "making do", or protecting anyone. That's a side effect.
That's an exaggeration. The difference in military spending between the US and the EU is less than 2% of GDP. If all military spending was a complete waste of money, with no economic or social benefits at all, that would correspond to about 4 working days/year. But because military spending contributes to the economy in some ways, the actual cost to the American worker is probably closer to 2 days/year.
