Waking the Sleeping European Giant

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Europe1 has a far larger population than the U.S. (~500 million vs. ~340 million) and an economy far larger than China’s ($26 trillion vs. $21 trillion). It also has a large and sophisticated manufacturing sector, with world-beating producers in aerospace, shipbuilding, pharmaceuticals, machine tools, motor vehicles, and weapons. If material considerations were all that mattered, Europe would be a military superpower.Yet this potential remains latent because “Europe” as a geopolitical entity does not exist. Instead of a strong and independent continent capable of securing the lives and freedoms of its citizens, Europe is divided into dozens of countries, all of which are too small individually to stand up to external threats. The problem is compounded by the mismatch between where the military resources can be found and where they are most needed. There is relatively little overlap between the places with the balance sheet capacity (mostly in the north), the places with the productive capacity (mostly in the center), the places with the largest populations of otherwise unoccupied fighting-age men (more in the south), and Europe’s front lines (largely, although not exclusively, in the east).The result is that Europeans are unable to protect their interests from a rapacious neighbor and an increasingly undependable ally. But this is a solvable problem. Europeans can mobilize their abundant financial and real resources, and deploy those resources to where they are most needed, if they choose to do so. And while it may be a challenge to get European publics to agree that their …