Europe has a painful choice: War vs welfare

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. GÖRLITZ, Germany—When the Cold War ended, European governments slashed their military budgets and spent a windfall of several trillion dollars on social programs—a popular policy with voters when Europe faced few external threats and enjoyed the security protection of the U.S. Now, European nations are finding it difficult to give up those peacetime benefits, even as the war in Ukraine has revived Cold War-era tensions and the U.S.

tries to shift its focus to China. Most are failing to get their armies in fighting shape. The lesson: It was easy to swap guns for butter; reversing the trend is far more challenging.

That means—despite promises to raise military spending—defense ministers say they are struggling to get what they need. In Germany, Europe’s largest economy, military bases are crumbling or have been converted to civilian use, including sports centers, old people’s homes and pension fund offices. The army, which numbered half a million in West Germany and 300,000 in East Germany during the Cold War, has today just 180,000.

It now has a few hundred operational tanks, compared with more than 2,000 Leopard 2 main battle tanks its West German predecessor had in the late 1980s. “That’s frustrating to me," German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius told journalists recently, after getting much less than he had requested for next year’s military spending. “It means there are certain things I can’t do at the pace that…the level of threat requires." It is also likely to frustrate U.S.

hopes that Europe will finally begin relieving some of the burden from Washington, which accounts for two-thirds of military spending among North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies. Both U.S. presidential