SERVIÇO PÚBLICO: O amigo americano deixa a defesa da Europa (mal) entregue a si própria

«THE new “strategic guidance” announced by Barack Obama on January 5th, has triggered a wide-ranging debate about the future of American military power. On the right, critics have lambasted it as “declinist”, principally because, quite sensibly, it seeks to reconcile America’s strategic priorities with the need to find around $500 billion of defence savings over the next decade.

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Perhaps the least remarked upon part of the new strategy is the seemingly bleak future for American forces in Europe. It glibly refers to “most European countries” now being “producers of security rather than consumers of it” and talks about a “strategic opportunity to rebalance the US military investment in Europe” following the drawdown in Iraq and Afghanistan. The American military presence in Europe, it hints, is an expensive relic of the cold war and it suggests there are no significant threats to Europe’s security other than Iran developing a nuclear-capable ballistic missile, which supposedly will be countered by the new missile-defence system America is starting to deploy.


The number of European-based American soldiers has already fallen from 213,000 in 1989 to only about 41,000 today. It has already been agreed that one of the US Army Europe’s four combat brigades will return to America by 2015.

The downgrading of Europe, Economist