According to these Cold War U.S. ideologues, Europeans taxed too much and spent the money on overly generous social security programs that supposedly rendered them soft while inhibiting innovation and growth. Frequent were the warnings that Europe was abandoning the ethos of open and competitive markets that had made it a bastion of capitalism and was edging steadily, if somewhat stealthily, toward a socialist dead end.
In a bygone age, prominent conservatives in the United States clung to any number of well-worn complaints about the country’s Western European allies.
According to these Cold War U.S. ideologues, Europeans taxed too much and spent the money on overly generous social security programs that supposedly rendered them soft while inhibiting innovation and growth. Frequent were the warnings that Europe was abandoning the ethos of open and competitive markets that had made it a bastion of capitalism and was edging steadily, if somewhat stealthily, toward a socialist dead end.
Another ritualized complaint, dating at least as far back as President Richard Nixon’s administration, was that Europe was chronically underspending on its own defense, free riding on the reliably lavish U.S. outlays to its Defense Department, which were designed above all to protect Europe—and thereby the West itself—from its greatest existential threat, the Soviet Union.
Some of these old gripes about Europe, such as those concerning the c
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