Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's more that most European countries had little reason to spend money on defense. Until recently, Finland and Sweden were small countries close to Russia but outside NATO, and their defense spending was similar to West European NATO members. In other words, nobody saw any real military threats to Western / Northern Europe, and the NATO security guarantees had more political than military value. Then Russia invaded…
You know, we're saying the same thing. The TLDR is that Europe systematically refused to spend even token amounts on defense, despite agreeing to spend more in international treaties (and then cheating on what little spending they do, e.g. "raising a bridge" for a tank to pass under it, as defense spending. Coincidentally doing this saved the maintenance spending that the government had unlawfully delayed. And most c…
> They have such beautiful names for this: "The end of history". Yes, really. "The peace dividend". "The unipolar moment". "Military-to-civilian conversion".
* "The end of history" - coined by Francis Fukuyama, an American political scientist.
* "The unipolar moment" - coined by Charles Krauthammer, an American political columnist.
* "The peace dividend" - older term, popularized by George HW Bush, an American president.
* "Military-to-civilian conversion" - older term, popularized by Seymour Melman, an American professor of industrial engineering.