"If you mark the significance of Europe's relations with America by how much we are prepared to spend on defense, forget it! We can't even pay the entrance fee!" said Christopher Patten, a Briton and the commissioner for external affairs for the European Union February 9.

Patten's comment came in the wake of the massive U.S. military operation in Afghanistan and after the Bush administration submitted its budget proposals to the U.S. Congress. If approved, funds slated for the Pentagon will rise by $120 billion over the next five years, putting the annual war expenditures by Washington at $396 billion.

The yearly Pentagon budget amounts to 36 percent of the total military expenditures by all governments in the world and exceeds the combined arms budgets of the 14 biggest spenders, including Japan, the countries in western Europe, Russia, and China.  
 
'Uncomfortable consequences'
This gap, the Financial Times of London noted in one of a series of articles, "has important and uncomfortable consequences for America's allies and its potential adversaries--as well as likely effects on future foreign policy decision-making in Washington." In military terms, "there is no serious rival to prevent the U.S. from pursuing its national interests," the paper said.

Addressing the evolution of Washington's collaboration with the imperialist governments of Britain, France, and Germany during the Afghan war, a French diplomat told the Times that the U.S. government, after monopolizing the fighting, expects the European powers to provide massive funds and troops on the ground to act as a police force.

"This kind of complimentarity is fine in the short term," the diplomat told the Times. "But it cannot continue in the long term.... It would mean giving the U.S. carte blanche for its military operations. The Europeans would be expected by the Americans to pick up the pieces. And frankly, the U.S. neither respects nor appreciates what the Europeans are doing. It would be a completely imbalanced relationship."

Responding to these and other criticisms by European officials, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger wrote in a column titled "Answering the 'Axis' Critics" that "at issue in the axis-of-evil debate is not America's attempt to impose an international order but whether every member of a coalition should have a veto over fundamental perceptions of security."

"The vast gap in military power between Europe and the United States compounds the difference in perspectives," wrote Kissinger. "There is no precedence for the military dominance the United States has achieved over the rest of the world. There does not exist now--nor for the foreseeable future--any country or group of countries capable of posing a military challenge to the United States," he reminded readers.  
 
World War II and Iraq
The U.S. rulers have made clear they intend to continue to use their military power to try to dominate the world and reinforce their position against their "friends" and "allies"--the rival imperialist powers in Europe and Japan. Although U.S. imperialism came out of World War II as the dominant economic and military power in the world imperialist system, it has only been since the assault on Iraq in 1990-1991 that Washington has used this advantage to deal indirect but palpable blows to other imperialist powers through wars against a semicolonial country.

In Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan, Washington has demonstrated it alone has the capabilities to transport, supply, deploy, and sustain the size of military operations needed to carry out a large-scale war abroad. For Berlin, London, Paris, and Tokyo, each of these assaults has reinforced the fact that they cannot allow a chasm to grow up between their ability to use strategic military might abroad and their economic power if they want to remain world powers.  
 
Relative size of U.S. military
The establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) following World War II codified the permanent presence of U.S. military forces on European soil. In addition to the 118,000 troops in Europe, U.S. imperialism also has some 100,000 soldiers and sailors stationed in Asia or afloat on ships in the region, backed by a nuclear arsenal on both land and sea. U.S. imperialism's heavy airlift and air-to-air refueling capabilities gives it an ability to deploy forces anywhere in the world.

But recent protests by working people in the Philippines, and by the governments of north Korea and China, to U.S. military deployments in the region highlight the fact that unlike in Europe, where Washington is integrated into a military alliance, Washington is not part of any such pact in Asia and its interventions in the region can be more explosive.

Washington's fleet of 318 warships, including 13 aircraft carriers, dwarfs that of any other nation. A total of 136 ships are deployed overseas at any one time. By comparison, France recently launched the first nuclear aircraft carrier in Europe, and sold its only other carrier to Brazil. Britain has three aircraft carriers, Italy one, and Germany none.

Washington is driving to ensure that its domination of space matches its rule of the seas. With 200 military satellites already in place, the U.S. rulers' pursuit of "the next generation of military technologies--such as unmanned aircraft and missile defense systems--[leaves] its closest allies inside NATO in danger of becoming incapable of fighting alongside U.S. forces," the Financial Times noted.

From the point of view of the U.S. imperialists, this situation was summed up by Joseph Biden, chairman of the U.S. Senate's foreign relations committee. "The good news is that we're the world's only superpower," he said. "The bad news is, we're the world's only superpower."  
 
Response of imperialist rivals
The results of the Gulf war pressed the capitalist rulers of Germany and Japan to strengthen their armed forces and chart a course to push back political constraints--both at home and abroad--on the use of military power beyond their own borders.

German chancellor Gerhard Schröder called "historic" Berlin's decision to mobilize 4,000 combat troops and warships to back the U.S.-led assault on Afghanistan. The Japanese government also took advantage of Washington's "war on terror" to make some gains along these lines. Tokyo, though still banned by its post-World-War-II constitution from undertaking combat action abroad, sent 1,500 troops to be available for "relief operations" in Afghanistan. Its forces included two transport ships escorted by three destroyers.

London, attempting to buffer the decades-long decline of British imperialism, once again grabbed onto the coattails of Washington and made available whatever troops and warplanes the U.S. military requested to use in its military assault in Afghanistan. "If you want to have influence over the Americans, you have to be on the ground with them," said a British senior government official about the recent decision to send up to 1,700 troops to serve under U.S. command in that country.  
 
Not so rapid-reaction force
Following the blows the European imperialist powers were dealt by Washington after they proved incapable of bringing force to bear in Yugoslavia in the mid-to-late 1990s, the European Union announced in 1999 that it would put together a rapid reaction force capable of operating independently of NATO. After three years, EU officials say the force of 60,000 troops will be put together by 2003, with support from a total of 100,000 troops, 400 combat aircraft, and 100 ships.

But from the beginning the creation of the rapid reaction force has been undermined by the bitter divisions among the European governments themselves. Short of massive increases in military expenditures, the imperialist governments in Europe lack the airlift, transportation, intelligence, or logistical capacity to field a military operation of this size. And an initial agreement to develop a military transport aircraft to be used by the European armed forces has not been able to get off the ground due to the failure to reach agreement on financing terms.

Klaus Becher, of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, told the Financial Times that the "Europeans need new capabilities. That is the bottom line. Once that is met then we can talk about a new relationship between the Europeans and the Americans. The ball is in the court of the Europeans if they really want to end the old divisions of labor. Until then, they should lower their expectations."  
 
 
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