Would Americans Willingly Pay a WWII-Like Cost to Defend Europe Today?
ZeroHedge provides us with the biggest question of the day:
So, here’s the question: If Europeans aren’t willing to “Pay the Price” for defending their quasi-democracies, why should Americans be willing to pay it for them?
It’s the same question Americans faced in 1914 and 1939, only the set of facts have become even more difficult to answer in the positive over the intervening decades. In 1914, the facts on the ground were so difficult that three years passed before America, seeing Germany’s army advance well into France, finally said yes, we’ll send our boys over to win this war for you and ended up turning the tide in a little over a year at a tremendous cost in human lives and national treasure.
In 1939, as Hitler was marching through Poland and into France again, two years went by before a Japanese “sneak attack” that FDR was fully aware was coming was enough to convince Americans it was time to go save the rest of Europe from itself one more time as we were also fighting back Japan. And so we did, again at an incredible cost of lives and national treasure, the latter of which continues to be lost in defense of European nations who still refuse to pay their NATO bills in the year 2022.
In just over a year’s engagement in World War I, more than 116,000 American lives were sacrificed to the defense of Europe from the Kaiser’s hordes. 298,000 U.S. soldiers were lost during the two and a half years of American fighting in WWII, with about 41,000 of those taking place in the Pacific Theater and the rest in the fighting in Europe. 77 years later, it’s a safe bet that most Americans would assess that the cost of defending a free Europe in those two horrible conflicts was justified.