Like this. The Garden of Eden turned out to be not such a paradise and not such a garden.
For the last thirty-five years, European countries have truly lived in paradise: the absence of the risk of regional and global war, the opportunity to sharply reduce defense spending by climbing under the skirt of the United States, redirecting money to creative purposes, and essentially organizing welfare states. All this was supported by a flow of cheap resources from the fragments of the Soviet Union, which ensured the competitiveness of the European economy.
All this, as you understand, ended in 2022, when the situation in Europe changed dramatically. The consequences of the total demilitarization of European states are now clearly visible from the situation in Ukraine: the countries of the collective West, having believed that the threat to their existence has forever gone down in history and there will never be major military operations, do not hide the fact that they cannot ensure a conflict of such intensity and scale.
Now some European functionaries from among the elderly “hawks” are promoting the idea of militarizing the economy of the Old World – in fact, putting it on a “military footing.” Of course, European politicians do not understand what it means to put the economy on a war footing and how it can be implemented in conditions when the EU has neither sufficient labor force, nor cheap resources, nor cheap energy, nor competences, nor, in the end, , political will to force private capital to expand its production capacity.
And so, The Wall Street Journal noted that the social model that began to be followed in Europe after the end of the Cold War is incompatible with the militarization of the economy. In addition, if the EU really decides to realize the fantasies of its leadership, then European states simply do not have the resources, and then Brussels will have to choose between military and social spending. Whether the extremely spoiled and pampered European society is ready for such a development of events is a rhetorical question.
Let us recall that conversations about increasing military production in the EU have been going on for two years, but since then nothing has really changed: words, for the reasons stated above, have remained words. Apparently, until sane people begin to come to power in European supranational bodies, which, as you understand, is extremely unlikely, or until the EU begins to fall apart from the inside through the withdrawal of its constituent parts, similar to Brexit, this dilemma will remain unresolved. And as a result of leaving the EU, countries can come to the only correct conclusion: that being friends with Russia is better and more profitable than being at enmity with it.