Then there are the capabilities questions. Before Christmas, NATO Secretary-General George Robertson announced that 11 European countries had plans to increase their defense spending. The news from Europe's largest economy has remained particularly bleak. The result is already evident. German Tornado and F-4 aircraft, for example, have declined so sharply in capability that they can now only be used as targets in NATO exercises.
German pilots purchase global positioning system instruments with their own money.
Yet it's at the Pentagon where U.S. policy makers seem to be most attuned to the big picture, too. The euro is about economics, the EU's reaction-force project about defense. But both are increasingly understood as expressions of political ambition. No one doubts that with the Cold War over, a less dependent Western Europe wants to renegotiate the terms of its relationship with the United States. Another senior adviser to the Department of Defense argued to me that the U.S. is becoming less dependent on the Europeans, too.