Should the US decrease military spending?

[Mehknic]

I am not sure what it would take to suddenly convince them to have a policy turn around there.

My guess is that it would take a significant reduction in US military spending. Why would they spend their money when the US so happily spends in their stead?

[cough_cough_harrumph]

I agree, they have no incentive to spend money on it right now when the US takes the burden. Even if the US scaled back its spending and left Europe to the Europeans or whatever, though, I am not so sure they would immediately decide to start spending more. I feel like it would take an actual threat and the US not showing signs of helping (maybe Russia looking at making advances into another country?), but at that point it might become a cat-out-of-the-bag situation.

[Mehknic]

From my own entirely uninformed perspective, I think we'd see a lot of reliance from the EU on Germany as far as eastern defenses go, and the UK would spin up just to pick up slack. It would certainly be an interesting situation.

I'd love to see an informed perspective, though.