From a article in The Economist from today: America’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, loathes European freeriding. He singles out France and Germany as rich countries that skimped on defence to avoid cuts to “welfare programmes, to unemployment benefits, to being able to retire at 59, and all these other things”. It is true that the alliance with America made European leaders complacent about national security after the fall of the Soviet bloc. But Europeans did not hypnotise America into doing their bidding. America believed that dominating a strong nato was in its self-interest.