It is the fault of the EU leaders. No question about it. > Under the presidency of Charles de Gaulle, France pursued diplomatic independence and promoted a vis

It is the fault of the EU leaders. No question about it. > Under the presidency of Charles de Gaulle, France pursued diplomatic independence and promoted a vision of European collective security that conflicted with American leadership in NATO, especially regarding the integration of member states' armed forces under a US-led unified command and the control of NATO’s nuclear arsenal. Charles de Gaulle believed that France and the EU countries should stay out of NATO so that it could foster it's own military defense, yet the French leaders and their other EU countreparts decided that it was much more convenient to have the US as a back-stop because they needed the cash that should have gone to their armies for other purposes. This has been happening for decades. That lead to the situation that we are in today where most of the EU's defense strategy is in fact subsidized by the US. The NATO EU countries despite signing the treaties have barely managed to keep up with the minimum NATO required spending on their own defenses. This was entirely the doing of Europe.