I addressed Korea only, but here’s a quick one on Europe.

NATO is a treaty that was, again, put together originally for the same reasons we fought a war on the Korean peninsula (my father was in all 3: WW2, Korea, VietNam).

Germany “paused” their requirement of military or civil service in 2011. So they bore that cost a little less longer than S. Korea, for obvious reasons.
Europe was helped after the war, but cannot be faulted for succeeding. And, in many ways, succeeding way more for their citizens than our country has, as the remarks in my article make clear.

When I lived in Germany in the ’80s, I remember a McKinsey Global Report on Germany’s relative inefficiency in capital usage, most of all in the utilities sector. The report called out all the costs that went into, for instance, putting most of it’s power and water distribution infrastructure in hardened underground conduits. Well, you’ll never guess why they had to do that? You know what tanks and other invading forces do to exactly that part of the infrastructure, right? It did thankfully get pointed out at the time how clueless McKinsey was. But it looks like most Americans, even the hotshots and McKinsey, gaze more at their navels than look up and around at what is really going on. Even in their own country.

NATO is a common defense treaty. A large component of the military hardware that is used by NATO comes from… USA. You can go look up the numbers, but it is very significant.

The USA, as the last great Republican president noted, maintains a vast military-industrial complex. This, as has been pointed out over and over (and I know a couple folks who worked at defense companies), is the source of epic waste. Just read up on the marines’ Osprey program or the F-35 program. If you can stay calm afterward and direct your concerns here more than “there”, you’re doing well.

And just for extra kickers: I’m not sure how aware you are of it. Or things like an oil services company named Halliburton and whose CEO became Vice President just in time for a war and suddenly Halliburton becomes one of the largest if not the largest supplier of a whole range of things to the military that had nothing to do with oil services.

That we pay that extra 1% or so over what our allies pay is more than accounted for in all this.