> Not sure how much that's true. EU spends billions buying US military hardware such as the Reaper.

The thing is, West Germany alone had about 3000 tanks at the end of the Cold War, and reunified Germany nowadays has 300. Navies and air forces have been run to the ground across Europe, even the nuclear forces of UK/FR are nowhere near what they had once been.

The expectation over the last decades, especially after the pacification of the Balkans, was that open war would not return to Europe any time soon - on the one side because almost all European countries were either members of the EU, EEA or Schengen and thus were likely to more integrate instead of going back to 19th century fiefdom wars, and on the other side because the only realistic opponent was Russia... which we thought we could handle by "peace by trade".

By "relying on the American tax payer" they mean trusting the US military to deter Russia.