THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Defend Europe that is. And why shouldn't they, almost 70 years after the end of World War II we still haven't left so we might as well do something useful. And since we are so eager to spend money on the military, we might as well pay for it.

A column of Russian tanks and artillery weapons rolled toward Donetsk in Ukraine recently, the latest move in a proxy war that’s seen Crimea and much of the country’s Donbas region pass from government control.

At the same time, fighting was raging in Kobani, Syria, between an assortment of Kurdish fighters and the radicals of the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

Donetsk is smack in the middle of Eastern Europe. Kobani is just beyond Europe’s southeastern edge, and thousands of radical fighters there come from Europe. The two hot spots span what military experts call the full spectrum of modern warfare, from the traditional Russian force to the far-too-common asymmetric threat of the terrorist Islamic State. Both represent very real and serious threats to European security.

Yet European militaries aren’t prepared to deal with either one, much less both. European security remains dependent on the might of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and NATO increasingly is dependent on the might of the United States. The European nations NATO was set up to defend contribute less and less to the organization.

“If we think about the threats from this year, there was no real possibility that Russia would push beyond Ukraine, because the Russians knew invading a NATO country would mean facing the might of the American military,” said Patrick Keller, an international security expert at the prestigious center-right Adenauer Stiftung research center in Berlin. “They most certainly would not have had similar concerns about facing the Bundeswehr,” the German army.

History isn’t kind to nations that neglect their own defense, a point military experts agree is on the minds of European leaders in light of the twin threats. But NATO’s over-reliance on the United States was built into the organization from the beginning, military analysts said. It was fundamental to the American role in a two-superpower world. Europe was never expected to contribute much, said Stephen Long, an international security expert at the University of Richmond, in Virginia.

“The European contribution is not so much the military force, but the rights/privileges/logistical support for the U.S. presence in Europe,” he wrote in an email.

Just one thing, we might be a little short of boots on the ground, can you spare a few divisions?