What do the Europeans want?

European-American relations don't get nearly the attention from the American press as they should.  One of the results is that a lot of people are going to be surprised to see the results at various times at developments of which European publics are considerably more aware.

This paper (which is the lenght of a small book) has some worthwhile observations on the subject:  The Atlantic Crises: Britain, Europe, and Parting from the United States by William Hopkinson (Naval War College Newport Papers 23; 2005)

Hopkinson relies heavily on the conventional American assumption that the European Union countries aren't spending nearly enough on their militaries and that they should be building larger militaries.  But, if you read it closely, he's also assuming what the US conventional wisdom does about the security needs of the Europeans: that they have a need to project large forces around the world on short notice.  American political and military thought is becoming so saturated by the idea that the United States should dominate the world, and do so primarily through military might, that even serious strategic thinkers seem to almost unconsciously assume that the goal of world domination by military power is the rational goal of all other nations and blocs of nations.

This is a decent summary of the current situation, though (from Chapter 4):

The potential contributions of European countries to confronting these new problems may, in some respects, be relatively greater than their contributions to common security during the Cold War. Indeed, in some respects the Europeans, individually and collectively, contribute more in money, action, and engagement to the new security agenda [i.e., combatting transnational terrorism]  than Americans. In some of the necessary security skills and aptitudes they are at least as well versed as the latter. However, their ability to contribute useful military forces (and it is to these rather than to the other instruments of diplomacy that the United States tends to attach prime importance) in the areas that have become of most concern to the United States - the direct security of the United States is now much less dependent on military engagement in Europe- has recently been much less than it was before 1991.  Most European militaries cannot project forces any distance, and few can provide forces that can fight the sort of intensive all-arms and joint campaign that the United States has waged in Afghanistan and Iraq. In short, the Europeans need the United States much less than they used to, and the United States has much less need to secure Europe militarily than it believed it needed to do in the Cold War; thus the parties
are less valuable to each other than they used to be. The benefits to both parties from the United States having been in Europe are much less, and thus the costs are seen as less
acceptable than in time past.1 Even before the 2003 Iraq conflict, a number of Western European states were, therefore, less inclined to accept automatic American leadership. (my emphasis)

Note the implicit assumption that European leaders and publics should be willing and prepared to "fight the sort of intensive all-arms and joint campaign" that the Iraq War is.

But it's pretty evident that when it came to successfully carrying out "stabilization operations" and counterinsurgency, the US was also ill-prepared to fight the real existing war that the Bush administration decided to undertake.  We went to war with the Army we had.

Also notice the refernce to how the United States now puts its emphasis on military force as the primary tool in foreign relations.  Our foreign policy, to rephrase it, is becoming increasingly militarized.