Exactly this. It may seem heartless not to care about the Libyan rebels, but this would be the perfect moment to do just that, because there is (for those not in Libya) not much at stake. Imagine the US would not have helped and Britain and France ran out of ammo? The humiliation would be a real wake-up call and show us how much we should value having the US as an ally.
Then we could really make the whole thing working better. Reduce NATO back to the defensive alliance. Create a new organization that has binding quotas for spending and soldiers contributed. Let all those join who want, and escape the sclerotic constrains of NATO where the less enthusiastic members restrain the others because NATO decisions have to be unanimous.
Libya isn't just any other nation, though. It's been a cancer, a source of violence across Africa and elsewhere for decades. And it sits on NATO's edge. So when pro-democracy forces have a good shot at taking over, it isn't unreasonable for NATO to treat it as a security issue -- after all, shutting down a troublemaker, helping a neighbor, and hopefully ending up with a friendly neighbor on your border is beneficial to your own security.
But consider Syria, for contrast: they don't fund violence on a grand scale, and they aren't on NATO's edge. Even if NATO was flush with wealth and had military muscle to spare, intervening in Syria wouldn't be something related to NATO's security.
Getting away from the unanimity requirement is a tough one. It was a principle in the U.N. Security Council, for the "great powers", so no vote would pass when one or more of those powers stood in a position where it might be tempted to use military force to oppose the decision. This came to be called a "veto", but it's really a unanimity requirement. With NATO, other concerns arise, foremost of which is that if countries can be required to go along with an action against their wishes, you essentially have a government -- and no one wanted NATO to be a government.
It depends. Our social policies are at least partly credited for the fact that unemployment hardly rose in Germany through the financial crisis, even though our recession was deeper than in the United States. We have recovered to pre-crisis GDP just this year, but unemployment is the lowest it has ever been since reunification. To be fair, it seems to me like your health care system is actually more wasteful and inefficient than ours, and consequently this is actually an advantage compared to the US, we spend less on health care than you do for nearly the same or even better results. What really makes us lose money is unemployment policies. Investing in health care can have nice results, pampering the unemployed is a bad idea.
But Europe is just to diverse to give you a definite answer to your question. States like Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany have generous social safety nets, but they have no reason not to meet their spending targets, they could afford it. And of course some of our "savings" by not investing enough in our military goes to our welfare systems. On the other hand I have seen a report that said that Germany spends more money investing in/supporting green measures like feed-in tariffs for solar energy than it spends on the armed forces. Are those social policies? Nevertheless others spend to much on social matters and on defense, like Greece who spends 3.2% of GDP on their military and is practically broke.
I've seen a couple of articles crediting Germany's unemployment payments for a hefty part in the economic stability you've had. It kept money flowing from customers to stores, which keeps employment from getting worse. Actually the biggest problem for the program in the U.S. is how poorly funded it is; if it were run as an insurance program, even not-for-profit, it would have to collect far more than it presently does. On the federal level, it's essentially a welfare program -- I don't know what it is in Germany; are there payroll taxes to fund it?
Health care is a huge area I'm just going to pass on, save to say that it, too, is tied into the feedback loops that drive economies.
Are green measures social programs? Only if that's the only choice of where to put them. We need to get accustomed to having "taking care of our piece of land (and the world" as a category of spending. It comes with having a nation: together, as a social unit (willingly or unwillingly a part of it), the citizens of a country hold territory, and have in common the interest of keeping it healthy and useful. That doesn't need to be a function of the state; if we had a rational basis for our property systems it would be a corollary that could be run by an independent foundation. At the very least, all income to the state from the use of natural resources should go into a fund for taking care of green issues -- the first step toward getting them out of government hands.
Greece... I wonder how much of his GDP Alexander the Great spent on his military?
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Now, please explain those other things about wars Croats - Muslims or Albanians - Macedonians. But you can mention to me why Slovenians ban Croats onto way to EU in last few months... it seems Slovenians and Croats are not Serbs, right? Are we guilty for that too).
