Indeed. To be more exact, US encouragements for higher spending are implicite calls to buy more US arms.

Keeping Europe in vassaldom is pretty much the accepted policy on both sides of the aisle. Top National Security Democrat Zbigniew Brzezinski, onetime National Security Adviser for President Carter put it this way:

"To put it in a terminology that harkens back to a more brutal age of ancient empires," he writes, "the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together."