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CBS I and the world. I'm John Bachelor.

Bloomberg headline. This is Bloomberg Europe.

EU's new defense plan aims to boost European military purchases.

Subhead, the European Commission is set to unveil a new strategy.

Subhead, the Commission paper will be unveiled in the coming weeks. I go to Joseph Sternberg.

Remember the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. He writes political economics

column he's based in London, who anticipated this in his column of several days past

that what we're looking at here is Europe adjusting itself to a mandate a

recommendation a suggestion it's been in place since 2014 the famous 2%

number there's more to it than that question is is this real or is this the

European Commission Joe a very good evening to you, because you've done the footwork here about where the 2%

number came from, and also looking at the plans of the Europeans now, this is the EU talking, not NATO talking, the

EU talking. Is this a credible catch-up that they're producing or are they having to build from scratch to start factories

all over again. Good evening to you Joe.

Hey John, I mean the point is that Europe wants its defense spending and its militaries to be credible in a way that they perhaps

haven't always cared about in the way that they ought to.

And I think that this is a development that's worth paying attention to in the U.S.

So I mean, the backstory here is that really since the end of the Cold War, America has been complaining that Europeans were not pulling their weight for military expenditure

within the context of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO.

I mean the Europeans spent on defense during the Cold War when they were on the front line,

but they thought that the collapse of the Soviet Union and communism in Europe was an excuse to take a holiday from history and so they shifted a lot of spending out of the military capabilities atrophied.

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