Can Europe's Shrinking Military Back up Its Commitments to Syria? Great Britain on Thursday became the latest European country to throw its support behind the nascent Syrian rebel opposition movement. British Defense Minister William Hague, who will host Syrian representatives in London on Friday to discuss cooperation going forward, said the time may have come for Western help in establishing a no-fly zone. "We are not excluding any option in the future because," he said, "the Syrian crisis is getting worse and worse all the time." In February, Mr. Hague had ruled out military intervention. With an estimated 35,000 Syrians dead, it may be heartening to many to see the West taking a more aggressive stance against the threat of more carnage. Nonetheless, a looming doubt hangs over this renewed sense of purpose: While European countries may want to help, it's very unclear they have the budgets, or even the materiel, to do so effectively. Indeed, Europe's backing of the Syrian rebellion could become a political -but more importantly, in a Continent still in crisis, an economic - liability. European countries are slashing defense-related budgets. Back in June of 2011, then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that Europe - and in particular NATO - faced "collective military irrelevance" because of drastic spending cuts. According to a Brookings Institution paper from July, "The Implications of Military Spending Cuts for NATO's Largest Members,," NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe James Stavridis said "if defense spending continues to decline, NATO may not be able to replicate its success in Libya in another decade." That time may already have arrived. On Thursday ,Britain's defense chief, Sir David Richards, blasted his government for recent cuts in Army spending. That's spending that could very well be needed to make good on the recent commitments to the Syrian opposition. We have a whole load of tasks expected of us. Our political masters are quite happy to reduce the size of the Armed Forces, but their appetite to exercise influence on the world stage is, quite understandably, the same as it has always been," Richards told The Telegraph. Often politicians say to me, 'Can you go and do this?' I say to them, 'With what?' Britain's armed forces are quickly heading toward their lowest levels in a century. The defense budget has been cut by 8 percent, tens of thousands of personnel have lost their jobs, and morale is at an all-time low. Senior British officers, including six prominent generals and Brigadier Nicky Moffat, who was on track to become Britain's first female general, have quit in disgust and resignation recently. Cuts are scheduled in virtually every sector of the Armed Forces, from Air Corps to Artillery to Engineers. Other countries are going through similar cutbacks. France, which was the first European country to openly back the Syrian opposition, faces severe budget cuts that will shrink its forces 7 percent in 2013, a reduction in defense spending as a percentage of GDP from 2 percent a year down to 1.5 percent a year. Ten years ago NATO members collectively agreed not to dip below 2 percent of GDP; today only Britain still holds to that commitment. "The risk is all the greater that we maintain - on paper - capabilities we are, in reality, in the process of losing," said François Cornut-Gentille, the author of a November report to the French Parliament. NATO-wide, defense spending dropped by $56 billion between 2009 and 2011. One reason the cuts have increased significance now is because of the threat Syria's civil war poses of growing into a regional conflagration. Britain's Richards has said that the only way to avoid a regional war is to eliminate President Bashar al Assad's surface-to-air missile capability, which would mean establishing a no-fly zone, which in turn could mean exactly the kind of military build-up he says the British government is hampering with its budget cuts. In addition, Syrian rebels said recently that they fully expect to receive arms, including surface-to-air missiles from the West, prompting concerns that the weapons could fall into the wrong hands and be used against civilian airliners. Exactly the kind of thing that could further inflame an already unstable situation. The United States is not in a position to back up Europe's moves in quite the same way it would have a decade ago. "For the first time in our history, we may be facing a moment where we really do not have the money to do exactly what it is that the experts or the policy advisers" suggest, Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the Center on Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, told Reuters. So while Mr. Hague continues to edge further to more actively helping the Syrian rebels, it might be worth considering whether the Armed Forces of Europe are going to be in a position to go along for the ride.