While Americans certainly tend to overstate the case, I've seen a lot of very proud Europeans claiming the US has had no stake in defending them, after half a century of Cold War left the US the sole standing military hegemon, maintaining an extraordinarily expensive reserve capacity to wage warfare on behalf of the West when it's not directly against their interests.
Universal healthcare is preferable because it's cheaper. The rest of the European-model social welfare state would be possible in the US if we didn't blow so much more than putatively 'military independent' allies on our military, and if we hadn't developed the popular culture we needed to justify that spending in opposition to "Communism". Guess what? We're kind of broke. Europe is going to need to buck up and raise its military spending as a proportion of GDP if it wants to remain in its comfortable non-tenuous position for the rest of the 21st century.
