As a JS J5 staff officer during roughly the same period you were a NATO staff officer, allow me to say how much I appreciate this essay. But, I'm afraid my own experience with the "coffee and chocolates" crowd led me to conclude the US would be much better off restructuring our strategic alliances.
Debra, one big issue there is NATO is squarely the "devil we know" problem. Uniquely to Europe, NATO survived where SEATO and CENTO failed. In the post-SEATO/Asia construct we went for basically bilateral agreements, Rewriting NATO is hard, and one big issue is what the real definitions were for "One Europe, united and at peace."
Personally, I think that the standard of using NATO for the defense of actual allied territory, while using the EU where possible for Eurocentric non-NATO defense operations isn't a bad one. The issues within the EU (which are large) cannot be laid at the feet of the Americans or Canadians by the French as some sort of perfidious plot by Albion.
Good points, and worth considering once all the NATO members have met their obligations not just to pay their full dues and bring their forces up to speed. The problems the Brits are having with their new carriers, for example, suggest we are a long way off from the latter.
Strenuous agreement. And, we haven't even started down the road of if there is enough institutional military talent within Europe to really spend 2-5% of GDP in a way that gives actual military capability with good analysis vs. just some politically hardware with no people, or people with no hardware. In Sarotte's "Not One Inch" book, she references how initial figures for NATO expansion were many billions to make credible, interoperable forces out of the Balts and Visegrad nations. We hand waived that assessment, and it took decades to even really make progress on low/no costs initiatives like Military Schengen.
Its a hagiography of Democratic Party efforts at NATO enlargement. Basically, it comes across as the foreign policy effort version of the Yogi Berra line "if there is a fork in the road, take it."
At every turn, it seems we were exploiting Russian weakness (fine, I'm not Russian.) But, if there were inconvenient truths like "this is going to be really expensive to be really meaningful" or "we really might be agitating the Russians without being able to deter them" it was kind of ignored as know-nothings standing athwart history.
The difficulty for the Democrats was/is their reverential attitude toward Europe, and apparent inability to prioritize US strategic interests because it would seem imperialistic. Or, chafe European sensibilities. Or something.
About 10% of Germans were members of the NAZI party, and a little less than 10% of USSR citizens were Communist party members. And, as Billy says, "6.5% so far".
Lots, starting with democratic processes against excesses. Now, Europe might be jettisoning that, but in the US, there is still a fairly robust political contest.
M perception as a ground pounder in NATO/EU countries Cold War and post-Cold War was that the Europeans had two takes on the threat from USSR/Russia that resulted in the same unwillingness to provide for their own defense (i.e., meet the NATO goals). 1. If the threat was recognized as really big (Hungary '56, Czechoslovakia "68, even Afghanistan '79, the Euro members of NATO would say, "thank God the US recognizes the threat and are stepping up to support/save us. I guess we can shirk a little bit." 2. If the threat is downplayed, and the US is negotiating with the USSR/Russia on some security arrangement or treaty, then the Euro members of NATO would say, "see, the threat has receded or is overblown - if the US can get along with the USSR/Russia or declare a 'peace dividend' a la the Clinton years, then we don't have to worry so much either." In either situation, despite the differences, their desire to see the US as leader/bellweather/savior overcomes their assessment of the situation, and serves to justify their lack of action.
I've referred to Trump's attempts to cajole Europe to action (other than financing the Russian war effort, but that's another post) to be public/bad cop effort of good cop SECDEF Gates declaration, back in 2011. For those of you burdened by New Math, that was AFTER Georgia and before Russian efforts in Donbass.
"But some two decades after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the U.S. share of NATO defense spending has now risen to more than 75 percent – at a time when politically painful budget and benefit cuts are being considered at home.
The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress – and in the American body politic writ large – to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense. Nations apparently willing and eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in European defense budgets.
Indeed, if current trends in the decline of European defense capabilities are not halted and reversed, Future U.S. political leaders– those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me – may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost."
Instead, the US has been accused of being the "unreliable ally." The irony of this charge, considering just French actions since the mid 1980s, is large and tasty.
Further, when compared to Asian allies, many of whom face similar demographic and budget challenges, we see far more willingness to invest in common security, and far less moaning and gnashing of teeth.
As always, CDR Salamander a great break down on the issues at hand. It is fair to say that the world when NATO was formed was one thing, and now decades later it is another. China alone is example. At one point barely eking out a living with everyone running around with little red Mao books, and now doing reasonably well though not without its own set of problems. (Who can truly manage 1.3 billion people? I guess Modi is asking himself the same question!) Regardless, this writer agrees with the notion that NATO needs at minimum a “reshaping” of the whole, the how and what of that reshaping can be left to greater minds. But what is on offer today is pretty antiquated and as we watch the astoundingly fast adjustments on the battlefield in the SMO/Ukraine conflict, the notion that a coalition like NATO being able to adjust fast seems hard to fathom, doesn’t mean after a good back on your heels, really bad first 2 rounds it doesn’t get back in the fight, but maybe the time for learning to switch from right hand to left mid fight is neigh One thing for sure. The effort to become “more expeditionary’ is critical. One can only hope that the puzzle palace sees the mistake the 38th and now 39th Commandant’s of the Marine Corps made with FD2030, and move to rebuild the Corps MAGTF capability and fast. If the other services see advantage in being an MMA fighter rather sumo wrestler than come board. But at the least we need a fast ships going into harms way Navy with leathernecks aboard or in trace with revitalized ARG/MEU and up capability. We do not have that today. We don’t need to pull up the up the drawbridge over the Pacific and Atlantic moats, but neither do we need to keep funding an old system that brings marginal return on investment at this stage in the life of the company aka Europe and NATO.
1. Increasingly, the Muslim population and growing Muslim leadership of NATO countries will determine which direction NATO's weapons are pointed and who controls the nuclear assets.
2. Israel's inability to put a lid on Hamas and Hezbollah shows the limitations of airpower and the dangers of cutting back aggressively on infantry and armor.
My own thoughts...Israel has done pretty darn well against both terrorist groups thru Jan-25 given that their efforts were hamstrung by the former POTUS. I'm optimistic that eventually both efforts will succeed and Hamas will no longer rule Gaza.
Steel City: For me, the important lesson is that the ability to flood a battlefield (city, region, country) with troops and to keep those troops well supplied is absolutely critical and the US needs massive expeditionary capability. We cannot take 6 months or more to move tens of thousands of troops, armor, munitions and supplies. This will be as true in the Pacific as in Europe.
Truer in the Pacific. In that the distances are vast and the assets needed to campaign there need to be equally vast. The WWII USN wasn't built to fight the Germans, but rather the Japanese and we just used some against the Germans.
Tarawa was 4 months from kernal (July '43) to execution (November '43). I fear we have neither the leadership nor the logistical capacity to execute Operation Galvanic in this decade.
Jeffrey: Hezbollah and Hamas also had the ideological commitment that no European troops have. This situation will arise throughout Western Europe and the UK. In France, for example, there are enough motivated Muslims around Paris or Marseille to storm and capture a French military base. Same with Belgium and the Scandinavian countries. After what happened in Gaza, such a scenario is plausible.
And considering that European cities are geographically small and in two cases, the C2 nodes of a P5 nuclear armed state as well as global tourist sites, one wonders about a Black Swan like this.
Second, for all the sturm and drang over the topic, the whole "The Muslims are taking over Europe" thing isn't supported by the numbers.
The UK is 6.5% Muslim, France is 7%, Germany is 4.6%, and Sweden is 2%. The only countries in NATO that are majority Muslim are Turkey and Albania, and in all the others fewer than 10% of the people are Muslim.
If that is enough to turn Europe to the crescent we may as well just recite the shahada and have done with it.
You are singing to my choir about getting Europeans to spend more on defense so America can focus on China. But ...
... I want it done through NATO that remains led by America that knits together European capabilities. American strength in Europe and the waters around Europe is already--justifiably--a small fraction of the Cold War deployments. EU strategic autonomy is just a means for the proto-imperial European Union to kill NATO in order to strip away that inconvenient prefix. Vance's warning about European democracy and freedom will need to be turned to 11 if the EU is fully in charge of Europe.
More than a century of American foreign policy has kept a single hostile power from controlling Western Europe. Staying in Europe via NATO prevents the Atlantic from being our first line of defense in the east. I think we can afford that insurance policy.
Well, how the EU creates itself as anti-Russian Holy Roman Empire out of consensus driven structure that includes the Irish and Greek Cypriots seems to be a rather large and not entirely plausible project. For the EU to replicate the even grossly inadequate NATO command and control structures would be a massive undertaking, that German pinky budget swears to the contrary, would be an enormous investment in manpower, alone.
From the news today it looks like Operation Paperclip depleted Germany’s ability to produce working rockets. (My FIL used to entertain von Braun and Ley when he worked for Douglas in the day). Let’s see if they can recover.
Rockets blow up, esp. in testing. At this point the Europeans via ESA/Ariane and various new entrant rocket projects is just trying to preserve a level of strategic autonomy. I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't an engineering talent shortage in Europe just like some of the US champions like Boeing seem to exhibit.
Contrarian here. The point of NATO was to keep the Germans from needing an army. A weak German army makes the world a safer place. No sooner do those Euros get an Army than they are unleashing it on their hapless neighbors. Keeping Germany unarmed kept the world safe. Do the German tanks break down? Good. Are their troops undisciplined? Excellent.
Gorbachev's position on German reunification was that it should be neutral and outside of NATO. We eventually backed him off with a promise that NATO would not expand one inch further East. How did that work out.
Why should we support countries whose governments outlaw or imprison their political opponents or put people in jail for exercising their speech or religion?
If Starmer and Macron want to redo the Crimean War that is their business not ours.
Man, those in Europe seem quite forgetful of decades of nearly reflexive anti-Americanism. Three months of Trump asking them to stop buying Russian gas and its "the post war agreements are over."
“Decades of nearly reflexive anti-Americanism?” Where was it?
I’ve been going to Europe since the mid-70s. I took German in high school and was stationed with the Army in West Germany 75-77. There was a residue of anti-Americanism remaining from the Vietnam War, and a general concern about the possibility of a nuclear war being fought on German soil. There were protests about nuclear weapons, some of it astroturfed by the KGB, most of it genuine and understandable. All in all, the Germans tolerated the presence of 250,000 US troops on their small country very well.
After the army, I lived in Spain and studied Spanish. The country was in “the Transition,” where free speech was again allowed and democracy was being restored. A spent a lot of time with students, mostly members of the scores of Left parties which were again allowed. The anti-American sentiment derived from the perception that the US had supported Franco during the years of dictatorship, but it was nothing personal or visceral, just political.
All this time, I saw American music, movies and television permeating Europe. Watching Combat! and Hogan’s Heroes dubbed in German on German TV. Going to rockabilly concerts in Spain. The continual presence of Holloywood movies in theaters. Europeans generally like US culture.
Are you talking about Schroeder and Chirac refusing to participate in the Iraq War, saying it was a bad idea? The days of “Freedom Fries?” They were right!
But when I went to Iraq, I worked with Polish, Danes, Spanish, Romanians, Dutch, Hungarians. Of course even more countries went to Afghanistan.
I live in Spain now. I don’t feel any anti-Americanism, and Spanish relations with the US presence on the Spanish bases at Rota and Morón are good, there are only the usual disputes with the strong unions representing local workers for KBR and other contractors.
You have either read some nonsense or are very sensitive, i.e. “snowflake.”
So is Canada with government officials stating that fact publicly.
My comments are on what may be going to happen not an idea.
They were not friends before and France after WW 2 became all but an enemy with De Gaulle. Keep in mind, The soviet Union and China were once our allies.
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world".
Here across deaths other river the Tartar Horsemen shake their spears.
Post Ukraine Invasion 2022, was there any notable improvement in the defenses of the UK, France, or Germany?
At least the Poles seriously expanded defenses and readiness. How about joint NATO exercises on Polish territory?
Ok. Germans tanks in Poland is a tender subject. But why NOT rotate a French and a British armored battalion in and out of Poland?
Too expensive?
Too potentially destabilizing with regard to Putin? (If YES, why should we care?)
OR...
Too destabilizing with regard to French and British troops' expectations of 30 hour work weeks?
AND...
Too destabilizing for politicians when high op-tempo training shows the current state of disrepair of most NATO armor. (Broken down tanks and APCs in the Polish countryside are hard to hide from cameras.)
Some of it is Russophobia/antiorientalism inherited from Europe.
Some of it is TDS,
Some of it is EUCOM is a wonderful vacation PCS! A lot of retirees need the Army structure.
Europe as it evolved is no longer worth the money, and immensely unworthy tripped nuclear war.
Russia very kindly can’ get much past the Vistular with a large mobilization
As a JS J5 staff officer during roughly the same period you were a NATO staff officer, allow me to say how much I appreciate this essay. But, I'm afraid my own experience with the "coffee and chocolates" crowd led me to conclude the US would be much better off restructuring our strategic alliances.
Debra, one big issue there is NATO is squarely the "devil we know" problem. Uniquely to Europe, NATO survived where SEATO and CENTO failed. In the post-SEATO/Asia construct we went for basically bilateral agreements, Rewriting NATO is hard, and one big issue is what the real definitions were for "One Europe, united and at peace."
Personally, I think that the standard of using NATO for the defense of actual allied territory, while using the EU where possible for Eurocentric non-NATO defense operations isn't a bad one. The issues within the EU (which are large) cannot be laid at the feet of the Americans or Canadians by the French as some sort of perfidious plot by Albion.
Good points, and worth considering once all the NATO members have met their obligations not just to pay their full dues and bring their forces up to speed. The problems the Brits are having with their new carriers, for example, suggest we are a long way off from the latter.
Strenuous agreement. And, we haven't even started down the road of if there is enough institutional military talent within Europe to really spend 2-5% of GDP in a way that gives actual military capability with good analysis vs. just some politically hardware with no people, or people with no hardware. In Sarotte's "Not One Inch" book, she references how initial figures for NATO expansion were many billions to make credible, interoperable forces out of the Balts and Visegrad nations. We hand waived that assessment, and it took decades to even really make progress on low/no costs initiatives like Military Schengen.
Hard to keep up. I have just ordered the Sarotte book. I well remember the "EU Defense Force" planning circus from 20-odd years ago.
Its a hagiography of Democratic Party efforts at NATO enlargement. Basically, it comes across as the foreign policy effort version of the Yogi Berra line "if there is a fork in the road, take it."
At every turn, it seems we were exploiting Russian weakness (fine, I'm not Russian.) But, if there were inconvenient truths like "this is going to be really expensive to be really meaningful" or "we really might be agitating the Russians without being able to deter them" it was kind of ignored as know-nothings standing athwart history.
The difficulty for the Democrats was/is their reverential attitude toward Europe, and apparent inability to prioritize US strategic interests because it would seem imperialistic. Or, chafe European sensibilities. Or something.
Don't forget Bush.
EU is our enemy in the NATO alliance.
In all but fact.
Look what UK is, an Islamic state coming into being, France is a one party ruling nation.
What will be the second nuclear armed Muslim Nation?
The UK, or maybe France.
Pakistan
Pakistan has Nukes. Has had them for a while now.
My bad.
My bet is on UK.
Friendly reminder that only 6.5% of the UK is Muslim.
6.5% so far
About 10% of Germans were members of the NAZI party, and a little less than 10% of USSR citizens were Communist party members. And, as Billy says, "6.5% so far".
Religions are generally rather less coherent in their political programs than political parties are, I've found.
They are in government.
Which differentiates them from us...how?
Lots, starting with democratic processes against excesses. Now, Europe might be jettisoning that, but in the US, there is still a fairly robust political contest.
M perception as a ground pounder in NATO/EU countries Cold War and post-Cold War was that the Europeans had two takes on the threat from USSR/Russia that resulted in the same unwillingness to provide for their own defense (i.e., meet the NATO goals). 1. If the threat was recognized as really big (Hungary '56, Czechoslovakia "68, even Afghanistan '79, the Euro members of NATO would say, "thank God the US recognizes the threat and are stepping up to support/save us. I guess we can shirk a little bit." 2. If the threat is downplayed, and the US is negotiating with the USSR/Russia on some security arrangement or treaty, then the Euro members of NATO would say, "see, the threat has receded or is overblown - if the US can get along with the USSR/Russia or declare a 'peace dividend' a la the Clinton years, then we don't have to worry so much either." In either situation, despite the differences, their desire to see the US as leader/bellweather/savior overcomes their assessment of the situation, and serves to justify their lack of action.
I've referred to Trump's attempts to cajole Europe to action (other than financing the Russian war effort, but that's another post) to be public/bad cop effort of good cop SECDEF Gates declaration, back in 2011. For those of you burdened by New Math, that was AFTER Georgia and before Russian efforts in Donbass.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/natosource/text-of-speech-by-robert-gates-on-the-future-of-nato/
"But some two decades after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the U.S. share of NATO defense spending has now risen to more than 75 percent – at a time when politically painful budget and benefit cuts are being considered at home.
The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress – and in the American body politic writ large – to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense. Nations apparently willing and eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in European defense budgets.
Indeed, if current trends in the decline of European defense capabilities are not halted and reversed, Future U.S. political leaders– those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me – may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost."
Instead, the US has been accused of being the "unreliable ally." The irony of this charge, considering just French actions since the mid 1980s, is large and tasty.
Further, when compared to Asian allies, many of whom face similar demographic and budget challenges, we see far more willingness to invest in common security, and far less moaning and gnashing of teeth.
As always, CDR Salamander a great break down on the issues at hand. It is fair to say that the world when NATO was formed was one thing, and now decades later it is another. China alone is example. At one point barely eking out a living with everyone running around with little red Mao books, and now doing reasonably well though not without its own set of problems. (Who can truly manage 1.3 billion people? I guess Modi is asking himself the same question!) Regardless, this writer agrees with the notion that NATO needs at minimum a “reshaping” of the whole, the how and what of that reshaping can be left to greater minds. But what is on offer today is pretty antiquated and as we watch the astoundingly fast adjustments on the battlefield in the SMO/Ukraine conflict, the notion that a coalition like NATO being able to adjust fast seems hard to fathom, doesn’t mean after a good back on your heels, really bad first 2 rounds it doesn’t get back in the fight, but maybe the time for learning to switch from right hand to left mid fight is neigh One thing for sure. The effort to become “more expeditionary’ is critical. One can only hope that the puzzle palace sees the mistake the 38th and now 39th Commandant’s of the Marine Corps made with FD2030, and move to rebuild the Corps MAGTF capability and fast. If the other services see advantage in being an MMA fighter rather sumo wrestler than come board. But at the least we need a fast ships going into harms way Navy with leathernecks aboard or in trace with revitalized ARG/MEU and up capability. We do not have that today. We don’t need to pull up the up the drawbridge over the Pacific and Atlantic moats, but neither do we need to keep funding an old system that brings marginal return on investment at this stage in the life of the company aka Europe and NATO.
Napoleon prayed to always be opposed by a coalition.
How did that end up working out for him?
Two points:
1. Increasingly, the Muslim population and growing Muslim leadership of NATO countries will determine which direction NATO's weapons are pointed and who controls the nuclear assets.
2. Israel's inability to put a lid on Hamas and Hezbollah shows the limitations of airpower and the dangers of cutting back aggressively on infantry and armor.
My own thoughts...Israel has done pretty darn well against both terrorist groups thru Jan-25 given that their efforts were hamstrung by the former POTUS. I'm optimistic that eventually both efforts will succeed and Hamas will no longer rule Gaza.
Steel City: For me, the important lesson is that the ability to flood a battlefield (city, region, country) with troops and to keep those troops well supplied is absolutely critical and the US needs massive expeditionary capability. We cannot take 6 months or more to move tens of thousands of troops, armor, munitions and supplies. This will be as true in the Pacific as in Europe.
Truer in the Pacific. In that the distances are vast and the assets needed to campaign there need to be equally vast. The WWII USN wasn't built to fight the Germans, but rather the Japanese and we just used some against the Germans.
Agree completely on expeditionary capability. Not sure how we ever let ourselves get into our current state of non-expeditionary readiness.
Tarawa was 4 months from kernal (July '43) to execution (November '43). I fear we have neither the leadership nor the logistical capacity to execute Operation Galvanic in this decade.
I've argue that LH/HAMAS on October 6th likely had as much ready ground combat power as non-US NATO nation did.
Jeffrey: Hezbollah and Hamas also had the ideological commitment that no European troops have. This situation will arise throughout Western Europe and the UK. In France, for example, there are enough motivated Muslims around Paris or Marseille to storm and capture a French military base. Same with Belgium and the Scandinavian countries. After what happened in Gaza, such a scenario is plausible.
And considering that European cities are geographically small and in two cases, the C2 nodes of a P5 nuclear armed state as well as global tourist sites, one wonders about a Black Swan like this.
Okay, first, what Muslim leadership?
Second, for all the sturm and drang over the topic, the whole "The Muslims are taking over Europe" thing isn't supported by the numbers.
The UK is 6.5% Muslim, France is 7%, Germany is 4.6%, and Sweden is 2%. The only countries in NATO that are majority Muslim are Turkey and Albania, and in all the others fewer than 10% of the people are Muslim.
If that is enough to turn Europe to the crescent we may as well just recite the shahada and have done with it.
You are singing to my choir about getting Europeans to spend more on defense so America can focus on China. But ...
... I want it done through NATO that remains led by America that knits together European capabilities. American strength in Europe and the waters around Europe is already--justifiably--a small fraction of the Cold War deployments. EU strategic autonomy is just a means for the proto-imperial European Union to kill NATO in order to strip away that inconvenient prefix. Vance's warning about European democracy and freedom will need to be turned to 11 if the EU is fully in charge of Europe.
And while the Pacific is the ocean of concern today, we have a long history of threats from the Atlantic that I don't want to revive: https://bjdunn61.substack.com/p/the-enduring-threats-to-america-from?r=vhgbs
More than a century of American foreign policy has kept a single hostile power from controlling Western Europe. Staying in Europe via NATO prevents the Atlantic from being our first line of defense in the east. I think we can afford that insurance policy.
Well, how the EU creates itself as anti-Russian Holy Roman Empire out of consensus driven structure that includes the Irish and Greek Cypriots seems to be a rather large and not entirely plausible project. For the EU to replicate the even grossly inadequate NATO command and control structures would be a massive undertaking, that German pinky budget swears to the contrary, would be an enormous investment in manpower, alone.
From the news today it looks like Operation Paperclip depleted Germany’s ability to produce working rockets. (My FIL used to entertain von Braun and Ley when he worked for Douglas in the day). Let’s see if they can recover.
Rockets blow up, esp. in testing. At this point the Europeans via ESA/Ariane and various new entrant rocket projects is just trying to preserve a level of strategic autonomy. I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't an engineering talent shortage in Europe just like some of the US champions like Boeing seem to exhibit.
I nearly spit out my coffee reading the "Jeb!".
Well played sir, well played.
Please clap.
I'm still waiting on my ¡Jeb! 2016 SundayFunday Guaca Bowle.
Every ending is a new beginning. Time for us to close the door on the European chapter. Bunch of NWO elites that eat bugs. No thanks.
European strategic autonomy requires Europe to:
1. Take the long road being back to being democratic
2. Engage with Russia on a constructive basis that recognises mutual legitimate security concerns
3. Stop picking fights with Russia that Europe can’t win even with a blank check from the US, let alone going solo.
"If there are American troops still in Europe 10 years from now, I would consider this alliance a failure"- Dwight Eisenhower, 1952.
Contrarian here. The point of NATO was to keep the Germans from needing an army. A weak German army makes the world a safer place. No sooner do those Euros get an Army than they are unleashing it on their hapless neighbors. Keeping Germany unarmed kept the world safe. Do the German tanks break down? Good. Are their troops undisciplined? Excellent.
Gorbachev's position on German reunification was that it should be neutral and outside of NATO. We eventually backed him off with a promise that NATO would not expand one inch further East. How did that work out.
Europe is an albatross around our necks.
Why should we support countries whose governments outlaw or imprison their political opponents or put people in jail for exercising their speech or religion?
If Starmer and Macron want to redo the Crimean War that is their business not ours.
Europe is fast becoming The enemy of the United States and inside four years will openly against the nation.
Strange as it seems, Russia in that time may just become a new ally against the EU block.
That's why we need to knock out Canada and deal with Mexico our northern and southern enemies.
Then acquire Greenland for the GIUK gap.
Sounds crazy I know but things are coming apart fast.
If Europe is "becoming an enemy" it's in part because of "crazy" ideas like yours (and Trump's) -- "knock out Canada?" "Acquire Greenland?"
I've read a few editorials in center-right newspapers in Spain in the last week saying that the alliance with the USA is ending because of that stuff.
Man, those in Europe seem quite forgetful of decades of nearly reflexive anti-Americanism. Three months of Trump asking them to stop buying Russian gas and its "the post war agreements are over."
“Decades of nearly reflexive anti-Americanism?” Where was it?
I’ve been going to Europe since the mid-70s. I took German in high school and was stationed with the Army in West Germany 75-77. There was a residue of anti-Americanism remaining from the Vietnam War, and a general concern about the possibility of a nuclear war being fought on German soil. There were protests about nuclear weapons, some of it astroturfed by the KGB, most of it genuine and understandable. All in all, the Germans tolerated the presence of 250,000 US troops on their small country very well.
After the army, I lived in Spain and studied Spanish. The country was in “the Transition,” where free speech was again allowed and democracy was being restored. A spent a lot of time with students, mostly members of the scores of Left parties which were again allowed. The anti-American sentiment derived from the perception that the US had supported Franco during the years of dictatorship, but it was nothing personal or visceral, just political.
All this time, I saw American music, movies and television permeating Europe. Watching Combat! and Hogan’s Heroes dubbed in German on German TV. Going to rockabilly concerts in Spain. The continual presence of Holloywood movies in theaters. Europeans generally like US culture.
Are you talking about Schroeder and Chirac refusing to participate in the Iraq War, saying it was a bad idea? The days of “Freedom Fries?” They were right!
But when I went to Iraq, I worked with Polish, Danes, Spanish, Romanians, Dutch, Hungarians. Of course even more countries went to Afghanistan.
I live in Spain now. I don’t feel any anti-Americanism, and Spanish relations with the US presence on the Spanish bases at Rota and Morón are good, there are only the usual disputes with the strong unions representing local workers for KBR and other contractors.
You have either read some nonsense or are very sensitive, i.e. “snowflake.”
Europe is now at odds with the US.
The NATO alliance is broken in all but name.
So is Canada with government officials stating that fact publicly.
My comments are on what may be going to happen not an idea.
They were not friends before and France after WW 2 became all but an enemy with De Gaulle. Keep in mind, The soviet Union and China were once our allies.
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world".
Here across deaths other river the Tartar Horsemen shake their spears.
Post Ukraine Invasion 2022, was there any notable improvement in the defenses of the UK, France, or Germany?
At least the Poles seriously expanded defenses and readiness. How about joint NATO exercises on Polish territory?
Ok. Germans tanks in Poland is a tender subject. But why NOT rotate a French and a British armored battalion in and out of Poland?
Too expensive?
Too potentially destabilizing with regard to Putin? (If YES, why should we care?)
OR...
Too destabilizing with regard to French and British troops' expectations of 30 hour work weeks?
AND...
Too destabilizing for politicians when high op-tempo training shows the current state of disrepair of most NATO armor. (Broken down tanks and APCs in the Polish countryside are hard to hide from cameras.)