2. As it stands today, the US comes out on top. They paid a measly sum to throw Russia in the meat grinder and it will take decades until Russia is threat to the US again.
3. Our military hawks now get to focus on China. EU still has to worry about Russia
Question and I ask this honestly. What if Americans no longer care about global hegemony or the fate of Europe? As an American I am tired of the continual idea that we have to care about what happens in Europe and if anything bad happens there it is egg on our face. What about egg on Europe's face? They choose not to spend money on their defense and keep their end of the NATO agreement. I have no appetite to keep up our end of the NATO treaty in wartime if the other parties couldn't keep up their end in peacetime.
who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;
who rules the World-Island commands the world.
— Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality, p. 150
If you want to argue for a renewed commitment to the Monroe Doctrine, I'm with you. Heck, I'm even there for Manifest Destiny (Canada as the 51st state, as Benjamin Franklin would have had it). But the downsides of a multipolar world are legitimate. Ideally we can maintain our global dominance without oppressing/degrading our own and allied populations.
But here’s the thing. Great powers compete globally, but the real question isn’t whether America competes. It’s how, where, and at what cost. If we’re keeping influence by stretching ourselves too thin, ignoring our own problems, and paying Europe’s defense bill forever, then we’re setting ourselves up for failure just like Britain did.
Ukraine matters to Europe, not really to us. Losing Ukraine isn’t a crisis for America, but losing focus on our own borders, economy, and the Pacific definitely is.
I get that multipolarity has risks, but so does trying to be everywhere all the time. If European security is that important, then Europe should handle it. If they won’t, that’s on them.
If we don’t start prioritizing where America actually needs to be strong, we’re going to wake up one day and realize we’ve spent decades managing other people’s problems while letting our own pile up.
I only point out the foreign policy consensus inherited from the Cold War is still operational among Atlanticists and other Ukraine war hawks. Stripping away the hysteria, we can accept there will be a cost to Russian dominance of Ukraine, if allowed. I expect the foreign policy establishment in State, CIA, and DoD will continue to try to torpedo Trump. But the China hawks are ascendant at the moment. The recent debacle with Zelensky at the WH is maybe the nail in the coffin for overt "Ukraine uber Alles" war hawks. (They say Personnel is policy. Remember that key architects and actors of Atlanticist policy have personal ties to Ukraine. Nuland is second generation Ukrainian-American. The Vindmanns are Ukrainian nationals. Personally, I would not be surprised if Ukraine saboteurs were implicated in the Trump assassination attempt in Butler. They feel, perhaps correctly, that Trump is an existential threat. Doesn't necessarily mean their problems should be our problems.)
I tend to agree that Russia, China, and Iran are our global competitors, that India and Brazil are dark horses, and that transnational Islam (supported by our foreign adversaries) is another wild card. Abandoning the liberal pieties of Pax Americana and retrenching along nationalist sovereignty lines appears to be the way forward with regard to the very real domestic problems you mention. Unconstrained international labor migration is a failure for domestic populations and needs to be largely reversed. Border security and foreign influence need to be addressed. These are civilizational problems as old as civilization itself. The pendulum is swinging back. Some people get it.
I also appreciate the occasional encounter with sensible HN readers who eschew the vitriolic rhetoric and try to argue objectively. Looking at your other recent comments I see you are in a similar boat as I am on HN. Good luck!
What are you on about? EU countries + UK have over a million professional military personnel.
> Brussels is the equivalent to the Deep State in the US but with official status, instead of being a shadow government.
The EU parliament has members elected from each country in the EU, there's no deep state conspiracy there.
> The member states of the EU are soon going to realize they are "a peninsula at the tip of Eurasia" and their best interests lie in close ties to the US.
This is the complete opposite of what's actually going on, EU countries are realizing we need a stronger EU and we need to fend for ourselves and will be moving away from US ties.
The "deep state" is not a "conspiracy". It's a form of parallel government. Nothing unique about that in history. (The Roman Catholic Church should be familiar to all Europeans.) The comparison is to point out that there are two "sovereignties" in play (member states and EU) making laws. And when you have two, you have none.
Ukraine is in a bind, and it is sad when a buffer state is put through the meat grinder in a proxy war between two great powers. But here we are. The upside is that the Ukrainians who weren't killed in the conflict will be, along with Poland and Lithuania, the only "European" states with anything resembling a capable military. I doubt the EU members want Ukraine as a full member of NATO. Too risky. There are some proposals on the table for a more complicated peace without conceding full neutrality of Ukraine to Russia.
I don't think many people understand the nature of this conflict. They merely see "Russian aggression" but have little comprehension of great power competition and the events leading up to the hot part of this war. I feel for the Ukrainians but I wonder if any of the Ukraine boosters would shed a drop of their own blood for Ukraine. If the US demands that the Europeans take a larger role in the security of Europe, we will see if the European NATO members are up to the task. The US needs to pivot its resources to China in the coming decade. The war with Russia has been very costly and strengthened the bonds between Russia and China (and Iran and North Korea). The Europeans should take a great role in policing their own neighborhood, but I don't believe the EU, as currently constructed, is the governance vehicle capable of leading a unified Europe. The member states are, quite understandably, not happy to give up their sovereignty and culture. Participation in a common market has been a disaster for the working class of Western Europe (unless you think cheaper products is the only measure of a country's vitality). The EU experiment might be at an inflection point. They can remain in this bureaucratic quagmire, or reassert the spirit of Wesphalian sovereignty, or await the arrival of a new Charlemagne to unite a strong Europe under sovereign leadership capable of meeting the challenges of the 21st century. My money is on the decline of the EU into irrelevance and a return to the Westphalian spirit. There is no political will centered in Brussels capable of leading this ragtag assemblage of diverse states and peoples. The border problems persist. The result will be more populist revolts and ascendant "right wing" parties advocating "blood and soil" nationalism. If that's the future, then the western european states will only be supported militarily via bilateral treaties with the US or under the umbrella of a NATO dominated by the US. The latter is just the norm for the post-WWII "New World Order" so it will feel familiar. With luck, the collapse of the EU will allow EU member states to reassert control over their own borders and laws. If that happens, they should abandon this resentment of the US and be grateful they were saved from the managed decline of their central government in Brussels.