This article arguing America should help Europe achieve strategic autonomy rather than opposing it is plain wrong:
There are many reasons to be skeptical of this new yet age-old [European unity apart from America] debate. First, Washington has a poor understanding of the current intra-European debate, its core notion of strategic autonomy, and its implications, a shortcoming that has its roots in the fact that Europeans themselves have not fully defined the concept. Second, it is in America’s interest for Europeans to attain (or at least move closer to) strategic autonomy. Washington should embrace and support European endeavors, specifically by reassuring its skeptical allies across the Atlantic that it does indeed want a strategically autonomous Europe. The worry for Washington should not be that Europeans strive for strategic autonomy. The real worry should be that they might not make it.
The EU surely has an idea of where this is going, and Europeans not fully defining what they want helps the EU push forward to create their continent-spanning empire that represses nation-states and their annoying democracy with soft autocracy built on ever-expanding and onerous cheese regulations.
This is contrary to a century of American efforts to deny a single hostile power the control of the vast economic, scientific, military, and demographic potential of Europe.
And the bums in Brussels have the nerve to believe that the people themselves have to be suppressed in that autocracy to prevent war!
Europeans should indeed be more capable of defending themselves. And if they don't need much or even any American help, that is good. It frees up American power for other threats that Europe can't address.
Although keeping NATO to allow America, Canada, and Europe to act together is still a good thing rather than letting NATO wither and die as an alternative EU military structure is built.
As I've long written, Europeans can be America's friend. "Europe" cannot be America's friend, as long as that term is defined as the super state that Brussels wants to build:
Europe will not be our friend. European states can be our friend. And Europeans even in countries without governments friendly to us can be our friends. Why let these sources of support, friendship, and alliance be submerged in an EU supra-elite culture of hatred for America?
America should resist the European Union's efforts to move from free-trade zone to empire. Europe is home to important friends and allies. Do not let Brussels define what "Europe" means. We won't like it.
Good grief, Russia probably can't believe their eyes that Europeans who can't seem to spend money on their own defense want to decouple America--which still has a real military in capabilities and size--from Europe's defense.
