An author asks does America still need to worry so much about Europe. He's not quite asking the right question.
This seems reasonable in many ways:
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, however, removed the overriding geopolitical impulse for close American engagement with Europe. The “heartland” that so worried Mackinder and his intellectual successor, Nicholas Spykman, is now divided among a group of great and middle powers.
As the American effort to promote integration and cohesion in Europe is now largely complete—with a Europe that is capable of holding the line if that’s what it wants to do. Europe united under the banner of NATO now serves the role Great Britain did in the nineteenth century—ensuring that no security threat can break through that littoral barrier on Eurasia’s western peninsula to threaten the eastern shore of the United States.
Post-Soviet Russia remains one of the world’s major players but, unlike the USSR in 1945, it is “hemmed in” all around its borders.
Yes, America doesn't want a hostile power to control the tremendous military potential of Europe. American interventions in World War I, World War II, and the Cold War can be viewed through that lens.
And Russia today is too weak and too far east to be the hostile power that can control Europe. Russia is a threat to the countries near Russia.
And yes, Asia--with China and its little pet psycho North Korea--is now the primary source of military threats to America. So American military power rightly flows to Asia away from Europe.
But that doesn't mean Europe isn't a threat to America. In my view the threat of a hostile power gaining control of the tremendous military potential of Europe lies in the proto-imperial European Union rather than hostile powers like the Kaiser's Germany, Hitler's Germany, or Soviet Russia that America helped defeat.
So this take is just dumbfounding:
ROMANTIC GESTURES are difficult in a pandemic. But America and the European Union are trying to rekindle their old passion.
There is no romance. The EU just
wants to break up America and NATO before ghosting both of us. The EU
doesn't like America because America made Europe democratic after World War II. And the proto-imperial EU wants to erase the prefix.
The European Union wants America out of NATO. Without American influence Europe will be less democratic and more autocratic. And then Europe will be a source of problems from internal forces and not any single military power trying to conquer Europe.
America must not encourage the growth of the EU. And America should do what it can to oppose the EU as it tries to transition from free trade area to empire.
