Will the European Union step up to defend Europe or is the Russian invasion of Ukraine just an opportunity to strengthen the EU's political power over the for-now sovereign states of the EU?
In the key area of military aid, the gap is even wider: the US has pledged $24 billion, the Europeans only $12 billion. The actual difference may be greater, as key European donors have reportedly been slow to deliver on their pledges.
That was a month ago. The inability of our mostly European NATO allies to match American arms and ammunition
supplies for Ukraine is a growing problem as the war drags on. Both for Ukraine's ability to fight--let alone liberate territory--and for America's willingness to spend money on Ukraine.
Yet America also worries about
what Ukraine might do with more capable American weapons. We haven't sent tanks, fighter planes, and long-range missiles, for example. We don't want Ukraine to be able to take the war deep into Russian territory.
Both of these things reflect what has been a long-time American worry that allies will drag America into a war if they have too much ability to wage war:
We tend not to encourage allies to have large stocks of ammunition for US-designed weapons because we don't want allies to have the ability to wage a war for long that we disapprove of.
Will that change because of Putin's invasion? Would the European Union step up to bolster European weapons and ammunition stockpiles? That would be an actual useful program.
... The alternative to a EU military is not America standing alone. We have NATO. Which is the military alliance that has defended Europe and promoted European freedom since the Cold War started. Don't let the EU elites confuse the difference between geographic Europe which is the basis for NATO and political Europe which is the basis for an empire.
And any autonomous EU military will naturally subtract resources from the proven military alliance that has defended Europe. Nothing inherent to NATO prevents Europeans from building stronger military power.
Further, NATO does not prevent European countries from sharing weapon production to gain efficiency. So that is a BS reason to gut NATO to fund a EU military.
As for the second reason, we're supposed to lie back and think of nuance as the inevitable EU military is formed?
What Euro-elite apparatchiki want is the "autonomous" part and they don't care if the military they get is stronger than what European countries contribute through NATO now. The purpose of a EU military is to gut NATO and therefore eject American influence from the continent.
Although we have to be careful of even European military industry.
The EU pushes its most heartfelt goal even during this war:
The European Union will train thousands of Ukrainian soldiers on its own soil [...]
Mind you, that's great. But the European Union does not have its own soil. That's the soil of sovereign member states. For now. The proto-imperial EU wants to strip away the prefix, so likes to confuse the terminology to pretend "Europe" is synonymous with the European Union.
The EU is a threat to European states from within Europe:
Are we going to let an egomaniac build an anti-American empire in Europe? Oh, I'm not talking about Putin. We're resisting him. I'm talking about France's Macron.
America has successfully prevented a Kaiser, Hitler, and Communists from taking all of Europe. We're nipping Putin's imperial bid for glory and territory in the bud.
Let's not forfeit this record of success by allowing EU bureaucrats--whether under Macron or someone else--exploit yet another crisis to control Europe and give anti-American forces the opportunity to organize the potential military power of the continent against America.
NOTE: War updates continue here.
