Are Americans losing interest in Europe's fate? Perhaps Americans have little interest in Europe now. But have no doubt that Europe is very much interested in America, at least according to the historical record.
Is it true that politically divided Americans are united in not caring about Europe?
If Europe whole, free and at peace was a priority for generations of US policymakers, it no longer is one – and it may never be again.
That attitude pre-dates the NATO summit where NATO agreed to significantly higher defense and security spending while Trump endorsed Article V defense guarantees--which are less automatic than you think.
Americans haven't faced a threat from across the Atlantic since the Berlin Well fell all the way through Moscow and disintegrated the USSR. But threats from across the Atlantic have been a New World defense problem since Columbus discovered our hemisphere:
The homeland is not secure if an enemy can use the Atlantic as a highway to strike us. That’s the foundation of why we waged war in Europe during World War I, World War II, and the Cold War.
As an aside, if "America’s ill-fated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan" play a role in a desire to walk away from Europe, perhaps an understanding that we chose to lose Afghanistan and that we won Iraq would change some minds conditioned by fairy tales of ill-fated defeats.
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
NOTE: You may also like to read my posts on Substack, at The Dignified Rant: Evolved. Go ahead and subscribe to it. You know you want to.
NOTE: I made the image with Bing with an interesting work-around to a problem with the site at the beginning of the month. The next day Bing fixed the problem. But it was neat as a history major to figure out how to bypass the glitch.
