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The US Must Pull Out of Germany/Europe
It is abundantly clear that the US-NATO umbrella over Europe has achieved the complete infantilization of the Continent. Lacking the need to do anything serious in terms of core national interest (i.e., defense), Europe has entirely lost the plot.
There is no longer any justification for propping up Germany, or any nation that refuses to invest in its own national defense. Beyond that: the US should not be defending illiberal countries that arrest people for “mean tweets.” If the US pulls out, Europe gets the very sharp shock that it needs if it is going to wake up, defend against Russia, reduce the Nanny State, and deport Muslims.
Truly: the US should leave Europe – for its own good.
Published in General
Rerun of a really unpleasant movie, at least for the conquered.
He’d probably prefer “Comrade.”
Russia today has expended itself in Ukraine. It lacks everything needed to invade – even the Baltics (assuming Poland helped the little guys, which it would). The economy is in shambles.
On that basis, Germany can rebuild and rearm as well as Russia can. I don’t see Russia being able to take Germany or Poland or Czechia if the US pulled out tomorrow.
Send Cromwell’s portrait to Connacht!
(And Churchill’s to Calcutta.)
(Tbh I can’t judge. I’m in India and we’re busy putting UP portraits of our Quisling equivalents. I am sick of all culture wars, I feel they attract – on both sides – the most mean hearted, power hungry and morally compromised people of any society.)
China unlikely to take it intact.
I suspect they think that their domestic chip production will suffice for their needs. Everybody else pays retail + 50%.
Percival, the fact that you have to go back so far to obtain such an obscure and trivial citation (“participated in” is not the same as “steamrolled”) is the exception that proves DonG’s rule. We can accept that Russia has effectively never expanded on their own. One can thank FDR for the Warsaw Pact.
The Russians lost, IIRC, a million men on the German front. Ask Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Their view of the Italian campaign and of the Normandy landings is as a distracting action.
We lost slightly fewer than 100,000 men and women in the European and Pacific fronts combined.
We have offered USA LNG to Europe. Unfortunately, Biden’s crew usurped our country for four years. Now Germany can buy our cheap energy.
Oh, shoot! I forgot about the Danube cruises.
Whether we have an alliance with a certain country is determined by a number of factors. It seems to me that whether they share our precise view of free speech may be one of them, but certainly not the only or most important one. Whether they’re the enemy of our enemy would seem to be a far more important factor.
It’s just another example of how domestic political factors seem to be determining our foreign policy. The Dems think Russia helped Trump win in 16, so they become hawks on Russia. Republicans reflexively move in the other direction, propelled by their “Russia, Russia, Russia!” mockery of the Democrats. Vance goes to the security conference and browbeats them over issues that resonate with his party’s base back home, issues that are really way down the list when it comes to who we should have alliances with. That’s why he did it, not because it makes sense in terms of foreign policy.
It’s time to grow up.
This sounds like the same behavior demonstrated by the regressive left in our own country during the Biden regime. They have a playbook and they stick to it. It sounds as if Germany is developing a political party that can repel this idiocy. I do not know about Great Britain.
I don’t think so. It was a speech not meant for the people attending it, but for the European public.
It doesn’t have to roll over Europe in order to accomplish its objectives to some extent. The Soviets never rolled over Finland in any thoroughgoing way, but Finland’s foreign policy was hostage to the Soviet Union. Finlandization, they called it. The Finns who are old enough to remember have bitter memories of those days when they weren’t completely free to be their own country. Russia tried doing that with Ukraine, too, until things got more kinetic in 2013-2014.
Trump is trying to do some of that for Russia now by insisting that Ukraine and the United Nations tell public lies about the start of the Russia-Ukraine war. Or at least refrain from speaking the truth.
I agree and believe strong alliances must include a shared value system amongst the people involved. Apparently, W Bob believes that freedom of speech and association is way down the list of important values. Not me.
Ok, let’s get past the politics and talk about logistics. Between 2004 and 2012, a total of 14,000 injured US servicemen were evacuated from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the US Military Hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. (Plus their satellite facilities, two in Belgium, two in Italy and three others in Germany.) The survival rate for Landstuhl Level I Trama patients is 99.5%.
So, get into a political snit about who’s pulling their weight in NATO or who’s propping up who for what reason is consigning more American servicemen to death and needless grieving for their families.
Yeah, let’s close our facilities in Europe. That’ll teach us.
(Statistics provided by the US Army to the American Forces Press Service.)
I do believe Russia is more motivated than Germany ever will be. Poland is certainly motivated; I have little knowledge of Czechia.
When you say things got “more kinetic in 2013-2014” are you referencing the Orange Revolution in Ukraine? Isn’t that the one where the USA ambassador, Nuland, and the CIA rigged a coup against the Russian-sympathizing and legally elected Ukrainian President? Where does the history lesson in the Ukrainian-Russian conflict begin? I agree that Russia invaded Ukraine in the most current rendition of the conflict. Ukraine will not win this without our country going all-in against Russia. I do not want war with Russia. Do you?
We have facilities all over the world without having NATO-like treaties with those countries if that is the point you are making.
The Soviets, with a superior number of troops and massive superiority in artillery, tanks, and aircraft (sound familiar), managed to take a little over 10% of tiny Finland in three and a half months. It only cost them a casualty rate of 6-t0-1. That performance was so bad that it convinced Hitler that the Soviet edifice would collapse once the Wehrmacht started to roll.
That’s a fool’s errand.
In the long run, it was an essential speech. If there is no Germany as we know it, then a brief “alliance” period before it is consumed by Islam was nothing more than a Pyrrhic victory.
Nothing that cannot be matched by the upcoming and amazing US hospital on US sovereign soil in Gaza. Closer to the action, too.
Ha, ha, ha! Perfect!
Off topic: I love conservative commentators who come anywhere near sober, rational analysis of issues taking into account all the interesting angles. There seem to be few of these and more of what you reference so succinctly above, which is why I won’t listen to that guy. Most of these show hosts seem intelligent enough–perhaps they just cater to a certain market. Honestly, we’d probably be a more informed and effective conservative electorate if these influential people wielded their abilities differently.
Honestly, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Clearly a matter of national security (not to mention Rhine River cruises).
Yes!
However, I don’t believe Vance’s speech is a good example of what you’re talking about.
Funny how that is exactly what I was thinking👍
I think Trump and Vance are talking exclusively to Europe on this matter at least, and that they’re in the aforementioned “Snap Out Of It!” mode. The effect, so far, has been extraordinary, at least in the European press. So far, things haven’t quite coalesced, but boy howdy, they’re stirred up.
Just as one of the immediate effects of Trump’s Gaz-A-Lago threat, after about seventy-five years of Middle Eastern potentates whistling past the graveyard and doing absolutely nothing except virtue-signalling about the two-state solution, has been to get the Gulf States, Egypt and Jordan together to discuss how they are going to rebuild Gaza and create a future without Hamas or Palestinian Authority governance.
Nothing unites a fractious constituency like a common Trump.
What if Donald Trump actually is (yes, it makes my head hurt even to suggest this) the incarnation of the guy who only cares about actually getting things done, rather than the guy who only cares about who gets the credit? 🤯
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.
— Anonymous