- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
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TBH US backing out of NATO seems impossible. My guess is that it is all saber rattling to manufacture consent for pushing European defense spending up.
if that is the case it seems to be working
I don’t see why that’s impossible at all actually. The purpose of NATO was to keep Europe subservient to the US, but now there’s a rift in policy towards Russia. The US starting direct talks with Russia is a clear sign that from US perspective Russia is the more important player. Unless Europe knuckles under, then I fully expect the US to abandon it.
Furthermore, US pulling out of NATO will provide a big stimulus for the military industry in US, which will boost the economy that Trump desperately needs right now. Europe is already in panic and they’re talking about allocating vast amounts of money to defence. Given that Europe lacks any serious military industry, much of that money will go directly to US.
Another factor here, is that US is not terribly happy about the EU existing. Vance was pretty clear on that point at Munich. With NATO being gone, the US will have an easier time attacking the EU politically. The ideal situation from US perspective would be if EU broke apart and they could deal with individual countries from a position of absolute strength.
Main reason is that NATO provides a convenient pretext for maintaining American presence in and around Europe which helps keep Europe subservient to USA. They could keep American troops if NATO is dissolved but that feels like an awkward situation since that is the kind of thing that is usually done to black and brown people of the rest of the world.
Second reason is that the chain of possible events suggested in this piece seems incoherent to me. It goes like: US pulls out of NATO -> EU starts rearming itself -> EU keeps down the untermensch. It doesn’t make sense to me. A natural consequence of US pulling out would be make Europe a little bit more sovereign which would make them more likely to seek peace with power countries.
I think the US wants to push European defense spending up and for doing that it is crucial that they keep NATO around and have NATO military spending requirements around as a pretext otherwise it will be much harder to get public approval for this irrational spending.
US having talks with Russia I put that on Ukraine having been pretty much defeated and US trying to pivot to Israel (maybe China) combined with how attacking Ukraine has been a core republican talking point to attack Democrats.
For Balkanising EU I am not sure about that. Haven’t considered that possibility yet.
I get that, but that assumes the US still feels the need to use NATO to maintain this relationship. If the US plans to deal with Russia directly, then Europe becomes largely irrelevant. US and Russia will just carve up spheres of influence in Europe instead.
The relevance of Europe stemmed from USSR being the main adversary of the US. Today, it’s clearly China and the US is very openly saying they want to pivot to Asia. In this scenario, normalizing relations with Russia and pulling out of Europe makes perfect sense. The US can’t be everywhere at once, and they have to prioritize now that they’re dealing with multiple peer adversaries in form or Russia and China. Europe simply doesn’t have the relevance that it used to.
Frankly, one can hope.
