Sad foolishness.

NATO spending by the European members reminds me of people that neglect health insurance until they are sick. We have foot the bill for decades. The lack of spending on their part cannot be fixed over night. It takes more than just buying military hardware and recruit young men to be ready. It will take a few large training exercises to get up to competence.

Peter Zehian. Isn’t he the guy that predicts that all maritime trade is going to just collapse and go away?

That we foot the bill for NATO is much less true since the start of the Russo-Ukraine War. Nations that used to whine about spending 2% of GDP on defense – and which Trump, presciently, started bitch-slapping over the matter even in his first term – now seem fine with ramping such expenditures up to 5%. Even the Germans seem once more inclined to become an actual military power instead of the embarrassment they proved to be in Afghanistan. There are still some laggards, but a lot fewer than formerly.

Of course, to the extent the European NATO allies actually step up, we will have to get used to them going their own ways more than has been typical to this point. If they pay their way, they get to say. That’s just how these things work.

Putin wants a lot more than the Donbas. He wants to restore the combined borders of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. At its zenith, the Soviet Union had genuinely defensible borders for the first time in its history. Putin wants that back. The geopolitics scholar Peter Zeihan explains all of this in his books and many of his YouTube videos. He predicted that there would be a Russo-Ukraine War and even called 2022 as the year it would likely start in a book written nearly a decade before the fact.

Putin is, of course, not going to get any such thing. The Ukrainians are busily deindustrializing Russia at an increasingly ferocious clip. I think they will not only succeed in ejecting Russia from the entirety of Ukrainian territory, but in defeating Russia in fee simple. Just as there was massive territorial loss after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there will be even more after the defeat of Russia by Ukraine.

Russia, if it is fortunate, will get to die a more or less natural death by century’s end as its terminal demographics play out to their inevitable conclusion. If it is less fortunate, one or more of the new nations spun out of Russia may decide upon a campaign of extermination to insure Russia never troubles them again. If that happens, we should let it. Russia has been a hairy nuisance to the world for a millennium. It’s utter destruction would be a sizable net positive for the world.

The EU may be “liberal” by Russian standards, but is increasingly illiberal and even borderline totalitarian by the standards of even a half-century ago. I am cautiously optimistic that the Europeans will dismantle the EU in time to prevent it becoming the Eurasia of 1984, but it may be a near-run thing.

I have not heard of any German plans to restart their shut-in nukes, but am pleased if this is so. The Germans have been indulging what amounts to an increasingly suicidal and delusional social/political contagion since the end of the Cold War. The Russo-Ukraine War appears to have snapped enough of them out of their mental fog to perhaps save their nation, though I hardly regard that as a sure thing. Still, here’s hoping.

The Muslim barbarian hordes that have invaded Western Europe are certainly eager to establish a European Caliphate, but that now seems at least moderately less likely than it did even five years ago. I think a lot of the recent arrivals will be expelled once the EU is gone. Things may get bad enough for a significant number of the Muslims in Europe who are not recent arrivals that they follow the short-timers back to their ancestral lands as well. Lots of ways this could go, many of them quite messy.

Overall, I don’t see Islam doing so well during the remainder of this century.

I am clear in the distinction between NATO and EU, and the overlaps. I am also clear on the weak state of NATO, since we tax payers foot the bill for the rest of the members defense. They have been allowed, for decades, to neglect their treaty obligations of paying for their own defense, content to live under the penumbra of safety we provide.

The EU, while not a free market, is still competition to the Russians. Putin would like a passive subservient fractured Europe he can milk and manipulate as needed to enable his other endeavors. A unified EU buys less, and is less pliable.

The EU is also liberal, and not to his taste. The Russians have never like western European Culture, and do not want it on their border any more than they want a NATO nation in their border. Putin want Ukraine in neither organization. He also wants the Donbas industrial areas.

I should clarify, outright eliminating the EU is the Easy Button, as opposed to a reformed free market and democratic EU, which would take decades or an EU civil war to achieve. But also, I re-iterate: all self indulgent speculation.

Your other points are good. Germany needs to, and is considering, I hear, restarting nuke power plants.

By European War, I should have also clarified Western Europe. While UKR vs RUS is a European War, and people are shocked by the devastation they see on the social media, they don’t really care. Much like they did not care about the Iran-Iraq war. The fact that UKR-RUS war could expand, and get ugly, it is unlikely.

To the Baltics. Their defense is not tied to the EU, but it has benefited their economies, where previously, they were closer to Russia, and struggled. The same was true of some other Eastern European countries. The EU market control sucks, but overall, they still do better than they did in the USSR.

Of course, maybe we are both wrong, and in 30 years we are faced with a European Caliphate.

“The European Union should be abolished.”

Yes, it should.

The transnational socialist EU grandees have been trying their poor best to extinguish any sense of blood and soil nationalism in Europe in furtherance of their notion that people are pretty much interchangeable parts in the grand socialist machine. That being so, who could possibly object to importation of millions of such interchangeable parts from various Islamic and Sub-Saharan African hellholes? Oddly enough, there actually are such people. And they are legion. And they will, I think, prove the ultimate doom of the EU project. Get rid of the Euro and trim the EU back to being just a Common Market as it was to start with.

sippin_bourbon,

You seem to have confused the EU with NATO. While there is considerable overlap in their respective memberships, they are not the same and are certainly not equivalent. Most importantly, it is NATO, not the EU, which keeps Gospodin Putin at bay. Monetary and military equipment aid to Ukraine, for example, is a project of a NATO coalition of the willing, not of the EU.

Now to subordinate matters:

You are correct to note the cravenness and greed of many American multinationals, especially the social media giants, anent EU diktats. These outfits will continue to juke and jive as best they can but what will likely come to their rescue in the not-so-distant future is the end of the EU administrative superstructure from whence all of these bits of egregious overreach emanate.

Most of the world, unfortunately, seems quite willing to tolerate a European war so long as it stays far away. The Russo-Ukraine War, now ongoing, is an existence proof of this proposition. That is even true of far too many Americans, who ought to know better.

The notional elimination of the EU cannot, logically, be both “The Easy Button” and a project that will “take Decades.”

In truth, it is proving to be neither. There will be difficulties, but the continuing overreach of the EU – especially in the matter of limitless filter-free immigration – seems likely to provide the necessary ongoing motivation to the EU’s detractors. Enough so that their project seems massively unlikely to “take Decades.” A few years at most. The way things are going, both France and Germany will likely be led by populist nationalists before the end of the current decade. They won’t be alone in this respect. The EU, as presently constituted, cannot survive such a transition.

Just how economically sound France, Belgium, Austria and Germany will be in future is open to question. All but France have truly crummy demographics. The German economic model, in particular, needs a lot of work to make up for a rapidly aging workforce with grossly insufficient replacements on-deck.

There is also the absence of Russian natural gas. Germany’s best hope is for Ukraine to triumph over Russia sooner rather than later and to take over the Russian oil and gas industry as part of reparations. Failing that, Germany will have to complete what it has already started to do, namely, moving much of its industry to the US to take advantage of cheap fracked gas and more available labor. Either way, Germany is going to be a different place in future than it is now.

The fate of the Baltic nations is not crucially tied in any way to the fate of the EU. NATO, yes. But not the EU.

You are correct that Europeans are intrinsically more state-authority-tolerant than Americans. The EU is now is such bad odor in many European nations not so much because it is dirigiste, but because it wants to destroy their cultures. That will prove a bridge too far.

That, sadly, extends to the UK as well. Brexit wasn’t really comparable to the American Revolution, but it was a national removal from an overweening imperial power just the same.

Still, in the wake of that, the Brits have put in power a government barely distinguishable from the EU in its enthusiasm for its own continued invasion by tribal barbarians and which is not only willing to hand over its young women to the invaders but to jail anyone who objects.

This lunacy will not likely stand much longer, but the fact that it has happened at all demonstrates a fairly stark contrast between the modern-day Brit and the modern-day American. If what has been going on in Britain had been seen in the US, there would have been a lot of emasculated and disemboweled Muslim corpses found nailed to crosses.

On the general matter of European wars, there is really only one nexus for such remaining and that is Russia. The solution, then, is that Russia needs to be hammered into paralysis, then vivisected and buried.

The Ukrainians are well along with the first part of that and show every sign of being both willing and able to complete the job within months.

Anent the second part of that, letting nature take its course should largely suffice. There are already increasingly frisky secessionist movements in many parts of the remaining Russian Empire. These will find it fairly easy to make their exits once Russia is both defeated and defanged. This will result in Russia being reduced to a comparatively modest European rump state, especially once Siberia departs – either in a single chunk or in two or more.

That will leave a residuum of perhaps 80 million ethnic Russians, most elderly or of advanced middle age – a sort of nation-scale hospice. If any of the formerly long-subject peoples care to do their own version of a Mongol Horde invasion at that point, they should be given free rein. The world doesn’t need Russia or Russians. No one will miss them at all when they’re gone.

Agreed. Overbearing government is always a problem. The EU has that to spare.

It may take an EU civil war to steer it the right direction.

But the EU and all the European States love their socialism. They embrace their State control. They all evolved out of monarchies, principalities, etc.. A collection of Vassal States where some tyrant ruled. They accepted socialism because they were always used to the State, in the form of a potentate, ruling everything.

They never won their liberty as Americans did. They simply accept their discounted freedoms that socialist leaders doll out and retract at will.

If they are lucky, can they can shake themselves of it without a civil war. I personally think that is unlikely. I see a future of 2 or 3 divisions. The industrial and economically sound nations, such as France, Belgium, Austria and Germany and few other northern countries, and then everyone else falling into a poorer group, and a third group that return to independent status (think Malta or Cyprus). Italy is a maybe for that first group, if Giorgia Meloni and her party can continue to mend the nation.

If it falls apart, the Baltic nations are screwed (which is a big reason Putin wants to undermine the EU).

I indulge in speculation here, but stand by my original point, above. An EU prevents a European War. We (the US) have a habit of getting sucked into those. I do not want to see another European War.

This thinking represents two things:
1. The Easy Button.
2. Putin’s wet dream.

A re-fractured Europe would make life so much easier for old Vladimir Vladirovich. But the world as a whole cannot tolerate another European War. And for all it’s faults the EU still represents the best option to prevent war on The Continent. *

It needs major reform. It will take Decades. The socialists in the EU cannot dream of letting go of power.

* European history has been described as ‘War, with brief intermissions’. I cannot remember the source for the quote.

sippin_bourbon: Point well taken. The bottom line remains: When government gets involved, people suffer.

I disagree.

They have all kinds of stupid and onerous rules for companies already, and yet, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc, continue to do business there. They go through a gauntlet of lawsuits on a regular basis.

And yet, they still continue to offer their products to the the citizens of the EU. Why? Because in the end, even with the fines, they still make money.
Lots of it. In the end, the economics prove that access to the market is worth enduring the pain.

What really happens is that these companies continue to do business there.
But no EU based companies can establish themselves to compete.

So in an effort to “level the playing field”, they commit free market suicide.

The real bottom line?
Socialist do not understand how real world markets work and never will. Like Marx and Engels, they are still trying to fit the world into the faux, theoretical, and impossible utopia.