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Do American on The Motte feel that the country is generally in favour of breaking from its old European alliances? I am not sure I have got that sense when visiting but I've visited only fairly D-leaning areas in recent years.
From the British/European point of view, one has the sense from current reporting that a significant rebalancing is happening, one that I would characterise as going beyond wanting to reduce American spending on e.g. Ukraine, and towards decisively breaking with European countries out of gut dislike, and beginning instead to form either a US-Russian alliance of sympathies, or if not that, then at least a relationship with Russia that is rhetorically much friendlier than that with Europe. I think the fear is starting to take root in Europe that the US would effectively switch sides in return for Russia granting it mineral rights in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine. This heel turn seems unlikely, but things are murky enough that it is worrying people.
I feel that this rebalancing is already working in a way towards achieving stated Trump goals – it certainly is succeeding in restoring Europe's appetite for military spending (underinvestment here is one thing Trump has been consistently right about but European leaders have buried their heads in the sand on, hoping he'd go away). But the current situation re Ukraine is also sending confusing signals, as it had previously seemed as though the US wanted Europe to step up and be part of a solution for Ukraine, whereas currently it seems they actively want to stop Europe from having a role in peace talks. The motive for this appears to be stopping Europe from asking terms of Russia that would delay a solution the US and Russia find jointly satisfactory, though perhaps there is more going on beneath the surface.
I did not have the impression that the American population generally has gone through this kind of Europe->Russia realignment in their hearts, Russians still being a regular foil for the good guys in movies (said movies coming from liberal-leaning Hollywood, sure). I have the impression that moving towards Russia is an aspect of foreign policy that Trump has not built domestic support for. But maybe this is wrong. Maybe the average American now thinks not only "Europe should contribute more to solve their own defence problems", but furthermore, "Europe should get its nose out of international affairs and attempt to help only when it's spoken to. We, Russia and China are in charge now."
I'm writing this without especially detailed knowledge of foreign policy, but I'm more interested here in the emotional calibration of ordinary Americans generally. What outcomes would they accept, what outcomes are they afraid of, who do they feel warm to and who not, and to what extent do they feel entirely insulated from global events, alliances and enmities?
NATO was (since the 70’s) a Disneyland vision of Europe propagated by American thinktanks and intelligence, propped up by US aid and USAID. A place for young PMC progressives to take a summer break, as real as Cabo or Cozumel.
The Ukraine war is the culmination of Europeans believing that fantasyland. A million dead with almost no gains and Nordstream 2 gone. Do not believe my country’s military/industrial decisionmakers. We cannot hold your borders locked in their postwar positions forever.
The more important question, in my eyes, is whether "the Europeans", or the EU, are even a natural geopolitical unit if the US actually draws down its support. Its scale and structure have grown way beyond the initial undertaking of intertwining the three perpetual poles of conflict (France, Germany and the UK) economically and culturally so they would never go to war against each other again, and while I would see the France-Germany axis of that project as essentially successful and stable for the foreseeable future, it's hard to understand any of the eastward expansion as anything other than driven by a mixture of American geopolitical interests (which are now being withdrawn) and the Western European industry's interest in maintaining wage pressure on their own workers (which is increasingly irrelevant as Western European industry itself becomes irrelevant, Eastern European living standards have gone up, and Arabs/Africans have become an alternative source of undercutting labour) and supported by a well-oiled deputised propaganda machine of transatlanticist media and NGOs (which is getting weakened as American soft power is eating itself and the USAID money hose has been shut off, though it has a heavy flywheel).
Without either the US stick of "we can bring you on the brink of civil war" or the US carrot of "we can ensure political stability, pay for your defense and insulate you from responsibility for any hard and unpopular decisions", it's not clear why countries like Germany or France would have any shared interests with countries like Estonia, Lithuania or Poland, which are all mooching off subsidies and still basically behaving like adversaries (between sabotaging infrastructure and demanding ever more reparations). The natural order of things in an America-free Europe may see Western Europe downsizing back to something like a Coal and Steel Plus community, which would maintain cordial relations with the great gas station in the far East, while the Baltics have to figure out for themselves how to shine the boots of the two greater powers on either side well enough that they do not just get partitioned up and invaded again. Interesting things would probably start happening along the Balkans-Greece-Turkey axis, but the rump EU parties might be able to muster enough of a peacekeeping and expeditionary force to keep the minnows down there from each other's throats (though it might be hard to save Greece from a thousand-cut death in the long run, similar to what is happening to Armenia).
How are the mooching off of subsidies? As far as I know, the economic development of Poland and other eastern European states has been a great boon to both themselves and Germany; why would Germany cut that relationship off when its aids them?
They received about 3% of their GDP in EU subsidies every year for the past 20 years, for a total about 250bln EUR. I don't doubt that their development has been a great boon to themselves, but it's not clear a priori why it would be to Germany, or how to quantify whether and how much of a boon it would have been. Manifestly, Germany's economy is currently shrinking. (...and the standard analysis attributes this to loss of Russian gas, where Poland for years obstructed procurement and finally hosted and sheltered the group that blew up several of the Baltic pipelines!)
It appears that Poland's economic development has paid dividends to Germany. Developing nearby countries is a priori beneficial for Germany; not only does it get a new market for its goods, it gets a source of skilled workers. The strategic partnership improves the eurozone economy, which in turn improves Germany's position.
Germany shot itself in the foot when it comes to energy. Their hesitancy to adopt nuclear or at least diversify their natural gas sources is their problem. Blaming Poland for the inevitable energy crisis is just shooting the messenger; that pipeline was always going to be targeted by any actors that are fighting against Russia. If they weren't going to be based in Poland, they would have been based in some other eastern European country with an axe to grind against Russia (read, practically all of them).
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