Subject: Re: More EU views on the trade deal
The point is that even in the face of the very thing they claim is their number 1 existential threat...they're not in a hurry.
They just aren't, I'm sorry.

They are. 300 tanks in five years starting from scratch (not refurbishing hulls) is actually pretty fast. The U.S. has an existing tank manufacturing infrastructure, and we're looking at a longer time frame to bring our new tanks to deployment. And even the refurb/update of existing Abrams hulls takes us more than three years to move 300 tanks to deployment. So they're moving pretty quickly for peacetime arms development.

Same goes for energy deployment - they've pivoted hard and fast to replace their now-jeopardized Russia sources of fossil fuels, basically jettisoning the green agenda you so often lambaste, and moving to exploit domestic and "friendly" sources of fossil fuels. As noted above, they're moving at near-China speed on that.

I think you're just coming from an incorrect factual basis. They are moving very fast, but you think they're not in a hurry.

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As for the threat of Europe....I certainly don't disagree that China presents a major strategic threat to the United States, and we probably need more resources there. But I think you're ignoring history by dismissing the need to maintain a strong presence in Europe also. Remember, China doesn't really pose much of a direct threat to the territory of the United States as it does a threat to our allies and trading partners in the region. We need to boost our presence there to thwart that threat, not to rebuff a possible invasion of the U.S. West Coast. But that's the exact same threat profile that we face in Europe today - and it's actually Russia, not China, that's been directly nibbling off little pieces of their surrounding neighbors by direct military action over the last decade or so.

And again, historically, the U.S.' biggest military conflicts have been when we've had to ride off to Europe and get involved in a World War. It's very easy to dismiss that possibility, because we've had 80 years of Pax Americana - but if you're deciding to eliminate the Pax Americana and get all those European countries to re-arm themselves again, you dramatically raise the risk profile over there. Because once one of your neighbors starts increasing their armed forces to the point where they do pose a military threat to you, you have to address that possible threat through either militarization of your own country or through alliances (or both). Which puts dry tinder on the base of Europe.

It's very unlikely that a European war would start with the same countries as last time, of course - we're not likely to see Germany invading France. If you had to play out a possible scenario, it's most likely that you'd see the spark lit between Greece and Turkey, which are both heavily militarized relative to their size in response to their several conflicts with each other.

As much as we might want to not have to be ready to fight a large-scale war in Europe in addition to anywhere else, the truth is we always have to be able to do so. Because a large-scale war in Europe remains a possibility, and the chances of it happening go up considerably if we end the Pax Americana there.