No. of Recommendations: 12
Let me know how basing aircraft carriers in the port of say, Kiel helps out with deterring China in the Pacific.
China's in a different theater. You were very much aware of the fact that foreign military bases are extraordinarily useful in projecting power into those regions, so I don't accept that you really believe your dismissive labelling of our bases in Europe as being no more than a few acres for troops to "hang out" in. Our bases in the continent basically give us a massive ability to project power across the European theater and into the Middle East....and I think you know that.
Uh, huh. And it's going to take the Germans 100 years to replace their artillery from 2004.
No, it won't. It would take them 100 years at prior rates. But they're not going to stick to prior rates, are they? We've forced them to close-to-double their defense spending....and they're going to plow all that extra money into their domestic military capabilities.
I don't think you quite are coming to grips with today's European pol vs. the ones from even 20 years ago. This new bunch is more apt to throw their borders open and kneecap their domestic energy production than they are to defend anything.
You keep saying that, but the response of all of these countries has been to sharply ramp up their domestic military defense expenditures and manufacturing capabilities. Having forced "today's European pol" to significantly increase their defense spending, it's no surprise that they're going to spend that money at home rather than send it to the U.S.
How do you think Europe came to be even partially dependent on Russia for energy in the first place?
The same way we came to be so dependent on Taiwan for chips and China for rare earths. Russia is a cheap, well-supplied, and geographically convenient source of that resource, which is a vital input to lots of manufacturing and other processes that promote economic growth. If you have a free market economy, then a lot of your market participants end up sourcing their factors of production to the cheapest dependable source of that factor of production.
They also believed - as we did for a long time - that increased economic ties to a rival nation is a way of dialing down the threat profile of that nation, as it markedly increases the costs to them of hostile action against you. That's what Trump is counting on with China, right - that because their economy requires access to U.S. markets they have to bend the knee, because they can't afford to just have that be cut off?
So, yes - now that the world has changed in a non-trivial way, Europe is reconfiguring its energy supply. But it made a ton of sense for them to get cheap and available energy from Russia during the post-Cold War era, when it was widely expected that fostering those economic ties would be more likely to bring Russia into the Western way of thinking.
