(03-09-2025, 05:29 AM)sailorsam Wrote: a lot of Europe got complacent after the Soviet Union dissolved
Putin's invasion of Ukraine was wakened them.
and the USA is tired of being their private security.
darn shame. all this spending money and taking years of men's lives for military service, all because Putin wanted to be a warlord.
I have different perspective. I wouldn't blame Putin for the EU's own emotional panic. That falls squarely on the EU.
A very close analogy to the situation would be if Canada and Mexico had gotten panicky over an "expansionist warlord regime in the US" when the Untied States invaded the Confederate States. It's the same situation. Lincoln invaded in order to annex a breakaway nation that had formerly been US territory before it exercised it's sovereignty. Same-same in the Ukraine. Russia invaded to annex a breakaway Russian province that is exercising it's sovereignty.
Basically, both were, and are, "reclaiming" territory - and an associated tax base and natural resources - that had formerly belonged to them before the splits.
I think, personally, that the EU is scared of a "monster under the bed" that is mostly just in it's own imagination, and ramping up to fight said "monster" while at the same time ignoring the fact that it is actively inviting a REAL enemy directly into it's bed and under the blankets - the foreign invasion of fundamentalist Islamic fighters that it is actively promoting into it's own countries under the disguise of "asylum seeking refugees".
Of the two, I am VERY certain which poses the actual existential threat to the EU countries. It ain't the Russian soldiers casting hard stares from their side of a border while the Islamic Fundamentalists drive SUV's into crowds within Europe, and engage in stabbings, beheadings, bombings and firefights within the EU, already inside it.
A hard stare or a harsh word has never intimidated me as much as a very real, very solid, bullet or knife coming straight for me. One is simply chasing ghosts, while the other is ducking actual death incoming.
The Ukraine War is really just a cash cow and playground for the MIC from the perspective of "the west". It's not an actual legitimate danger to Europe.
The Islamic "asylum seeking refugee crisis", on the other hand...
Know your Self, know your enemies, and pick your battles carefully. Maybe the EU governments have never read Sun Tzu's "The Art of War".
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