The position of NATO general secretary is irrelevant, the actual treaty is irrelevant, in the end military action is always a political choice of member states.
The worrisome part of course is that Mark Rütte was leader of an EU country for 14 years. There are certain to be people loyal to the USA in EU politics and military after all those year of US alignment. Heck Russia has managed to buy a few EU politicians in a couple of decades.
The reason the US cannot (successfully) invade is not due to nuclear deterrence but the difficulty in bringing over enough heavy equipment (MBTs, artillery) if you don’t have a foothold (ports, airfields). Seven carrier groups are not going to be able to secure you that even if they amounted to more than a 1000 F-35s, which they don’t.
Canada cannot join the EU legally. It will take amendment of the treaties to remove the geographical requirement and still Hungary would veto the ascension anyways. You can scoff at this and argue that we should ignore the treaties and Hungary but this will weaken the EU as an institution. It already is obviously less cohesive than a nation state.
It’s also not necessary for Canada to join the EU for us to support them militarily. The issue is that we can’t really do so in the near future.
EU military spending was already not going 100% to US products, therefore not all of the increased spending benefiting US companies is not divestment, it’s actually investment. The US after all marketed the F-35 to EU members.
I salute your strategy of the great wall of rambling text, it truly is demoralizing at this time. I do not think the best EU can do is rely on Americans waging a civil war on it’s behalf.
This isn’t WWII though, opposed landings aren’t something anyone still does. Besides that, in this hypothetical scenario everyone has nukes. It’s really just an exercise in how much aggression each side will tolerate before someone escalates to that point.
I am confused though, if you understand that the US cannot invade despite their superior military why do you think it’s suicide for the EU to take military action against the limited US forces in the EU’s own territory?
Look I’m not disagreeing with the broad sentiment that the EU needs to get it’s shit together and divest from the US militarily – the US has been practically begging for that since clinton, hell obama, biden and trump all warned against this exact fascist-takeover america-unreliable scenario. I also for sure am not assuming the US will not be the aggressor. I mean, we’re even threatening the EU with annexation right now. I seriously doubt it’ll get to that point, but it’s by no means ruled out.
The US has never before pushed for EU divestment from the US. Quite the opposite it has repeatedly pushed for more EU investment in military defense, a part of which would go to US industry. It has reduced it’s presence when the SU fell but it still maintained bases in Europe and while military action would not be in the table other forms of coercion would come into play if the EU demanded a complete US withdrawal from EU territory.
I am also confused about who you think Trump warned the EU against? His own America? He just wanted the EU to pay more to US industry.
Things like adding canada to the EU are excellent strategic moves, since it not only gives the EU an ally with many friendly airbases across the ocean but, waaaaay more importantly, it gives them economic strength with which to batter the US and bolster their own economies. This is an economic war, and the US probably won’t win it. Hoorayyy?
Adding Canada to the EU is not adding an ally to the EU it’s adding a member. It creates a security obligation which the EU cannot fulfill towards Canada. At the same time it could provoke the US to attack Canada. Of course if the US attacks Canada the EU should try and provide as much help as possible but at the moment or the near future that won’t really be much.
I do believe CETA is being provisionally applied reducing tariffs even if the arbitration stuff is not (nor should it really). There is no ‘economic’ war to be won, the US is putting arbitrary tariffs on anyone but Russia, they will obviously be hurt more than any of the individual economies they target.
I am not American. I don’t want Europe to try and ‘fix’ the US, my suggestions are merely for the EU to avoid being taken over by the US.
Since the US has put a bunch of nazis into power it’s possible it will come to violence or threats of violence. It’s better to be prepared. It’s also better to act first if you know violence is inevitable.Or you could just acquiesce to any demand when threatened. Tariffs, give your natural resources to US companies, ban gays, ban ‘communism’ etc.
You are making an assumption that the US will not attack or threaten to attack to get concessions from the EU unless the EU asks them to withdraw.
I am not saying the EU should take action today, it should prepare as much as it can first, but it needs to have plans to do it even today because it could be forced to.
Open warfare with the US in Europe is not suicide despite the US military being significantly bigger and capable compared to EU armies. Invading across an ocean is hard, you need to be able to move significant forces in or nearby before hostilities start or face no resistance in the initial landing.
Which is why EU armies need to have plans to quickly overwhelm US forces already in the EU, it can be done, they are not significant at present. Of course if you are unwilling to do so they can simply demand to increase their presence making the problem more difficult in the future.
It also needs to make sure the US have as few allies as possible that could help them stage from against it. Thankfully the UK at the moment does not seem to embrace Trump’s foreign policy but that could change in the future.
This is also why adding Canada to the EU at this point, when the main concern is security, is foolish, we cannot protect Canada, we probably cannot prevent an occupation of Greenland or any weird islands ex-imperial powers have god-knows-where.
The EU needs to implement a lot of changes to guarantee it’s safety and independence, some will be hard (unpopular, expensive).
It needs to increase military spending, massively It need to de-tangle EU military equipment from US dependencies, including US parts required for EU manufactured equipment. This could trigger a US reaction. It needs to replace NATO structures for interoperability of EU armies with EU ones, replicating as much as possible(personnel, procedures, equipment) It needs to make sure there are no outside loyalties in it’s armed forces which is going to be difficult after decades of NATO. Those are more dangerous than the existing US forces. It should implement some kind of conscription/reservist training force to have a bigger trained overall force. This is in addition to increasing regular professional forces. It needs to reduce US dependency in non-military sectors as well. Could also trigger a US reaction.
If they US is not planning on using military force against the EU, they will simply withdraw from EU territory peacefully when asked.
Chaos will be when US troops attack us from withing while Russia attacks from the east.
Are you from the EU?
EU countries need to start making plans to remove us bases by force and destroy any US forces if necessary.
I ain’t your brother, what I do know is that right wingers hate foreigners, the alleged crimes being just an excuse.
Imagine that, judges decided on criminals’ fate. Next they will want to decide who is even a criminal.
Your post boils down to US has insanely more logistics capacity than anybody else and is more advanced than anybody else. Which I never disputed.
However, logistics are not measured against your oppositions logistics, they are measured against the logistics requirements of your task. A significant advantage in logistics can be counteracted by having to operate across an ocean vs overland. EU still needs to improve logistics but it does not have the same hard requirements (when we are discussing strictly the defense of continental EU).
An actual air tanker fleet would help, mostly with time on airborne rather than range, EU aircraft but it is an absolute necessity for the USAF and USN. A C5 grade air transport would also help but it is not necessary.
I will also address the invest/divest issue because it’s not a red herring. You have misrepresented USA’s push for more EU military spending as being motivated by a desire for EU independence from the US, it was motivated by US commercial interests.
Then we have a lot of small inaccuracies that together paint a misleading overall picture.
Carriers are massive force multipliers, they allow you to project air power (and light land power) in areas where you could not at all (so they multiply by infinity in some cases). This obviously comes at a premium and drawbacks.
The same amount of money spent on a land based airforce will yield significant more air power. A Nimitz would cost about 11 billion 2023 USD, an F35C costs ~100 million so you get around a 100 extra modern planes for a carrier. Also the F35A that is not carrier capable costs ~83 million USD so you could get buy four get one free, or more realistically cover (easily) land based logistics the carrier would provide. The cost of the escorts accordingly should go to land based SAM systems.
And of course all that airpower being on a single ship makes them much more vulnerable than being based even on a single air base, which can have groups of aircraft physically separated from each other and/or the runway and/or the ammo depots etc.
They also do not have dedicated air tankers, they can use buddy transfer systems with fighters but this cuts down on the fighters they can use for fighter task. Usually it’s the USAF that refuels navy and marines aircraft since they have the dedicated air tanker fleet.
It’s theoretically possible for the USAF to refuel fighters operating from continental USA to strike at Europe, after all they conduct ferry missions often. Of course in combat missions tankers need to hold back from the combat zone. In any case the F-35 were never intended to fight over the atlantic. This leaves the B-2 which is both stealth and meant to operate over oceans. It also has a payload to do significant damage, though there are 21 of them. While it’s certainly stealthier than F-117 it remains to be seen whether they can consistently penetrate inflict significant damage and get out to have coffee at Missouri.
The F-117’s only interactions with SAM was getting shot down by 1970s Soviet SAM in Serbia. In Gulf war the F-117 did not have loses to SAM but was only operating at night, Iraqi air defenses failed to shot down any type or aircraft at night, even the A-10 that practically was banned from daytime operations. SAMs were actually dealt with by F4/F16 SEAD/DEAD packages (during daytime). Needless to say Gulf era Iraqi SAM systems (and practices) were not up to contemporary Soviet or European standards and of course even less comparable to today’s EU SAM systems.
Yes, I am certain the IRF can build an expeditionary air base in hostile Europe, in 24 hours. One wonders why they would bother instead of conquering the rest of EU by themselves. It’s obviously not happening when facing enemy resistance which will have heavier equipment than an airborne troop.
You might just as well try to take over an existing airfield and land planes there but it’s also an impossible task. Anything from fighter jets, armor, artillery, mortars, manpads can spell disaster for your reinforcement and therefore you.
LCAC can carry an Abrams, thus USN can deliver 90 Abrams if all ships with LCACs were part of an assault. Impressive, but still not enough even if they all manage to land.
As for terror and evil and all that. Historically war has been a job, it’s not something new or special to Americans, if anything there is more romanticizing with all that fighting for freedom or even with vile ideologically rationalizations (racism/nazism).