The US has this ridiculous belief that Europe has no military ability. The truth is that Europe is far too skilled at war, and collectively disarmed after the Second World War and let the US make the decisions and pay for it all because that was the only way to achieve a lasting peace. European armed forces aren’t ready for war, but they are skeletons on which wartime forces can be reconstituted.
Now that the US is dropping its responsibilities it’s also losing its privileges, but everyone is moving quietly so that the amateurs in the White House don’t cotton on. The world doesn’t need a sheriff; it’s just going to have a bunch of players looking after their own interests. The historical attitude to war already prevails: ‘it’s fine as long as it doesn’t affect us.’
With the exception of few European countries that did maintain a functional army (Finland, France), other countries' military skeletons suffer from terminally low levels of bone density due to decades of under- and malnutrition. The whole bodies (incl. skeletons) have to quickly be build anew.
Russia is still dangerous and annoying, but not the threat it was before the full scale invasion of Ukraine.
The thing that you are missing is the huge development in drone technology. Ukraine and Russia are the top2 countries that know how to use this technology as part of the military action, and Western countries would have a rude awakening as nails. More technologically advanced "tanks" would not matter much.
Those words hit harder when you've an executive that isn't beholden to Russia or threatening to fucking annex part of an ally, and a Europe that isn't investing heavily into rearmament.
But please, continue in your delusion.
> Can you help Ukraine enough so it can win?
Can you (the American executive) stop collaborating with Russia[1]?
> If not you can’t defend your own countries alone.
Are we talking about the EU or Europe here? Because only one is relevant to the Euro here. It's important to get this right, because it does tend to get confused by bystanders from the far side of the Atlantic.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/25/trump-envoy-...
The Baltics are in the Eurozone. If Russia invaded the Baltics tomorrow, Europe would be dependent on America to stay intact. That isn’t really a risk one wants to take with a reserve asset.
In practice, of course, most countries are willing to accept both risks.
[1]a lot of states that can be reasonably confident that they won't provoke the US in the manner Saddam Hussein or Putin did whether they're friendly or not can be rather less confident the current president won't take extreme measures in response to something completely innocuous like jailing someone for domestic corruption, being a source of emigrants to the United States or maintaining a trade surplus...
BRICs is dealing in store credits and raw-materials. Every other empire and kingdom is not to be trusted or only to be trusted as long as the town power-drunk world-police-man does his job. He may be the towns drunk, mumbling "Screw you guys, im going home!" but he is also the only one so far doing a decent job as sheriff.
You can grasp how unreliable the other actors are, by how one of the hostile actors (russia) recently complained about the (world-police) doing what its proxies in yemen and ukraine are constantly doing (piracy) to venezuella. They complained about the break-down of maritime safety- to the us. Yep, its that bad.