That itself would be a victory. One of Trump's stated reason for wanting out of NATO is Europe wasn't doing their part - the treaty requires specific amounts of military spending and most members were below that. Now that Ukraine happened most of Europe is at least close to the treaty required levels (many are still below, but at least they are close)

Which is to say you can't lay down arms you don't have. If you want to leave America behind (which is both good and bad in different ways) you need to have something in place to handle potential attacks without America.

[–] Kaavi 7 points 1 month ago

If trump wins, then Europe needs to think Europe first, don't buy so much American military hardware, we make so much already ourselves, support that.

Then we can look at what we do in 4 years.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

I think you may be underestimating Europe. National militaries is one thing, and pop culture understanding of the region is another, but you'll find plenty of armaments and munitions in private care all across Europe. Not to mention how some Baltic and Slavic countries are still armed to the teeth, despite having a deficit in military spending.

In any case, the complaint about Europe not spending enough on military is a tired argument, because Europe wasn't neglecting their military - Europe was literally told to remove large swathes of industrial military complexes.

For more info, ask an African, the Chinese, the global south, everyone told Europe to put their guns down - and all across Europe military assets ended up in private hands.

The joke being that in the cities you won't find much guns, but travel out to the country and you'll find large showrooms.

But yeah, if the US betrays Europe, that might be the final nail in the coffin for European and US relations, so much so that I think the CIA would just drop Trump to avoid diplomatic suicide.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Europe has quite a bit in place to defend itself without the US. Something like a million soldiers with some pretty good equipment and training. There are issues, but the EU could defend itself fairly well without the US. It is just that having the most powerfull military behind you makes things a lot easier. The problem is that this makes things easier and the US has a massive intresst in looking strong(Taiwan for example).

[–] OwlPaste 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Probably the main question is how long can Europe defend itself for. This conflict showed us that EU stockpiles of conventional weapons are questionably small for a real conventional war. That's the bit that we needed US for. We utterly failed to provide sufficient ammunition and weapons for Ukraine by ourselves.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

When the war started pretty much every European military placed some massive orders. So new production mostly did not go to Ukraine. But a lot of weapons are domestic and built in a large quantity. Also not everything from the stockpiles was send to Ukraine. That is just too risky.

So long enough to scale up production and use the EUs large economy.