When you say "Europe" I think what you mean is "Western Europe." Eastern Europe is not capable of standing up to Putin on its own, or to the degree that it could, it would struggle mightily (as we've seen with Ukraine). In that sense, the parts of Europe currently under real threat from Putin absolutely do require our help.
No, when I say Europe I'm roughly talking about the EU, and they are absolutely capable of standing up to Russia. Hell, Ukraine alone did a pretty fine job at the start of the war, because Russia is not this big behemoth that many of you are acting like. Do you really think that Russia is going to attack a NATO ally after this? Do you think that Russia would stand a chance against Germany alone, let alone the combined forces of EU nations? Now imagine if our European allies were forced to actually take their own defense seriously because we told them we are leaving European affairs such as supplying Ukraine, a non-Ally, to them.
The Europe that let itself get dependent on Russian energy and was rapidly tapped out against Libya in 2011? Yes, it’s obvious they need help against Russia.
This is precisely my point. Europeans have the financial means to provide for their own defense, but instead they get to spend their entire budgets on themselves because we are still pretending like it's 1950 and they need our defense while they rebuild their countries. Still, though, Russia would stand absolutely 0 chance of defeating a Germany, France, or UK, let alone all of them together plus the rest of the EU.
The Russian army may not have performed to expectations (that’s an understatement), but they are still a nuclear state with a strong willingness to feed people into the meat grinder, and commit crimes against humanity to bring down their neighbors. Belarus is basically a satellite state already, and Moldova is teetering. Yes they’re small and poor states, but what’s next? You think Putin’s Russia will stop there?
Russia can conscript people and give them rifles, throwing them to the meat grinder. If they try that against the EU, good luck. Yes, I think Russia will stop at Ukraine. I think Putin already deeply regrets invading Ukraine, and wouldn't do it again if he could.
What we’re dealing with here is decades of security decline in the European theater. Our enemies were emboldened while we fiddled around in the Middle East (to no avail), at the expense of pretty much everything else.
Another case of you making my point for me here. We fiddled around in the ME to no avail, and now we're going to fiddle around in Ukraine while our wonderful European allies do jack shit for their own security and neighbor. Meanwhile China is smiling.
I’m sorry to say it’s my opinion that infrastructure and education, as important as they are, will not be priorities until things go “splat” here in a big way. They take too long to fix for our current political system to take them seriously as priorities.
Unfortunately I think you're right, but we're discussing what we should do, not what we think our leaders will actually do, so this is as irrelevant as Brett's post above.
