Quote (Lebanon961 @ 6 May 2022 10:38)
Kinda like the same with US right now. Does that sound smarter, I am asking you :)
Our military dependence on the US is history-based, after the world war, the European countries had no other choice than to pick between either the US or the Soviet Union as their overlords.
Despite occasional conflicts of interest, the economic and geostrategic interests of Europe and the US are quite well aligned... well enough that the Euros have made only very limited attempts at developing their own military. Europe is perfectly happy to lean on US military strength for its defense. In fact, both Obama and Trump were basically begging Europe to invest more into their own military and become less dependent on the US.
Side note: just look at the divergent development of cold war Germany. After the war, the Americans invested billions into rebuilding West Germany (and the rest of Europe) with the Marshall Plan/European Recovery Act. In East Germany, the Soviets dismantled countless factories and shipped them off to Russia. After 45 years of being controlled, allied and/or associated with the US, West Germany was a prospering, free democracy in 1990 when the Iron Curtain fell. East Germany was a rundown, unfree police state with pervasive surveillance and a collapsing economy. (And a big fat wall which was necessary to stop its own population from mass emigration to the West.)
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Because the rewards are only global dominance instead of playing second fiddle to the US :)
Even if, hypothetically, Europe turned on the Americans and teamed up with Russia, this Euro-Russian alliance would still not come anywhere close to being strong enough to
dominate either the US or China. Russia is a minnow on the global stage execpt for three things: land mass, natural gas reserves and slaughtering innocent civilians. You overestimate the additional weight that the rest of Europe would gain from Russia.
Generally speaking, dreams of Germany and Russia teaming up in a quest for global dominance is not something that would go over well in the rest of the world (particularly Poland
)
Also, like I've said, I just don't believe that Russia would ever be interested in such alliance on equal footing, without the Kremlin (and the Kremlin alone) ultimately calling the shots.
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on May 6 2022 03:37am