Well, first, you didn’t ask a question. You made statements that seemed divorced from the geopolitical and military reality of the EU, so I offered some clarity. And no one thinks Trump will arm Russia? I think perhaps you forget how fond of Putin he and much of the party taking power in the US is.

No one said the EU will need to buy American arms. What I said is, if Trump decides to stop arming Ukraine and demands they end the war, and the EU decides to compensate Ukraine for what is no longer being provided by the United States, it’s quite possible Trump will withdraw the US from NATO. He’s already looking for an excuse.

If you think you can build a military coalition with 70% of the spend suddenly stopping, by all means. What is more likely, as I said, is the withdrawal of the US from NATO would dramatically hamper its effective strength as a deterrent in the region. You would then need to rely on individual member states to attempt to deter or defend from Russian aggression.

The US has a unified, centralized military with a clear and consolidated command structure across all of its branches with a military spending allocation 4x greater than the entire EU combined. The EU is a somewhat collaborative collection of nations with widely variant defense policies. Because of that, the EU channels the majority of its defense strategy through NATO, within which the US plays an irrefutably dominant role. Many of its smaller members’ defense strategies, Estonia for instance, amount to “try to die slowly for two weeks until NATO arrives.” Without the US in NATO, nations near Russia like the aforementioned Estonia could be in serious danger.

The idea that the EU could unilaterally “roll over” Russia if the US leaves NATO is unlikely, and extremely unlikely if it causes the US to start providing military support to Russia. That goes to my final point, which is, if you think you’re right, go ahead and try, and we’ll see how it goes. Fortunately, the leaders of the member countries in NATO are generally not as ignorant as you are, so the likely outcome here is if Trump stops helping Ukraine and tells them to end the war, then Ukraine will end up ceding territory and the war will “end.”

To be clear, none of these things happening are what I would consider good or positive possibilities. You may not like it, and I certainly don’t, but the idea that the EU will just “go it alone” flies in the face of the political and military reality of the United States and the EU. If you give Trump an excuse to exit NATO, he absolutely will, and the EU will then have serious challenges ahead. The economic impact of attempting to replace even half of the military power that will disappear if the US withdraws would dramatically reshape the EU economy. And not for the better. And that’s not even going into what China would do with the EU if this kind of political and military realignment occurred.

To be blunt, even as a union, the EU is not a superpower, especially militarily. Its member-states are, obviously, even less so. Its strength is generally in the arena of so-called “soft power.” What I’m discussing here is hard power.