signalmankenneth
Verified User
Yes, NATO can survive without the U.S.?!! NATO has 31 members without the U.S., that's a lot of manpower and weaponry too?!! NATO needs to move on without the U.S. and they should re-think about any intelligence sharing with the U.S. now too?!! America is no longer leader of the free world?!!
Seoul, South Korea CNN —
Europe is staring down the barrel of a stark new reality where the United States being the backbone of NATO – the alliance that has guaranteed the continent’s security for almost 80 years – is no longer a given.
President Donald Trump’s public animosity towards Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, his willingness to embrace Russia’s Vladimir Putin and recent comments casting doubt over whether he would defend NATO allies “if they don’t pay” have all forced European leaders to start thinking the previously unthinkable - is the US a reliable security partner at a time when the continent is being rocked by its biggest war since the 1940s?
But NATO without the US is far from impotent, with more than a million troops and modern weaponry at its disposal from the 31 other countries in the alliance. It also has the wealth and technological knowhow to defend itself without the US, analysts say.
The US and Germany are the biggest contributors to NATO’s military budget, civil budget and security investment program, at almost 16% each, followed by the UK at 11% and France at 10%, a NATO fact sheet says. Analysts say it wouldn’t take much for Europe to make up for the loss of Washington’s contribution.
If European countries unite and buy the right equipment, Europe “could pose a serious conventional and … nuclear deterrent” to Russia, Ben Schreer, Europe executive director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), said in a Zoom call with CNN and other journalists in late February.
“Europe alone (still has) a capacity to muster the resources it would need to defend itself, it’s just a question of whether (it is) willing to,” Schreer said.
And that’s the key question. Over more than 75 years and the administrations of 14 different US presidents, including the first Trump administration, the US has been the sinew that has kept the alliance together
During the Cold War, US troops on the continent were there as a deterrent to any Soviet ambitions to expand the Warsaw Pact alliance and eventually saw out its end when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. NATO campaigns in the Balkans in the 1990s were conducted with US troops and airpower. And, until the second Trump administration took office on January 20, Washington spearheaded aid for Ukraine.
Those decades of trans-Atlantic solidarity may have come to an end in recent days, analysts say.
Trump’s Oval Office blow-up with Zelensky - after which he halted US aid to Kyiv - “felt like a deeper rupture, not just with Ukraine, but with the US ‘free world’ strategy from Truman through Reagan,” Dan Fried, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and former US assistant secretary of state for Europe, said on the council’s website.
John Lough, a former NATO official who is now an associate fellow at the Chatham House think tank in London, sees an even more profound split in the alliance.
“It simply feels that the United States sees Europe more as a competitor, a rival, than an ally,” Lough told CNN, adding that because of that the commitment for Washington to defend NATO allies is somewhat in doubt.
It’s a fracture that Lough sees as unrepairable.
“Once you start to lose part of that commitment, you effectively lose it all,” Lough said.
Some people in European circles are starting to ask whether Washington should be described “in some ways as an enemy,” he said.
But some analysts say a NATO without the US is not a bad idea.
“As soon as US allies become convinced that they can no longer trust in US capabilities to defend them when push comes to shove, they will rush to pick up the slack and work towards growing their own capabilities,” Moritz Graefrath, a postdoctoral fellow in security and foreign policy at William & Mary’s Global Research Institute, wrote in War on the Rocks last year.
“It is in this sense that — perhaps counterintuitively — a withdrawal of US forces will create an even stronger, not weaker, Europe,” Graefrath wrote.
Prime Minister of NATO member Poland, Donald Tusk, thinks this process has started already.
“Europe as a whole is truly capable of winning any military, financial, economic confrontation with Russia - we are simply stronger,” he said ahead of a European Union summit this week. “We just had to start believing in it. And today it seems to be happening.”
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/07/euro...united-states-analysis-intl-hnk-ml/index.html
Seoul, South Korea CNN —
Europe is staring down the barrel of a stark new reality where the United States being the backbone of NATO – the alliance that has guaranteed the continent’s security for almost 80 years – is no longer a given.
President Donald Trump’s public animosity towards Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, his willingness to embrace Russia’s Vladimir Putin and recent comments casting doubt over whether he would defend NATO allies “if they don’t pay” have all forced European leaders to start thinking the previously unthinkable - is the US a reliable security partner at a time when the continent is being rocked by its biggest war since the 1940s?
But NATO without the US is far from impotent, with more than a million troops and modern weaponry at its disposal from the 31 other countries in the alliance. It also has the wealth and technological knowhow to defend itself without the US, analysts say.
The US and Germany are the biggest contributors to NATO’s military budget, civil budget and security investment program, at almost 16% each, followed by the UK at 11% and France at 10%, a NATO fact sheet says. Analysts say it wouldn’t take much for Europe to make up for the loss of Washington’s contribution.
If European countries unite and buy the right equipment, Europe “could pose a serious conventional and … nuclear deterrent” to Russia, Ben Schreer, Europe executive director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), said in a Zoom call with CNN and other journalists in late February.
“Europe alone (still has) a capacity to muster the resources it would need to defend itself, it’s just a question of whether (it is) willing to,” Schreer said.
And that’s the key question. Over more than 75 years and the administrations of 14 different US presidents, including the first Trump administration, the US has been the sinew that has kept the alliance together
During the Cold War, US troops on the continent were there as a deterrent to any Soviet ambitions to expand the Warsaw Pact alliance and eventually saw out its end when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. NATO campaigns in the Balkans in the 1990s were conducted with US troops and airpower. And, until the second Trump administration took office on January 20, Washington spearheaded aid for Ukraine.
Those decades of trans-Atlantic solidarity may have come to an end in recent days, analysts say.
Trump’s Oval Office blow-up with Zelensky - after which he halted US aid to Kyiv - “felt like a deeper rupture, not just with Ukraine, but with the US ‘free world’ strategy from Truman through Reagan,” Dan Fried, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and former US assistant secretary of state for Europe, said on the council’s website.
John Lough, a former NATO official who is now an associate fellow at the Chatham House think tank in London, sees an even more profound split in the alliance.
“It simply feels that the United States sees Europe more as a competitor, a rival, than an ally,” Lough told CNN, adding that because of that the commitment for Washington to defend NATO allies is somewhat in doubt.
It’s a fracture that Lough sees as unrepairable.
“Once you start to lose part of that commitment, you effectively lose it all,” Lough said.
Some people in European circles are starting to ask whether Washington should be described “in some ways as an enemy,” he said.
But some analysts say a NATO without the US is not a bad idea.
“As soon as US allies become convinced that they can no longer trust in US capabilities to defend them when push comes to shove, they will rush to pick up the slack and work towards growing their own capabilities,” Moritz Graefrath, a postdoctoral fellow in security and foreign policy at William & Mary’s Global Research Institute, wrote in War on the Rocks last year.
“It is in this sense that — perhaps counterintuitively — a withdrawal of US forces will create an even stronger, not weaker, Europe,” Graefrath wrote.
Prime Minister of NATO member Poland, Donald Tusk, thinks this process has started already.
“Europe as a whole is truly capable of winning any military, financial, economic confrontation with Russia - we are simply stronger,” he said ahead of a European Union summit this week. “We just had to start believing in it. And today it seems to be happening.”
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/07/euro...united-states-analysis-intl-hnk-ml/index.html
WRECKING OUR 80 YEAR TRANSATLANTIC ALLIANCE
