Not the person you responded to, but I agree that the EU needs a bit more independence from the US.
To me, it's mostly about being able to stand up for ourselves on a world stage - ideally through a common EU military that is strong enough to deter adversaries even without US support.
My main reason is the instability of the American political climate and the way every four years there's an election between a centrist and an extremist. Trump has already threatened to invite Putin to invade other NATO countries [0]. We can't risk being dependent on this madman.
I think many in the US would also be happy with a stronger Europe. A friendly peer competitor to call us out if we decided to go to war to ostensibly “spread democracy” would probably be good, for example.
We temporarily renamed some fast food that wasn’t even correctly named after them, and made a bunch of juvenile jokes about their performance in WW2 for a couple decades. I dunno, I was just a kid at the time, but I didn’t get the impression that we were taking their complaints very seriously.
I was a little bit older, and I do remember the hostility we had towards them (I was studying French at the time). But yeah, it was more like the way you'd boo the opposing sports team, not like we are at risk at war with them or anything...
Speaking as an American I want this for the EU as well. I liked the prior world order, but I think the dream of keeping it alive died when our current dumbass-in-chief pulled out of Afghanistan in the stupidest way possible. The previous dumbass-in-chief who may well be the next dumbass-in-chief if the current one loses also abandoned our Kurdish allies and is promising to do worse than that.
Also, I like Europe. I don’t want to see it falter.
That's probably a complicated slicing of "stateless state". Racial? Ethnic? Linguistic? Religious?
I'm guessing it would be something approaching "associated peoples who are part of a state, but who have collectively demonstrated a desire for an independent state"?
There are ~40M Kurds.
Off the top of my head, Palestinians, Uyghurs, Basques, but I'm sure I'm missing a ton.
To me, it's mostly about being able to stand up for ourselves on a world stage - ideally through a common EU military that is strong enough to deter adversaries even without US support.
My main reason is the instability of the American political climate and the way every four years there's an election between a centrist and an extremist. Trump has already threatened to invite Putin to invade other NATO countries [0]. We can't risk being dependent on this madman.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68266447