You know the more I think about it, the more I consider that even without US support, their primary adversary has already demonstrated their impotence as an offensive military power. Maybe they simply don't need to do much more than they're already doing.
A slight thawing of relations is a long way away from an alliance. Even then, would Russia take it? They might see more value in their current arrangement with China.
Still, long term maybe you're right. It does make geopolitical sense for the US to be more closely aligned with Russia. In a pivot to Asia it's much more useful to sow-discord in the Sino-Russian relationship, than it is to prop up the EU.
> It does make geopolitical sense for the US to be more closely aligned with Russia. In a pivot to Asia it's much more useful to sow-discord in the Sino-Russian relationship, than it is to prop up the EU
The EU have been loyal allies. Their defence production is also nothing to be sneezed at. If we found ourselves in a war of attrition with China and either Japan or Korea stood neutral, an America with Europe has a much higher chance of succeeding than an America alone.
And if we surrender to Xi the way Trump has to Putin, that puts the American homeland at direct risk in the next conflict from both sides.
This entire enterprise comes down to some Silicon Valley types not liking the EU. It's personal and irrational and unfortunately, with Trump an ersatz monarch for two years, an example of why extreme power concentration sacrifices the immortal goals of a nation for the personal whims of a mortal leader.
I think if we take the recency bias, emotion and partisanship out of this, we can see that the United States has been trying to pivot away from Europe, under both democratic and republican administrations, for over a decade now.
The fact is Europe can afford to defend itself. This isn't the cold war were the soviet military was 800km from Paris. It's 2025, where the shell of the Russian army is struggling to capture territory 2,400km from Paris.
If the USA in the 70s was willing to thaw relations with China to offset the USSR, it will surely thaw relations was the Russian Federation now to offset China. I do not think European arms production is a significant factor in any US/China conflict; any "Taiwan Emergency" will just by a factor of geography not be a long protracted conflict, and has much more potential to flair up into alarming levels than even this one.