Dear Europe,
There's a nauseating sense of deja vu permeating the land this side of the Atlantic. In 1981, the Reagan Revolution arrived in DC. The military budget doubled in his first term, passed by a Democratic Congress. The always inane Cold War rhetoric was pushed up decibel and idiocy levels. “The Soviets would be here soon!” Europeans probably remember Russians were called Soviets when the Bolsheviks ran things, not sure many Americans do. The US was always much more modern than Europe, modernity promotes amnesia.
Then, the Soviets did the dastardly. Gorbachev came to power. He started talking about too much military spending, not enough attention to environmental matters – Communists were as bad as the worst capitalists in this regard. Then poof! It was gone. The Soviet empire dismantled itself. First empire in history to do so. And in the end, maybe that's the best thing the Bolsheviks did.
The “peace dividend” never arrived. America's military spending continued unabated, growing ever more greatly in the last thirty years. The irony being the last thirty years growth was conducted with the great Vietnam draft-dodging generation coming to power. Those running the DC war-machine had all run from Vietnam; Biden, Trump, Bush, Clinton, Cheney, Rumsfeld, the list is pretty much endless. They spent military money like drunken sailors stumbling into one bloody misadventure after another. It would make a bad sitcom, unfortunately it’s already endlessly televised.
Europe, we need your help, we can't help ourselves. We need to re-find America, going all the way back to General Washington's advise in his farewell address, “Taking care always to keep ourselves by suitable establishments on a respectable defensive posture, we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.”
In regards to “temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies,” NATO is well passed its expiration date, if it was ever a good idea. NATO's main purpose was helping promote a permanent war budget in the US after World War II. We can't afford it anymore, though in an era of perpetual debt, that's hard for all to tell.
People of France, Germany, Italy, Turkey, (again I keep forgetting, Turkey's in Europe, right?), and all the rest of NATO, you can work your relations with the Russians on your own. Hell, judging by our hapless actions in the last thirty years since the fall of the Soviet Union, you certainly can't do worse. And, I'm not telling you anything you don't know, but don't listen to the Brits, always endlessly pining for empire lost.
As far as Ukraine, they've been dealing with the Russians for a thousand or so years. As Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz once said about Mexico’s position, “Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States,” so goes Ukraine with Russia, they can work it out.
It's becoming clearer and clearer the problems on this little planet will not be solved by military action, anywhere — beat those swords into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks, and learn war no more.