It's almost like war in Europe is always bad for Europe and good for the US. The US owes its status as a superpower primarily to most of Europe wearing itself o

It's almost like war in Europe is always bad for Europe and good for the US. The US owes its status as a superpower primarily to most of Europe wearing itself out in the two world wars. This time the damage of the war is mostly economic because it's largely a war by proxy, but by geography alone Europe is naturally more impacted than the US. I think it's baseless to say to the US "you did this, so pay up" but it seems that the main accusation is "you're our ally, so stop trying to profit from this to our detriment". The US has always been more of an abusive spouse than an "ally" by virtue of being powerful enough to bully everyone else around with implied threats alone. You can argue this is just politics but then we Europeans should stop allowing ourselves to be deluded about any pretense of being in the same boat just because we're on the same side in a given conflict or on a given issue. You say Europe should start "looking after itself by itself" and stop seeing the US as a "friend" but this is exactly how the US has been portrayed in Europe for over a century and this hardly went against the US's interests. FWIW this is another manifestation of the same problem I see within the EU. The EU is largely a trade organization and its politics are primarily shaped by the business interests of its member nations. But because that sounds boring and evil, we've come up with glorifying narratives about a shared European identity and common history and culture and whatnot and always bring up "European values" whenever we feel like it. But while e.g. Germany and France may have a shared history and culture, this doesn't manifest throughout all regions of both countries the same way (e.g. the Rhineland or Alsace naturally link both countries due to their histories but the same isn't true for Brittany or Schleswig-Holstein), and it certainly doesn't transfer to relationships between e.g. Portugal and Bulgaria. I think Brexit should have been the wake-up call that ultimately we're all isolated countries and any appeal to "friendship" or "allyship" is primarily performative, not material. The EU is fine to the extent that it serves "our" (i.e. whatever country we live in) economic interests but it's not a "shared heritage" or even a precursor to a federal body like the US federal government (which evolved very differently and carries its own undesirable flaws). Given the nature of the EU it would make sense to formalize a similar body to the NATO as an EU member alliance (alongside the many other mostly overlapping organizations the EU consists of) and re-evaluate our place in NATO from then on, but again that would require moving away from the kind of talk where this is portrayed as a "United State of Europe" military and rather a "European Treaty Organization".