EU militaries are a joke tbf. Apart from France and (formerly) the UK, most of them can't do shit except sell firearms to Arab despots. I think someone from Romania here mentioned that they trust the US to protect them more than they trust France or Germany.
German here, you're right. The biggest part of the problem is that historically there are only three superpowers in the EU - France, UK and Germany. The UK is gone off the rails, the French can't pick up the slack for everyone else alone and us Germans are (out of very valid historical concern) extremely wary of pulling our weight on the international stage.
Add to this that the EU is corrosively fractured, nowhere near as coherent as the US. We're no match, hell (thanks to the Brits) the EU doesn't even have a Foreign Minister, and the effective veto power of even a super tiny nation doesn't make it any easier.
Germany caused not one but two world wars and is, despite being beaten almost to death after ww2, once again the dominant power in the EU. Let's face it we usually get what we want even without having a competitive military - if we had there would not be much to stop us.
I'm actually grateful that our leaders have been and still are mindful of that fact.
Did I just imagine up a tyrannical despot who seized power from the democratic process, called himself Fuhrer, then went on to slowly acquire land from Czechoslovakia, Austria and Yugoslavia, before deciding to invade France, Benelux, Poland and a host of other countries?
Or the time when the hot-tempered Kaiser couldn't keep it in his pants and wanted to test his new toys with the rest of his aristocrat buddies?
It is quite a lot more complex than that. I'd say it is a stretch to argue that Germany was to blame for WW1 (post-WW1 Germany was forced to take the blame but the reality was a lot more complex).
You can then also argue about the context/contribution the harsh treaty of Versailles made to WW2. But to not blame principally Germany/NSDAP/Hitler for WW2 after Germany marched into Poland is pretty absurd.
West Germany had been very proactive under the Adenauer years to abolish all forms of Nazism. In East Germany, the Soviets did that, albeit violently often, which is why there is a higher rate of Neo-Nazism in the east (apart from the usual issues such as poverty and unemployment).
> In East Germany, the Soviets did that, albeit violently often, which is why there is a higher rate of Neo-Nazism in the east (apart from the usual issues such as poverty and unemployment).
Sorry, that's wrong. Eastern (Communist) Germany painted itself as an "anti-fascist state by definition", but in reality there were awful lots of Neo-Nazis active in the GDR - and after the Mauerfall Western cadres only had to move in to find faithful people. It's estimated that there were 15.000 (!) Neo-Nazis at the time. See https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/die-ddr-und-ihre-neonazis-rea... or https://www.zeit.de/2012/08/DDR-Nazis for more details.
This "the DDR was antifascist and there were no Nazis there" nonsense is a huge part of why the neo-Nazi problem in the former GDR was overlooked until 2015ff with PEGIDA and other violent far right movements appearing (for many uninitiated) "out of thin air".
I did not say the DDR was anti-fascist or something. But there was a concerted effort by the Soviets to purge all forms of Nazism actively - which effectively failed, as per the evidence you provide yourself. A large part of the population resented the Soviet rule and effectively turned to Fascism as a reprieve (something I thought was implied so I skipped mentioning it explicitly). The Soviets went, but Fascism was there to stay.
There was chatter about this back in the mid-2000s about the EU forming their own independent foreign policy. There was lots of ink spilled about the EU's soft power which evaporated as it turns out soft power doesn't exist without hard power. Obama lamented the "free rider" problem where much of the EU wouldn't live up to their treaty obligations. The EU wasn't on a leash; it just didn't bother.
By a leash I mean being a freeloader at your friends house with his wife and kids. He says its ok because he has known you since you were toddlers. That's the leash.
The EU didnt bother on account of the US taxpayer footing the bill regardless thus removing their freedom of action and their seat on the table. They've gotten so feeble, no one even cares.
> The EU didnt bother on account of the US taxpayer footing the bill regardless
The US didn't just burn that money for naught, they got something from all that investment and that is that they were for all intents and purposes the leader of the world, both in "soft power" and "hard power".
The problem is that it is very hard to quantify the benefits while it's extremely easy to quantify the costs.
