Do Patriotic Americans REALLY Want Trump To Abandon Europe And NATO?

I don't think Americans want to let Putin carve up Ukraine, steal a land bridge to Kaliningrad from Lithuania, and then maybe conquer the rest of the little Baltics and threaten Poland.

Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash

Imagine what will happen to Europe if Trump is reelected:

Let’s say Donald Trump gets reelected, and ends funding for Ukraine, and Europe just doesn’t have the will or political capacity to back up Ukraine militarily or financially. How long would Ukraine last?

Let’s ballpark it that Ukraine’s military lasts six months to a year with careful rationing of supplies, austerity, and strategic withdrawals before it starts really running out of ammunition, equipment, and fortified defensive lines.

Maybe Europe can surprise the world with speed and money to fill the gaping hole Trump’s “America First, Russia Second” foreign policy would leave in Ukraine’s capacity to continue defending itself… or maybe Europe won’t be fast or capable enough, and Ukraine’s population will exhaust itself, and the defense will collapse, and Russia will march into Kiev disinterested in reflecting on how many Russian boys had to die so Putin could conquer a country that fucking hates him and Russia.

Putin would quickly institute a puppet government in Kiev, steal the fruits and profits of Europe’s breadbasket, and co-opt Ukraine’s stimulated war economy. All the US taxpayer money we spent will go to waste, and American resolve will have failed and been embarrassed on the global stage.

The sunken cost is not a reason to keep the war going indefinitely—America of course learned that lesson twice this century already!—but, say what you will about our coming to help in Ukraine’s most dire hour, Americans somewhat heroically sacrificed to help keep free a fellow liberal democracy full of idealistic citizens yearning for freedom, liberty, and the self-sovereignty to decide Putin and his Hitler-2.0, war mongering dictatorship belong nowhere near their government. If that’s not American Values Classic™️, what is?

What a damn shame for Ukrainians to again be subjugated by Russia because Putin maybe have some lewd kompromat on Trump, is likely bribing him in direct and indirect ways, and has been without a doubt impressing Trump for decades with his murderous authoritarianism because Trump has the moral compass and geopolitical critical thinking of a sociopathic 5th grader.

Meanwhile, almost certainly, Putin will have rushed into the Moldovan separatist region of Transnistria, and then blitzkrieged the Moldovan government to install a puppet government there too. Maybe he takes advantage of the lull in fighting in Ukraine to smash Georgia one more time, and then maybe threatens Kazakhstan and other steppe countries flirting with the idea of make to get back in line with the Russian sphere of influence. Will Trump say anything about these actions beyond “America does bad things too” while his country’s long-time political enemy divides and conquers our post-Cold War collaborators on European peace?

Suppose then that Trump cheerleads for Putin and Russia steals all the Ukrainian military apparatus that has been built up over the last two years, and starts compulsory drafting and abducting Ukrainians off the street, and reconstitutes them as Russian military units with some degree of “reeducation” or torture so maybe a year later Putin will announce the West has offended Russia long enough by keeping Kaliningrad Oblast separate from the rest of Russia, and demand that Kaliningrad citizens get a land bridge to the mother country. Suppose Putin masses up troops again, this time on the border with our NATO ally Lithuania, and Trump announces he doesn’t care because it's not worth wasting American money and troops on the Baltics because they pay so little for NATO.

I don’t know where to begin explaining to MAGA people why America should continue to be blood-brother allies with our NATO partners, who also conveniently happen to be most of the next most developed economies after us, and who collectively help America enforce the rules-based order that has preserved for three generations a waxing-and-waning, but still peerless, global soft and hard power hegemony quite out of proportion to our population size.

And after that, might Putin try to conquer Estonia and then Latvia? With Trump abandoning NATO would France, Germany, the UK, and Poland all rush in to defend the Baltics? With what real army you know? Poland is quickly starting to be able to kick some ass, but it’s the same population as Ukraine, so a war of attrition that would inevitably swallow the Baltics and arrive on Polish territory could reach a point similar to this current relative stalemate in eastern Ukraine, or perhaps a WW1-esque front with widening swaths of no man’s land. Poland’s fast rising success after throwing off the Russian yolk and integrating with the West has turned Poland into Putin’s biggest threat to his domestic politics — because Poles are getting freer, richer, and happier than Russians. Perhaps eventually Germany, France, the UK, and Poland could collectively out-manufacture Russia, but how long would that take? How far into Poland could Putin get? Those countries have barely been able to wean themselves off Russian energy, let alone build up a world war caliber projection of military force.

At some point would Trump be compelled by public opinion, somewhat still patriotic Republicans, and, no doubt, all the military and foreign policy careerists who likely would be threatening to resign en masse to stop Putin from steamrolling the Baltics? Would he care, and just fire them all and replace them with people who make Stephen Miller and Ric Grenell look like altruistic moderates?

*Obviously the potential and already-threatened use of nuclear weapons is a wild card here, but would the mutually assured destruction leave those off the table in the way that neither side in WWII really used poison gas after seeing the horrors of it WWI? Maybe the US hacked control of Russia’s nukes decades ago, or perhaps Russia’s kleptocrats in the military siphoned away crucial defense budgeting so Russia’s nuclear missiles will have the reliability issues of a surprising amount of Russian materiel at the outset of the Ukraine War? Maybe the US has undisclosed laser or satellite technology that can shoot down all of Russia’s nukes, and the US military will intervene to protect the world from nuclear war? …Or maybe a chain-reaction of nuclear armageddon will happen?

Anyway, thanks for going along with me in this imaginative projection of a second Trump term’s foreign policy in Europe. Let me know in the comments if you think this is somewhat plausible, or way off the mark! 😜

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