> It is abundantly clear the USA is no longer a dependable ally, and that it will use all kinds of strings attached to hobble what they sell to be able to exert political pressure.
This isn’t a US-only problem, and if anything the US has been more reliable on this account than some major European countries. For instance, in the first several months of the war Germany actually prohibited other countries from exporting their own surplus Leopard tanks to Ukraine.
That's a borderline whataboutism statement. Yes, Germany could have done a lot better. But at least they're not actively trying to sabotage NATO, they're not threatening to invade allies and they're not bombing other countries just because they can.
Germany also spend the last couple decades buying as much Russian natural gas as possible, even to the extent of decommissioning their nuclear power plants, and only really stopped when someone (probably Ukraine) destroyed their pipelines. They also pressured the rest of Europe to admit a surge of ‘refugees’ that has incited a populist backlash and very likely materially damaged the national security of almost every European country, many of which already have fully endemic terror cells (e.g. the one in Belgium responsible for the Paris attacks in 2015).
The US has spent years begging, pleading, cajoling, and now threatening the Europeans to take responsibility for the defense of their own continent. It took the outbreak of war in Ukraine for anyone in Europe west of Warsaw to even start considering rearmament.
Also, the shitty anti-American attitude from Western Europe isn’t anything new, it existed for decades before Trump seriously entered politics. I’m just speculating here, since none of us actually know what’s said between world leaders behind closed doors, but the US wants Western Europe to rearm and Western Europe’s leaders probably recognized the necessity of doing so in 2022, so it’s pretty convenient for all parties involved that they can pretend they’re doing it to spite America rather than at America’s request.
I mean we did make Western Europe decolonize and stopped the Anglo-French intervention in the Suez Crisis, and both of those turned out to be mistakes, but we also spent basically the entire twentieth century liberating, rebuilding, and defending your wretched continent. I think it’s mostly a reaction to having an inferiority complex about Western Europe increasingly turning into a poor, irrelevant backwater, which is tragic compared to the heights of previous centuries but also inevitable after most of your best people crossed the Atlantic.
This isn’t a US-only problem, and if anything the US has been more reliable on this account than some major European countries. For instance, in the first several months of the war Germany actually prohibited other countries from exporting their own surplus Leopard tanks to Ukraine.