No. of Recommendations: 2
They are. 300 tanks in five years starting from scratch (not refurbishing hulls) is actually pretty fast.
Where do you get 300 from? The Leopard number is 105 and it's going to take them 5 or more years. For the record the US tank production rate is currently 12 per month.
Same goes for energy deployment - they've pivoted hard and fast to replace their now-jeopardized Russia sources of fossil fuels, basically jettisoning the green agenda you so often lambaste, and moving to exploit domestic and "friendly" sources of fossil fuels. As noted above, they're moving at near-China speed on that.
Actually, as noted upthread they're moving in fits and starts.
I think you're just coming from an incorrect factual basis. They are moving very fast, but you think they're not in a hurry.
They're moving as fast as their political system will allow> them to move. Which...isn't as fast as they need.
And that's another point. You keep mentioning that without the US in charge of their security, Europe is going to devolve into a series of warrior states constantly conquering one another. But as has been illustrated here, even in the face of an imminent threat it's taking them a long time to get their acts together. In other words, their political structure isn't built to go out and lay waste to continents.
It's very easy to dismiss that possibility, because we've had 80 years of Pax Americana - but if you're deciding to eliminate the Pax Americana and get all those European countries to re-arm themselves again, you dramatically raise the risk profile over there.
No one is saying 'pull out of Europe completely'. However, there's no need to station many tens of thousands of US troops there nor is there a need for clouds of aircraft. There will soon be a need to have those in the Pacific theater along with a Navy capable of confronting the PLAN at sea (and not for nothing, a logistical fleet able to move supplies around the globe).
The logistics elements are actually where the real US emergency is today.
One more point.
Why is asking the Europeans merely to return to their early 2000's levels of armaments 'abandoning Pax America'? It isn't, not in any way, shape or form.
