No. of Recommendations: 11
What does "independence" even mean?
That they're not going to continue to shape their foreign policy efforts to line up with those of the United States. Such as what happened today, when Germany (and the rest of the EU) pursued a different resolution on Ukraine than happened today. This will probably be reflected in a chilling/separation on a host of other fronts: less sharing of sensitive intelligence information, fewer "heads up" and consultations in foreign policy and other decisions, etc. Expect the formal actions of NATO to also be a little less deferential to the direction that the US might want to steer it as well.
To what purpose? Are the French and the Germans going to re-fight the Franco/Prussian war for the 4th time over Alsace-Lorraine? Or are the Brits going to decide to smack the Belgians around?
Who knows? The most likely cause of problems isn't an issue directly between the Great Powers, but something that happens within those Powers' spheres of influence (it's often the Balkans). For example, you get one "team" that lines up with Greece, and another "team" that lines up with Turkey - and a conflict between Greece and Turkey ends up spiraling out of control.
There's a reason you think of this as an absurdly low-probability event. It's because of the international order that's been in place for the last 80 years - a rigorous dedication to the idea that nations should use non-martial institutions (like the UN) to resolve issues, and that European security was provided through the collective forces of NATO rather than individual countries relying on separate military capabilities. Once you start kicking that away, the chances of conflict on the Continent go way up. If you throw away the Pax Americana because we can't be bothered to enforce it any more, what replaces it will be more dangerous (and ultimately more dangerous to us, IMHO). Especially add in China trying to stir the pot - a well-timed recognition of the Armenian Genocide or a bumping up their footprint in Moldova or Albania (not all countries are going to react like Italy)?
So in your mind that unless our thumb is on their governments the Europeans are going to go buck wild and start teaming up against one another again?
No. That unless we continually support and reinforce the global international framework that provides collective security for Europe (rather than individual national security) one significantly likely outcome of the resulting fragmentation of national security interests is that you'll get a conflict that spreads into a military conflict. They're not going to go "buck wild," but they're going to need to start making their own arrangements. If NATO isn't strong enough as an institution (not as a military force) to protect their national security, they'll have to find other means. And as you point out, none of them is strong enough to be a global superpower - which means that they most likely mechanism for securing their national security is through forging alliances within Europe to replace the "universal" alliance that the UN and NATO represent.
In Europe, you have about 40+ separate nations crammed into an area about the size of the US - most of them wealthy industrial powers, several of them nuclear armed, many of them with militaries among the world's largest (for all your slights). If the US isn't willing to be the "leader of the Free World" anymore, what do you think happens with no leader? Internal conflict, jockeying for position....all the Metternich/Council of Europe kind of stuff that ultimately led to WWI.
The entire international system was set up to favor us. To have the U.S., as the leader of the free world, have unparalleled influence in Europe as a way to check against the Communist threat. The price of that was U.S. having to maintain the world's largest and most effective military and use it from time to time - the benefit of that was that we had eighty years where we were driving the bus in First World global policy.
