With an unknown number of anti-American, anti-Trump and pro-Putin traitors in D.C. eagerly awaiting to leak everything
You just know that fuentes-style la creatura wignats are salivating at the thought. Contrarians egged on by resentful glowies, who will do anything they can to sabotage traitor trump for failing to enact total kike death with his first executive order.
Europe has to build up a military. If each country would stop some of the socialism and spend money on their military, they could probably defeat Russia as a collective effort.
The problem with statements like this is that it's not really that simple. Every nation in western Europe agrees, in principle, with the idea of having a military capable of responding to Russian aggression. Very few of them, even without their "socialism", would be able to afford it, even collectively.
The problem is that the threat of Russia has been perceived as minimal since the end of the cold war. Russia seemed more interested in consolidating control over central asia than posing any threat to Europe, and appeared to be willing to join the post-war consensus of mutual benefit through trade. This post-soviet era let Europe redefine the meaning of an "external threat" to be something far less expensive, while membership of the EU gave member states a way to defray costs by punting final responsibility for everything onto a nebulous collective effort. The EU has been content, for the last thirty years, to leave the US and Russia to stare at one another across the fulda gap and play superpower games, while it set about creating a unified European military capable of handling all the disparate requirements of the core member states. They ended up with the European Rapid Reaction Force, the structure of which was based on the belief that all future conflicts would be asymmetric sandpit wars, with the occasional dip into a poor European neighbour, and so it ended up as little more than a way for France to externalise the cost of its colonial policing force. The fact that it was also ideal for suppressing internal civil conflict was left unremarked in all the white papers.
You also have to account for bureaucratic incompetence. The UK, for instance, exceeds its NATO budget requirements and has for as long as it has been a member; with such a large economy, that turns out to be a fairly significant amount of money being thrown around. Yet, what is the end result of that? Two carriers that were compromised from conception by the need to be compatible with the ERRF and the Joint Strike Fighter (they were originally a joint project with France), a half dozen missile destroyers, a handful of frigates, less than 300 tanks (with half due to be mothballed while the other half are going to be upcycled and called "new"), and a generally poorly equipped military that has not met recruitment goals since before the turn of the century. The number of idiotic spending decisions made by the MoD and the Chiefs of Staff Committee has seen a significant component of that budget wasted time and time and time again, on useless radios that took twenty years to develop and were scrapped after mere months in the field, constant equipment churn, and endless "consultations" on why 80s-era landrovers should be kept for another five years instead of replaced with vehicles that actually protect the men inside. (They did eventually get rid of the snatch landrovers, but then after considering all the better options, replaced it with something equally bad).
There are some exceptions. Sweden still has a large military, despite cuts. It could certainly hold its own if the Russians ever managed to break through the defensive Finnfield. Overall though, the problem is that Europe, even collectively, doesn't have the resources to fund and field the kind of military people like Trump seem to envision when they say "spend more". And spending more doesn't necessarily get the results in any case.
Tell me how any of those backwoods territories are important Friend
Taiwan is where most of the important parts in your computer and phone are made. The others, meh.
