n my own words, European NATO members either don’t see Russia or China as becoming severe threats to them, if only Moscow and Beijing are mollified enough — especially if said European states willingly accept the de facto bribes offered to them by Putin and Xi, in lucrative trade and essential energy deals, in exchange for turning a blind eye to aggression over Ukraine and Taiwan and elsewhere.

I suggest that we must not forget how ineffective Continental Europe was in resisting Nazi conquest despite Hitler’s very visible military buildup and violent rhetoric in the ’30s, and furthermore how little of a truly active role rubble-strewn countries like de Gaulle’s France and West Germany were able to play in building the post-War American-led world order.

While occupied by Hitler’s minions, Europe was split between resistance fighters (heroic), collaborators (despicable), and a middle ground who just desperately tried to survive — and often didn’t. This leaves terrible lasting effects on the survivors, and on their kids and grandkids, of lasting guilt feelings, deep insecurity, and difficulty sustaining healthy relationships — just ask any descendants of Holocaust survivors.

This gives an extremely different structural and historical basis to current European society compared to American that extends across generations “from then to now”, a implicit but drastic difference, in perspectives and reactions, that Americans tend to not see or understand, exacerbating America’s national weakness of endless cultural mirror-imaging.

The U.S. has been the primary producer and provider of defense and security throughout Cold War I; the Continental Europeans have been the consumers and dependents, with few notable exceptions. Breaking this cycle/linkage/feedback loop is going to be very challenging for both sides. As the French say, transslated, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Finding a common vocabulary about who the adversaries really are, how dangerous they really are, and (especially) what to do about that, are going to be seriously complicated by these differences. The U.S. needs to be much more aware of what makes European countries tick qua European countries. Then we need to rediscover the common ground of national survival and security that unified us all in WWII and CWI against the deadly global perils posed by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan, followed by the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact — now substitute Putin-esque Russia, Xi’s China, Kims’ North Korea, and the Ayatollahs’ Iran.

From on our own Indo-Pacific perspective, we concur with these lines: “For the foreseeable future, arms control has no realistic prospects. It is even difficult to argue that nonproliferation efforts are worthwhile since the United States may need the assistance of a nuclear-armed South Korea and Japan to stabilize tension in East Asia and prevent North Korean or Chinese aggression.” In the coming decades, the general direction of high mutual strategic mistrust will get worse before it gets better. We should steer our nuclear deterrence policies accordingly.

Furthermore, the methodology of this article can be applied to the practice of Lawfare and the reliability of any form of semi-enforceable instruments such as “codes of conduct:” whereas adversarial tactics will be to cheat our side by defaulting, in the meantime, enemies will leverage these instruments to control our side’s behaviour via stalling and inhibition, gaining strategic advantage at our expanse.