As a presidential candidate, Trump has threatened to quit NATO unless European allies contribute more, and should he carry it out Europe may decide to go it alone on defense, the game suggests. “A US policy of frustrating NATO has the potential to cause the alliance to collapse, with the EU as a candidate for eventually replacing NATO’s ultimate function — defending Europe from Russia,” wrote Finley Grimble, the British defense expert who designed and ran the game.
Trump threatened NATO with this, Biden actually got NATO to contribute more and bombed European infrastructure with the destruction of the Nordstream pipeline. The US is NATO, they can even destroy the infrastructure of other NATO members without consequence. The war game obviously did not account for this.
“Ultimately, SACEUR is answerable to the president of the United States,” said Grimble. “So he [SACEUR] can start slowing things down, or prevent things from happening. The US can just take the funding from NATO programs and they will collapse.”
Yes, because the US is NATO. This is how the military wing/monopoly of imperialism works. Do the people in charge not understand how their own system works?
Some NATO members also quail at the thought that they might actually have to fight Russia without support from America, the most powerful NATO member given the size of its conventional forces and nuclear arsenal. “If I’m Italy, for example, I’m certainly guaranteeing the security of Estonia,” Grimble said. “But I’m not really expecting to have to play such a prominent and crucial role in this.”
However, fictional Moscow does launch new offensives in Ukraine. Bereft of US support — which Europe is unable to compensate for — Ukraine feels compelled to sign a peace that cedes eastern Ukraine to Russia and installs a pro-Russian government in Kyiv. Europe faces another problem: fear that Russia might attack NATO is scaring off domestic and international investors, causing European economies to stumble.
This is likely to happen anyways. And the whole point of the Ukraine war is to subjugate and vassalise Europe, and cause their economies to stumble. That is fully intentional from the Biden administration.
By the end of the game, the effects of a US pullback from NATO are global. China realizes that the US has really shifted its focus from Europe to the Pacific, which deters Beijing from invading Taiwan.
Again, this is going to happen anyways and is the US strategy. Win the inter imperial rivalry with Western Europe by vassalising it through the Ukraine war, for a united refocus to China. This is the plan, regardless of who is the president.
Yet at the same time, there was a genuine desire to keep NATO alive. “Many NATO members — except for France mainly — thought post-Trump it could be salvageable,” Grimble said. “So it was necessary to keep the US in, keep it together, and rebuild later.”
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