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These excellent points all round. In fairness of the (admittedly already dubious) coherency of the groupchat that inspired this, there were six of us trading ideas, and I just dumped the logs into Deepseek, creating a particularly contradictory medley. However, that's on me for posting without vetting the consistency.
Would be curious to hear your thoughts on what a more focused and thoughtful European spitelist would look like, conditional on a continuing decline in Euro-US relations to the point where the consensus among European leaders is to classify America as a strategic competitors rather than allies.
Bottom line- a more focused and thoughtful European spitelist wouldn't be a spitelist, it would be a clinch-list. Rather than trying to punch the other guy in the face and get pinched back, try to get as close as possible to mitigate his ability to punch you.
A fundamental issue that is both causing the Euro-American rift and would be made worse by a spitelist is that the Europeans are not militarily capable of meeting what it views its security needs as vis-a-vis Russia. This is one of the foundational issues of the conflict with Trump- Trump called on the Europeans to do more, he was laughed at, and now he's in transaction mode. Worse, as bad shape as the Russian military is at the moment, it is still in greater position in the immediate-near term to pivot from any sort of Ukraine stop to do something in the Balkans or the Baltics than the Europeans alone are able to resist.
However, even if you think the US should be classified as a strategic competitor, this doesn't mean you want to start pushing away the Americans as fast as possible. Immediate American departure- especially on hostile terms- is the third-worst case scenario. (The second-worst case scenario is immediate American departure, followed by a Russian Baltic / Balkan crisis. The worst case is if the Americans can't be persuaded to come back.)
Instead, you want to build up your own strength before they leave, while still leaving the option for them to be there. Even if they aren't being relied upon to fight, there's no reason to make it harder for them to do so if they were open to it in the future, and kicking them out of the country means it's both physically harder to get them in, and much less likely.
Which means, in turn, that maybe you start your aircraft replacement program ASAP... but instead of kicking the Americans out of those bases, you cover more of the stationing costs. It's paying more, yes, but it's making them less likely to leave- and as long as they are in the country, that's still a deterrence value all of its own.
Similarly, cutting off European export supply chains to American critical industries is stupid. You want to maximize that shit. Invest heavily in certain shared benefits, so that IF something bad happens, THEN you can take it down, or threaten to.
Some things are relatively, and can be done at any time. There's never been anything preventing the French from extending their own nuclear umbrella across Europe. Other things have costs and are irreversible- if you announce a French nuclear shield for Europe, then the Americans may change their minds on the need of their own nukes in unit, and withdraw- and if those go, a lot of the political weight does as well. (After all, the American lives are there to help drive the use of American nukes- no nukes, less basis for Americans.)
But start going through these sort of considerations- and thinking in terms more than a decade away, well after Trump leaves office-
-and a spite list will be pretty shortsighted. You don't act solely out of spite of your strategic competitors, you try to coopt them to your own advantage, even when they do things you don't like.
This sounds pretty much exactly the kind of thing you'd do if you wanted to improve Europe's military and geopolitical relationship with America. I can see under some assumptions that's not unreasonable, in the same way that a woman planning to leave her violent and abusive husband might want to act like an even more loving wife than usual, right up until the point where she's out the door and has the restraining order in place. However, I guess I was more interested in hearing your thoughts on what it would look like when the wife actually leaves, rather than the part where she cooks her husband his favourite dinner and gets her hair done the way he likes it.
There are a lot of ways to try and use that wife metaphor in a counter-argument that come off as variously inflammatory or quibbling about the nature of the relationship. (Like- where is the violent and abusive husband coming from?) So I'm going to move past that after just noting the awkward metaphor.
If you're looking for sort of stupid histrionics an emotional and impatient actor would do, I guess I could point out that taking 50,000-60,000 hostages (the US military presence in Europe) to be held hostage and exchanged for all Europeans in the US and all Americans of European origin willing to immediately migrate over and begin long-term re-naturalization would be an idea. Maybe you can also pressure all European-based religions to excommunicate all American political officials who take positions against European interests, while conducting crackdowns on any churches based in America with branches in Europe. You could also invest into cybercrime, and try to just steal all the bitcoin to fund a European renaissance, while forging American dollars in the gajillions to fuel American inflation while buying all the things.
But you asked me what a focused and thoughtful actor would do. And what a thoughtful and focused planner would do is practice strategic patience and wait while building up strength until they are ready, because thought reveals the need (I am not ready), and focus delivers the patience (I will prioritize getting ready before acting for my own satisfaction).
If doing so also happens to give grounds for further strategic cooperation... that's not a humiliation. Or rather, it shouldn't be, unless there's an issue with having to entice a military alliance when you need one. But there's already that concession going on- just referring to Europe as Europe collectively.
I wasn't looking for histrionics, amusing though your scenarios were (though I could easily see an American antipope being installed in Boston). What I was hoping for - and what I was gesturing towards with my wonderful metaphor - was your reflections on the best medium-term plays for Europe in event of a persisting breakdown of the transatlantic alliance.
I agree that the immediate priorities of Europe would be to significantly ramp up defense spending and local defense capacity, but it's not a particularly interesting insight insofar as every pundit under the sun is saying that now, not to mention most of Europe's leadership. I don't even necessarily disagree that Europe should be endeavouring to keep US troops on the continent in the short-term, but that's again a relatively conservative proposal. However, if we can skip past these steps and imagine things 2-3 years down the line, we can get to where the action space opens up, and start asking about what a serious decoupling of Europe from the US would look like. For example -
This is just to give you a flavour of the kind of questions I thought you'd have solid takes on. That said, I wouldn't want to impose if you're averse to these kinds of horizon-scanning exercises.
Mid-sized African countries willing to be paid to receive European deportees. (There are no large ones.)
Between population decline, relative economic winnowing, and its own strategic priorities, Europe will likely lack the capacity to spare for power projection abroad when prioritizing Russia, and other geopolitical powers are unlikely to want to help Europe with Russia. This limits Europe's plausible geopolitical partners.
Unless you want to think in terms of a presuming the breakup of various other major global actors, but I'd expect the EU to break up more than most of the others.
No, no, and no respectively.
No, a closer relationship with China doesn't make sense, because China will prioritize Russia for its resources and strategic utility against the US and Europe has little to offer beyond market access. This doesn't mean China wouldn't accept that, but if Europe is just wanting to be an uninvolved economy, it doesn't need to be a geopolitical partner to do that, and it's hardly going to fight Russia on behalf of Europe.
No, a closer relationship with India doesn't make sense, because Europe cannot help India with its security challenges, particularly if Europe is a willing market for China and consumed with its own issues, and India isn't interested in Europe geopolitically as much as just a technology transfer target, which will dry up and doesn't require an alliance.
No, Europe will not be a credible leader of a non-aligned movement. Colonialism and post-colonial grievance aside, Europe is currently and probably will be engaging in exporting detention camps against the global south most interested in being a part of it, while the sort of xenophobia that supports anti-Americanism as a guiding principle will be even more pronounced against much of the global south.
Mass censorship and a gradual partition of the internet with a European enclave, mandating use of European government monitored / controlled platforms while criminalizing others.
As long as it's willing to accept increasingly direct American retaliation against non-digital service sectors, and to have the European digital service sector largely limited to Europe as others take on equivalent red tape firewalls that Europe has justified establishing.
Much the same as it does in a world where no-one expects the non-American elements to be able to honour Article 5- people will make their judgements based on the Americans and their strength of relations directly, not the NATO treaty, even as the potential of an American support shapes political issues.
Possibly, though less so if spite lists occur.
What would be the point? Just build the European alternative in parallel.
It's not NATO membership that stops a European alternative. It's the point that NATO is the means by which Europeans try to (politely) counter-balance against the French and the Germans, and European Alternative projects tend to be jobs projects disproportionately to the benefit of France and Germany.
Yep. Count me out for a Franco-German army with bases in Ireland.
There’s nothing wrong with NATO that couldn’t be fixed by members pulling on their big-boy trousers and also by respecting the actual borders of the alliance.
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