Europe committed suicide twice, in 1914 and again in 1933-45 when its states' genocidal empire-building boomeranged back into Europe with what goes around comes around karma.
The US-supplied Red Army demolished Nazism and then the Americans created the Bretton Woods $ reserve currency order that replaced the old European empires, which decoupled access to markets and resources from direct sovereignty.
European social democracy and its welfare states are the product of living under the American nanny's security umbrella. Capitalism had to up its game and reform due to socialist competition.
The result, and a simple fact you refuse to acknowledge: Europe's biggest power, Germany, is allergic to geopolitical independence. Europe still lives under DeGaulle's aphorism: the purpose of NATO is to keep the Russians out and the Germans down. Both the Germans and the French are happy to keep this status quo of NATO subsidizing Europe as economic giant and military pygmy. Germany doubling its defense budget to 200bn euros doesn't change this much.
There's no such thing as full sovereignty without global power projection to prevent the rise of regional hegemons who would undo the postwar American decoupling of resource and market access and sovereignty. The American global voluntary alliance networks (AUKUS, NATO, Japan defense treaty, etc) as indirect empire model is a vast improvement over its European predecessors. To replace it with the EU's less imperialistic shared sovereignty model, the EU states would have to more than double their military budgets, abandon national champion procurement policies and form alliances with Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, India.
Even if this distant and fanciful outcome came to pass, the EU would never acquire the permanent geopolitical advantages the US has:
1. Two oceans and undefended land borders due to friendly neighbors.
2. Energy independence and cheap energy, even in a decarbonization transition. The entire middle of the US is wind and solar paradise compared to cloudy, calm Germany.
3. Supercompetitive economy from the world's best river system for delivery of cheap commodities.
4. Unified single language rule of law internal market and deep and liquid financial markets that dwarf every other.
Europe understands, from its own history of suicidal nationalism and all these immutable realities, that stepping out from under the American security umbrella is fraught with far more risk than opportunity. Finland and Sweden are happy to join Norway, Denmark and Iceland in NATO. Present them with the alternative of an EU defense alliance and they’ll surely say no thanks. Same for the geographically exposed Baltic states. No sane Estonian, Latvian or Lithuanian would exchange the tripwire of US troops and prepositioned military assets for a Franco-German version. And remember that, with Brexit now consummated, any EU military alliance would leave out Europe’s strongest and most competent military: Britain’s.
The Japanese, Brits, Australians, South Koreans, Vietnamese, Singaporeans, Taiwanese and Canadians understand the same thing. America's Asian allies certainly prefer a treaty-based kowtow to the distant hegemon to submission to the local Chinese emperor’s more medieval kowtow.
Geopolitical security is a market like any other. Your vague, moralistic recipe that Europe pivot out of the American orbit completely lacks product-market fit. As I’d tell any entrepreneur what to do with an early stage business idea that needs customer discovery to reach product-market fit: go back to the drawing board and retest it with your idea’s real customers: LV, EE, LT, PL, SK, HU, CZ, SI, RO, DE, FR, NL, BE, E, PT, IT, FI, SE, N, BG, DK, GR, LU, HR.
If you don’t know what these letters mean, you don’t know how your idea’s customers see their true security interests. Since power abhors a vacuum, simplistic wishful thinking slogans like “no to NATO, no to Putin” won’t cut it.
