Timothy Birdnow

Here is a real American Stinker at American Thinker; an article arguing we need to keep defending Europe, because, like, Russians and stuff.

To quote Barack Obama "the nineteen eighties are calling...they want their foreign policy back."

The author, one Mario Alexis Portella, doesn't seem to grasp that the Cold War is over.

His argument is that Europe still needs American protection and that they have increased their own defense spending but that we cannot afford to leave them to it.

Perhaps but if they are increasing their defense spending they aren't increasing it enough, apparently, to no longer need our training wheels.

I have to ask a big picture question here; who, pray tell, are we defending Europe from in the first place? The Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact are gone and Russia can't even successfully invade the Ukraine. Does Mr.

Portella think the Chinese are going to invade Europe?

In fact Europe IS being invaded - by Muslims - and they couldn't care less about that fact. So what are American troops on European soil benefitting anyone?

Well, we know the reason; they are spending lots of money in these European countries. The American military is a giant public works program to enrich the Europeans so they can enjoy the good life, sit in their cafe's sipping espresso or wine or pilsners and thoroughly relish their lives at our expense.

But, the author argues, we need the bases for when we do have to go to war!

Fat lot of good they did us in Iran. The Brits blocked us, so did the Italians and Spanish and even the Germans. Told us we were not welcome to use their airspace in the conflict with Iran.

You may also remember similar issues with the Europeans during the Iraq War. And of course NATO - our invention - offered no help in the Strait of Hormuz, so we had to be the ones de-mining the strait even while it profited the Europeans and did very little for us.

At what point do we say "Enough!" We are being played for patsies.

One of the commenters was a woman (who put MS behind her name to show she was smart) who argued we need to "be strong" like under Ronald Reagan. She apparently doesn't understand that our being strong has bankrupted the country; we've pissed away trillions of dollars protecting the whole world and now we just can't do it anymore. When Reagan was doing what he did there was a very real goal and purpose, to bankrupt and collapse the Soviet Union (and cost me my profession in the process as I was going to work in national security but that jerk Reagan broke them just as I was getting out of school). There was a plan in place (and it angered fiscal conservatives like David Stockton at the time) where we would outspend the Soviets and their economy couldn't take it. In fact, when Reagan proposed his "Star Wars" laser ABM system he did so with the intention of forcing the Soviets to try to compete. Gorbachev met Reagan at Reykjavik and begged Reagan to cut a deal eliminating this program. When Reagan refused to budge old spotted head said to his aids "we are finished" because he knew it would cause his economy to collapse.

But it cost us a LOT of money to maintain that Cold War for all those decades. Now we have people who want to keep the whole system going because it's how we've always done it in their memory.

Well, if we are to maintain it we need a good reason and, like Russia and stuff just isn't good enough.

Now I favor a strong defense but we need to restructure, to have a leaner and more efficient military system and not waste resources protecting a bunch of ingrates. These particular ingrates are capable of defending themselves, they just don't want to.

And they never will if we don't toss them into the deep end of the pool. They will procrastinate, dither, and hope a Democrat winds up in power so they can go back to the big party they were having on our dime.

Increasingly the geopolitical threats are coming from other places. The Arctic is a hotspot. So is the Pacific Rim, and as always the Middle East. We need to redeploy our forces there and not waste our resources in Europe.

AS you might expect there are some commenters like that gal I mentioned who are calling us "isolationists" and acting as if we don't want any military power overseas. Far from it; I favor the military action in Iran right now, for instance, because I believe it is necessary for our own security. I do NOT favor our involvement in Ukraine. Not because Putin is a good guy and Russia in the right (neither are true) but because we do not have any national interests there. This is more a civil war than anything else and we would do well to stay out of it. If Putin invades Poland or some other NATO country than that would be a whole different issue.

At any rate this author and a couple of commenters are stuck on eighties stupid. Times have changed. And if you do not adapt to changing times you wind up being left behind. It's why so many once-great nations in Europe are now powder-puff countries. Just look at Britain.

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