No, each pushed alternative is just worser. The euro could take over, but europe just revealed itself as a "lawful" player with no plan and no pants (security-wise) - so the euro is just defacto tied to the dollar value wise. For without the us guarding europe, the euro is just loaded with invisible gigantic security and pension debts.
BRICs is dealing in store credits and raw-materials. Every other empire and kingdom is not to be trusted or only to be trusted as long as the town power-drunk world-police-man does his job. He may be the towns drunk, mumbling "Screw you guys, im going home!" but he is also the only one so far doing a decent job as sheriff.
You can grasp how unreliable the other actors are, by how one of the hostile actors (russia) recently complained about the (world-police) doing what its proxies in yemen and ukraine are constantly doing (piracy) to venezuella. They complained about the break-down of maritime safety- to the us. Yep, its that bad.
Everyone knows what’s going on. Europe is slowly reacquiring pants (too slowly for my taste).
The US has this ridiculous belief that Europe has no military ability. The truth is that Europe is far too skilled at war, and collectively disarmed after the Second World War and let the US make the decisions and pay for it all because that was the only way to achieve a lasting peace. European armed forces aren’t ready for war, but they are skeletons on which wartime forces can be reconstituted.
Now that the US is dropping its responsibilities it’s also losing its privileges, but everyone is moving quietly so that the amateurs in the White House don’t cotton on. The world doesn’t need a sheriff; it’s just going to have a bunch of players looking after their own interests. The historical attitude to war already prevails: ‘it’s fine as long as it doesn’t affect us.’
Unfortunately the skeleton analogy is not correct, because it assumes that the foundation is fine, and you just need more beef/muscle/money to scale it up.
With the exception of few European countries that did maintain a functional army (Finland, France), other countries' military skeletons suffer from terminally low levels of bone density due to decades of under- and malnutrition. The whole bodies (incl. skeletons) have to quickly be build anew.
It still has enough equipment and manpower to easily get through Baltics and defeat Germany and others. Fortunately for the latter, Poland is in the way and can perhaps put enough of a fight.
The thing that you are missing is the huge development in drone technology. Ukraine and Russia are the top2 countries that know how to use this technology as part of the military action, and Western countries would have a rude awakening as nails. More technologically advanced "tanks" would not matter much.
Those words hit harder when you've an executive that isn't beholden to Russia or threatening to fucking annex part of an ally, and a Europe that isn't investing heavily into rearmament.
Ah yes, because the US has been sooooo fucking supportive recently. Give me a fucking break. Your GDP is bigger than ours, and you claim to give more aid to Ukraine, but you haven't even remotely matched it. The sheer fucking arrogance of you.
> Can you help Ukraine enough so it can win?
Can you (the American executive) stop collaborating with Russia[1]?
> If not you can’t defend your own countries alone.
Are we talking about the EU or Europe here? Because only one is relevant to the Euro here. It's important to get this right, because it does tend to get confused by bystanders from the far side of the Atlantic.
The Baltics are in the Eurozone. If Russia invaded the Baltics tomorrow, Europe would be dependent on America to stay intact. That isn’t really a risk one wants to take with a reserve asset.
Do central banks really asses the risk of total collapse of the Euro (only) in response to Russia's currently frazzled military launching an invasion against NATO borderlands which NATO fails to mount any effective defence as higher than than the risk the current US administration freezes assets for arbitrary and capricious[1] reasons?
In practice, of course, most countries are willing to accept both risks.
[1]a lot of states that can be reasonably confident that they won't provoke the US in the manner Saddam Hussein or Putin did whether they're friendly or not can be rather less confident the current president won't take extreme measures in response to something completely innocuous like jailing someone for domestic corruption, being a source of emigrants to the United States or maintaining a trade surplus...
It's worth emphasizing this: without the US Navy, the remaining European powers don't have the naval force to stop Russia from blockading the Baltics. And without the ability to break such a blockade, there's little hope in aiding the Baltics against a land invasion from Russia and Belarus. Russia wants a land route to Kaliningrad, and they'll take it at this rate.
My understanding is that European Air and Ground forces have been able to deter or destroy Soviet/Russian Naval operations in the North and Baltic Seas since the start of the cold war. Land based anti-ship missiles have more than enough range to cover the entire water way on their own.
This was a major reason the Soviet Union and now Russia never invested in a large navy outside of Submarines.
Where would this blockade be? In the NATO sea (baltic sea)? Covered by European Nato countries at every direction, and then whole entry passes through Denmark.
BRICs is dealing in store credits and raw-materials. Every other empire and kingdom is not to be trusted or only to be trusted as long as the town power-drunk world-police-man does his job. He may be the towns drunk, mumbling "Screw you guys, im going home!" but he is also the only one so far doing a decent job as sheriff.
You can grasp how unreliable the other actors are, by how one of the hostile actors (russia) recently complained about the (world-police) doing what its proxies in yemen and ukraine are constantly doing (piracy) to venezuella. They complained about the break-down of maritime safety- to the us. Yep, its that bad.