I'm not saying they do give a fuck. I'm saying that next time you get into an argument about nato expansionism you should use it in persuading people towards the position nato is used as an aggressive organisation and threatens others. It is clear and undeniable here.

No one is secretly hoping to get a good deal from Trump. Everyone expects Trump to leave office at the end of his term and the precedent has now been set that the USA cannot be trusted to stand by any deals. Everyone is having to do the math of what to do about America's military because its economy is becoming less and less relevant by the month. When the only thing stopping economic disruption is tradition, and you actively destroy the tradition of stability, no one gets to make long term plans that involve economically stable relationships.

The US makes almost nothing. The vast majority of its GDP is artificially created markets involving intellectual property, military arms, insurance, finance, and the massive service industries that have been built around these industries and around navigating US government bureaucracy. There are only a handful of reasons why anyone cares about the USA:

1. Violence. This is the biggest one that everyone needs to manage.
2. Finance. Everyone's neoliberal system depends on the US and UK financial system. As long as they are coupled to it via dollar-denominated securities and instruments, the US is capable of crashing anyone's economy.
3. Consumption. The US consumer market gives people places to sell their shit and make money.
4. Oil. The US has an outsized influence on oil and has the ability to ruin most economies through that influence.

Speed run these 4.

Number 1 - I claim this is the only thing the US has keeping its hegemony relevant at every single turn. The rest can all be obviated.

Number 2 - this one is the one that Europe is fucked by. They can't fix this without aligning with BRICS and specifically China and Russia. That's because China and Russia are aware that the 3 pillars of their national liberation are military security against the US, domestic production with strong trading partners, and the ability to decouple from the US dollar. They are actively navigating the process of decoupling from the dollar and Europe will have to join them or be completely dominated by US financial institutions.

Number 3 - the US consumer market is utterly collapsing and has been for decades. The contradiction is very far advanced at this point, with average Americans putting medical costs on 17% interest credit cards. For decades the only reason the US remained a strong consumer market was because of the unfettering of debt and usury domestically. This is running its course. There is no real consumer economy that isn't 100% predicated on debt, and there is no debt that isn't 100% predicated on the dominance of US finance capital globally, and there is no globally dominant US finance capital without violence.

Number 4 - Europe is fucked. Their internal contradictions have reached their end stage. The only way they could continue their existence this long was through colonialism, and when the USA took over colonialism from European powers, it found that a distinct form of neocolonialism could be turned against them through finance capital and dollar hegemony. This form of neocolonialism didn't extract from European land, that was alread exhausted before the US rose to power. Instead, this form of neocolonialism was an extraction from the people. NATO is a tribute system to the US. Greece's dismemberment by German financiers was an echo of what US finance capital has been doing to the 3rd world for a century. The EU is trapped by its own unsustainable social relations and decoupling from the USA means social collapse into chaos and civil war between socialism and barbarism, a war that the US will enter on the side of barbarism. All the US has to do is cut off their supply of energy, and they already did a doozie with Nord Stream 2.

It all comes down to material violence, realpolitik not ideology. It's not because everyone's a neoliberal that they're acting like this. They're acting like neoliberals because the material conditions are requiring this behavior. For the European leaders, abandoning neoliberalism will result in dramatic violence and social collapse. For China, abandoning neoliberalism will accelerate the West's movement to world war.

You've got base and superstructure inverted.

The fact that america blew up nordstream 2 essentially setting the largest manufacturing power on the euro continent (which is also full of us military bases and flooded with think tank selected politicians and propaganda) into its death rows AND essentially got even the government to further sanction one of its largest trading partners as a response to an us planned terror attack —- is proof enough that european states are vassals. Being a vassal state doesn’t mean there are no lack of ambitions or chaffing against the us, in fact that france wants to be the winner of trump tariffs and not go against the us, only further highlights the vassal status.

Sure, but those countries are surrounded by countries that do have Atlantic coastline and/or sea access to the Atlantic. They're all within the geographical region identified by Article 6.

Notably Hawaii, located in Oceania and south of the Tropic of Cancer, isn't part of NATO's collective defense commitment. There are in fact zero nations in Asia that meet the requirements for NATO membership.

SEATO was a total flop, largely based around trying to prevent neocolonies from becoming independent. Unsurprisingly, nobody wanted to play ball so the French and Americans just took their ball and ran home to prevent further collapse of the paper tiger after Vietnam kicked their shit in.

Every later attempt has basically just been some random chud senator who didn't read a briefing on it going, "gee why don't we have a Pacific NATO," without reading about the Pacific NATO we already had at home.

Most coherent western politician?