To those who'd say a bigger U.S. war budget would have stopped Putin...this sobering fact:

[thucythucy]

156. You need to brush up on your history.

Russia, under Lenin, surrendered to Imperial Germany, signing the Treaty of Brest Litovsk, which, BTW, mandated an independent Ukraine, and freed the Baltic states and Finland from Russian control, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia until the Russo-German pact of 1939 and the Soviet occupation of 1940, and Finland for good.

The war started in August 1914, the US didn't enter until 1918, by which time Russia had been reduced to military impotence by the forces of Imperial Germany. If they had wanted, the Germans could have taken both Moscow and St. Petersburg, and if it hadn't been for the western front they might well have done so.

Similarly, on its own, Germany nearly crushed Soviet Russia in 1941-42.

So it stands to reason that Germany today, together with France, the UK, Italy etc., would at the very least be able to defend itself from any threatened Russian aggression.

To do this European nations don't have to "unite together" as a "United States"--they only have to form the necessary alliances and raise sufficient military force--which the "big four" (Germany, France, UK, Italy) together with the smaller states are capable of doing, IF they were required to do it.

Should the US continue to be involved with NATO, and be part of the alliance? Yes. Should all of western Europe, which taken together has a larger population and larger GDP than the US (and is vastly more powerful economically than Russia), continue to rely primarily on US military power to defend itself against a trump Russian state? I don't think so. But if you're willing to subsidize Europe indefinitely, as an excuse to support an intensely wasteful MIC, there's nothing anyone can say can convince you otherwise.