Yes, Europe is changing, but old habits die hard

Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, Kyiv’s pressing problems on the battlefield and a feckless Donald Trump stoking up unreliability, have done what for other European leaders are now asking themselves: What if the American offshore defense is no more?

- Daniel DePetris, Tribune News Service

Like it did in the three decades since the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. As French President Emmanuel Macron observed with trademark dramatic flair weeks ago, “It’s quarter to the midnight.” There’s an acknowledgement among Europeans that they’ve been waiting for too long assuming the US will be perfectly willing to keep the barbarians from breaching the walls. Americans have tried to disabuse them of this notion for decades — in 2011, then US Defense Secretary Robert Gates delivered a lecture at NATO that it would be difficult to maintain US support for the alliance if the burden continued to fall on America’s taxpayers. But the Europeans didn’t really take the lecture seriously, and a recent Russian leader by the name of Vladimir Putin brought war back to the region.