Reliance on the US is clearly unsustainable, but how quickly we can actually disentangle ourselves is a difficult question to answer. If I were a NATO power I’d be quietly trying to fully reverse-engineer any US tech we can’t get from elsewhere so that I could start replacing it, to make that transition less painful.
The problem is that such a transition is going to be very expensive, for little tangible benefit. You can’t tell when your military deterred a foreign power from invading simply by being sufficiently scary. But maintaining that power and independence from US influence on policy is paramount. Trump wants to do exactly what Putin is doing in Ukraine (and already did in Georgia and elsewhere): dominate smaller countries, dictate their policies to them, and if they don’t kowtow, punish them.
Reliance on the US is clearly unsustainable, but how quickly we can actually disentangle ourselves is a difficult question to answer. If I were a NATO power I’d be quietly trying to fully reverse-engineer any US tech we can’t get from elsewhere so that I could start replacing it, to make that transition less painful.
The problem is that such a transition is going to be very expensive, for little tangible benefit. You can’t tell when your military deterred a foreign power from invading simply by being sufficiently scary. But maintaining that power and independence from US influence on policy is paramount. Trump wants to do exactly what Putin is doing in Ukraine (and already did in Georgia and elsewhere): dominate smaller countries, dictate their policies to them, and if they don’t kowtow, punish them.