Also obviously with the end of the cold war, what most of this articles miss, the US lost Europe. Before e.g. Germanys establishment pushed US nuclear weapons ("Jump!" "How high?") into Germany against a large part of it's polutation, after 1990 no country in Europe jumps anymore when the US says "Jump!", because the Soviet scare is gone.
One of the most fascinating theories that I've read on this is that this was the result of a secret alliance between Reagan's CIA and the Catholic Church. The basic outlines of the alliance was that the CIA supplied money and material on non-violent resistance (through deniable channels), the Catholic Church supplied the network and connections that could distribute them. Also the two aligned on other things, such as tying US foreign aid to abortion policies that the Catholic Church liked.
What does Poland have to do with all of this? Pope John Paul II was Polish, and so their test became the Solidarity movement in Poland. After that proved a success, they replicated it throughout the Eastern Block.
I first read this theory in a Mother Jones article back in the 1980s. And every so often I wish I could find it to read it again.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1983/07/their-will-be-d...
(Asides: My first impulse to find the article was archive.org, but after that failed, Google delivered on the first try!)
The disastrous response to Chernobyl also gave a boost to independence movements in Ukraine and the Baltics. Gorbachev has always been in denial about how his policies helped hasten the collapse.
The timeline does not work on this. Gorbachev was in power only from 1985, while Solidarity got thwarted in 1981, during introduction of Marital Law (key leaders got arrested, the strikes and protests were broken down, sometimes using lethal force). The Polish communist party justified these harsh measures with exactly the argument that it's still better than a foreign (Soviet) invasion of their country.
Through NATO they follow us along into dubious, pointless, dangerous US conflicts, sparing the US President from asking Congress for authorization, while bearing the brunt of extraterritorial attacks since there arent two gigantic oceans separating them from the conflict.
The US uses almost countless Europe located bases for missile shields against Russia and to many hawkish people the cold war is still going on as if it was the 80s still.
Europe still depends on Russia for energy so this symbiosis is seen as important.
But I think this changes because the UK was the only EU member state vetoing an EU military, and with them gone the EU can arm itself. Dismantling a lot of the need for the US, we can mostly assume it will be to keep out Russia and lessen the burden of NATO but there are a lot of values that differ if we are being honest.
The complete list of countries known to have nuclear weapons worldwide is The United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. Now that the UK is no longer in the EU, France is it.
In fact France is surprisingly militaristic. For example it is the only EU country in the top 10 on https://www.globalfirepower.com/countries-listing.php.
Per https://fas.org/blogs/security/2006/11/new_article_where_the..., about 15 years ago the only country to put its nuclear weapons in other countries was the USA. That said, US nuclear missiles are in many EU countries thanks to NATO.
They are also wrapping up their own counterterrorism operation in the Sahel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barkhane
[Edit] After 1990.
Sarkozy: https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/thanks-but-no-th...
I'm not saying you're wrong -- I'm happy to get other evidence, but can you point me to something?
Update: thanks!
As a European, I tend to agree with that assessment, particularly with countries like Germany.
Most of the US military presence might be gone compared to cold war levels, but the pro-US political presence mostly remains the same.
Which is actually quite astounding considering we are slowly entering the second decade of when this distancing started [0] and it had plenty of additional contributions since then [1].
[0] https://www.csmonitor.com/2001/0919/p12s2-woeu.html
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/activities/cont/2014...
Public political discussion always considered the US, because of the scare of the Soviet Union, which was daily present (how many millions of kids in the 80s in Europe feared nuclear war?).
But already in 1990 when I was in the military the attitude had changed a lot.
To this day it's completely legal for the NSA to operate in Germany and spy on literally anybody [0]
Neither do I see the attitude change on a grander political level in Germany. Most of the German political landscape is still plenty happy displaying a double-moral that's would transplant neatly right back into the cold war [1]
One of the weirder examples: Persecuting alleged Syrian torturers for crimes against humanity committed in Syria [2].
While crimes against humanity committed by the US, trough German territory, are apparently not in the jurisdiction of German courts [3].
That's not what a "neutral" Germany looks and acts like, that's what a Germany looks and acts like that was for decades groomed to be a US vassal.
[0] https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2013-10/nsa-uerberwa...
[1] https://youtu.be/C4RalenYhoY
[2] https://www.dw.com/en/german-court-hands-down-historic-syria...
[3] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/08/germany-could-have-deli...