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Comment by pkaye | Hacker News Reader

The US military was concerned about this scenario long before and raised concerns back in 2011. They predicted why someone like Trump would would come in power and question the purpose of NATO. But it was not taken seriously by NATO allies at that time. Obama even wanted European allies to be able to launch their own military missions with just US as a support role. The Libya interventions was supposed to be a test of that.

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/natosource/text-of-spe...

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Yep. The warnings have existed for a long time, but most European states have continued to ignore the hallmarks.

Even Poland only started rearming after Kazynski's plane was shot down in Smolensk in 2010 (edit; not shot down), Romania only (started after Crimea and it's implications of a similar incident in neighboring Moldova in 2014, Turkiye began due interventions in Syria and Libya that lead to Turkish and Russian soldiers fighting against each other in 2012-15, and Netherlands after over a hundred of their citizens were shot down in an Air Malaysia Flight in 2015-16 (forgetting the exact date)

Trump is absolutely wrong in publicly abandoning our European allies, but this is something every administration since 2008 has been saying would eventually happen.

The failed UK-France intervention in Libya should have been the warning call (France and UK's air forces couldn't disable Libya's A2AD and ran out of precision muntions, forcing the Obama admin to intervene and spark the Benghazi crisis which helped bring Trump into the Oval Office in 2016). In fact, that incident probably further emboldened Russia as Libya's military apparatus was heavily Russian/Soviet in armament and strategy.

Uhm, that Polish plane wasn’t shot down. Don’t spread silly conspiracy theories. Polish military spendings were rising steadily since long before the accident, but a significant increase happened after Russian full scale invasion on Ukraine.

Fair point about the Smolensk Incident - confused it with the Netherlands incident - but it was that incident that sparked Poland's fears about Russia again [0], and most of Poland's military buildup and modernization only began in the 2012-13 period after the partnership with South Korea kicked in [1][2]

[0] - https://carnegieendowment.org/europe/strategic-europe/2015/0...

[1] - https://www.president.pl/president-komorowski/news/poland-so...

[2] - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10736700.2020.1...

When people tell me the Russians deliberately plotted to crash the Smolensk flight, I ask them to read

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/all-the-presidents-men-t...

As I said in my edited post, it was a typo where I messed up the impact of MH17's shoot down on Netherlands and the Smolensk incident.

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