The Same Old, Same Old European Runaround

American Greatness ^ | Oct 15 2026 | Victor Davis Hanson

[texas booster]

Europe resents its dependence on American military power while criticizing Washington’s foreign policy, exposing the hypocrisy, insecurity, and economic decline undermining its global influence.

Nearly every week, another psychodrama arises between the United States and its NATO partners.

Europeans blame the Trump administration for the usual things—a lack of cordiality and bombastic threats.

But two truths, rarely spoken, characterize all these spats.

One is hypocrisy; the other is insecurity.

Take Trump’s recent demand that Ukraine cease attacks on Russian diesel refineries.

Given the midterms and the critical issue of fuel prices, it was understandable that Trump might request an energy “ceasefire.”

So both Russia and Ukraine were asked to stop their attacks on refineries to calm jittery global diesel markets and help stabilize sky-high prices.

But the American Left, the Ukrainians, and the Europeans went ballistic—given that the aggressor, Russia, is blanketing Ukrainian skies with missiles and drones, while Russia’s critical refining industry remains vulnerable to retaliatory Ukrainian drone attacks.

But the largest purchaser of Russian gas remains Europe. It has been since the start of the war.

For years, Europe literally laughed at Trump’s earlier appeals to close European pipelines to Russia and quit fueling Putin’s war machine.

Are we to assume that Europeans buying most of Russia’s natural gas is acceptable, but Americans asking both Putin and Zelensky not to attack fuel facilities, given the world oil crisis, is somehow a betrayal?

Some like-minded European ministers are still blasting the Trump administration’s supposed efforts to revamp NATO.

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TOPICS: European Union; Foreign Affairs; Government; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections; Russia; Ukraine
KEYWORDS: europeanunion; nato; putinstoogery; russia; tds; ukraine; vdh; victordavishanson

[texas booster]

They damn the United States for pulling 11 B-1 strategic bombers out of a shared RAF–U.S. base in the United Kingdom.

The cause is usually omitted: the discovery of a dry-run terrorist operation to hit the base and destroy more than $3 billion worth of American bombers.

But in Orwellian fashion, the British government conceded that (1) the arrested terrorist team was Iranian-sponsored and (2) Britain had released all the arrested terrorists on bail!

Perhaps Prime Minister Andy Burnham fears his own unassimilated, pro-Iranian Islamic immigrant voters far more than he feels the need to ensure that Americans are safe while protecting NATO interests.

Europeans are also angry that the United States will likely pull 5,000 troops out of Germany and deploy about the same number to frontline Poland, which is rapidly developing the largest and best-equipped military in Europe.

But again, why the American change of heart?

During the ongoing, eight-month-long Iran war, some NATO partners—France, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom—either banned U.S. planes from their airspace or refused them landing rights at joint NATO–U.S. bases—or both.

Apparently, they opposed American efforts to denuclearize Iran and end the 50-year terrorist threat posed by that nation, fearing that it might activate terrorist operations inside Europe.

But do we remember when the French and the British—in what they called a NATO “coalition of the willing”—pleaded with the United States not merely to join them in bombing Serbia in 1999 and Libya in 2011 but also to conduct most of the combat missions?

And America did just that. ...

[rktman]

I suppose we could break up after covering their lame asses for the last 80 or so years. Tell them to pull up their panties and do what they need to do. 🤔🛫🛬

[PGalt]

Thanks. BUMP!

[Tench_Coxe]

Watch how quickly energy policy would change in the EU if:

[Brian Griffin]

Russian army trucks could run on biodiesel.

Is Zelensky going to kamikaze drone rapeseed fields?

[Brian Griffin]

Russian army trucks could run on biodiesel.

Is Zelensky going to kamikaze drone rapeseed fields?

[Brian Griffin]

[previously posted]

“Russian expenditure of artillery, mortar, tank and rocket rounds is between ten to fifteen thousand rounds per day.”

How many trucks are required to carry it from the railheads?

How far would they have to travel each day?

Let’s say 500 trucks (30 rounds per truck) and 200 miles. That’s 100,000 truck miles or about 20,000 gallons of fuel per day.

That’s 500 barrels per day, or 1/20,000th of pre-war Russian crude oil output.

[Brian Griffin]

The Ukrainian attacks on Wildberries [the Russian Amazon] warehouses have provided the Russians with justification for attacking large & busy (non-public access) structures in Ukraine.

The Russian retaliatory attacks have apparently whacked Ukrainian drone production, allowing the Russians to advance militarily.

[Brian Griffin]

The Russians might have to spend $200 million/month repairing refineries.

The $2/gallon added cost of 300 million gallons of diesel for consumers in the rest of the world comes to $600 million/day.

[Brian Griffin]

Do any of you hope to travel to France anytime soon?

Milano?

The EU should worry about dealing with the invaders already in the EU.

[bert]

I believe the Euros, especially France and the UK don’t do what we believe they need to do for a very simple reason.

Their failing economies are not capable of sustaining the needed actions

[delta7]

The EU is a bigger threat to America than Russia is.

[steve8714]

Oil barrels are 30 gal IIRC.

[Brian Griffin]

“Russia exported 150,900 MT of rapeseed oil” per year circa 2015.

https://apps.fas.usda.gov/newgainapi/api/report/downloadreportbyfilename?filename=Biofuels%20Annual_Moscow_Russian%20Federation_6-23-2016.pdf

That’s about 45 million gallons worth of biodiesel or about four times what Russian military trucks would need to bring supplies from the railheads to the front lines.

[Brian Griffin]

“The universally accepted measure for crude oil is 1 barrel = 42 U.S. gallons”

Bing AI: many gallons oil per barrel

[FLT-bird]

They’re not willing to pay the price to have a lot of global influence.....ie spending a lot more on their military, ending open borders, ending Gaia Worship, radically slashing the socialism....yet they also don’t want to give up their ambition to preen on the world stage and strut around as if they still had the influence they had 100 years ago.

It just kills them that those crude gauche Americans and not them are the ones with the growing economy, the dominant position in high tech and the powerful military.