The person who most presciently and effectively warned about the possibility of this situation was Donald Trump, a man who was democratically elected against the united wishes of the American and European establishment. He warned repeatedly that NATO allies were spending far too little on defence, leaving America to defend Europe in case of invasion. At the time he started saying this it was considered radically gauche and terrible by the western establishment, who rejected his whole position outright. They mocked and belittled him relentlessly. They even engaged in a massive conspiracy to try and convince the public Trump was literally working for the Russians. But that didn't matter because the USA is a democracy. He got was able to come from nowhere to being POTUS, where he then spent four years haranguing European leaders to spend more on defence against the country he was supposedly controlled by.
Those leaders (mostly selected via far less direct mechanisms than Trump) reacted by giving the EU's most powerful position to a woman who was until that point primarily known for screwing up Germany's military. On her watch it became so degraded their troops turned up to NATO training exercises with broomsticks instead of guns [1]. A bigger "fuck you" to Trump and his warnings could not be imagined.
Then a European country is invaded by Russia, and millions of refugees have flooded the continent. Trump's warnings don't look so gauche now. But still the European leadership refuses to respond. European arms factories lie idle awaiting orders, whilst the EU focuses on regulating the US tech economy. One might think they have bigger problems than that, or that maybe they should avoid directly attacking US interests given their perilous defence position, but the European political system is carefully set up to prevent people doing anything too dangerously democratic (like electing a Trump), so instead the appointee army fiddles whilst Ukraine burns.
Now the inevitable is happening - the Americans are getting tired of funding a war far from their shores to defend a part of the world that seems to prefer banning US products to actually make shells and tanks. Who could see this coming? Only Trump, apparently.
There's another twist to this story of democracy being smarter than non-democracy. During the Brexit campaign one of the (now mostly forgotten) campaigning points was that the EU wanted to develop an EU Army, which would duplicate and overlap with NATO in ways that made the latter largely ineffective. The UK was against such a proposal, recognizing that it was militarily nonsensical to try and defend Europe without the Americans, but the EU considered it a priority. Remain campaigners tried to do away with this issue by claiming plans for a non-NATO EU Army were "conspiracy theories" and a "dangerous fantasy that is simply not true" [2]. The lies here were all on the side of the undemocratic EU, because the creation of an EU Army was the very first topic of discussion at the very first EU leaders meeting after Brits voted to leave. Even with the UK and its objections out of the way though, they neither reinforced NATO nor built their own replacement.
So what we see here is that the people often described as stooges of Russia, or anti-democratic in some way, were actually the people warning most strongly about the failed European approach to defending against Russian invasion. They saw it coming years in advance. This is really an excellent advert for democracy, but people who hate it for ideological reasons will never accept this.
The person who most presciently and effectively warned about the possibility of this situation was Donald Trump, a man who was democratically elected against the united wishes of the American and European establishment. He warned repeatedly that NATO allies were spending far too little on defence, leaving America to defend Europe in case of invasion. At the time he started saying this it was considered radically gauche and terrible by the western establishment, who rejected his whole position outright. They mocked and belittled him relentlessly. They even engaged in a massive conspiracy to try and convince the public Trump was literally working for the Russians. But that didn't matter because the USA is a democracy. He got was able to come from nowhere to being POTUS, where he then spent four years haranguing European leaders to spend more on defence against the country he was supposedly controlled by.
Those leaders (mostly selected via far less direct mechanisms than Trump) reacted by giving the EU's most powerful position to a woman who was until that point primarily known for screwing up Germany's military. On her watch it became so degraded their troops turned up to NATO training exercises with broomsticks instead of guns [1]. A bigger "fuck you" to Trump and his warnings could not be imagined.
Then a European country is invaded by Russia, and millions of refugees have flooded the continent. Trump's warnings don't look so gauche now. But still the European leadership refuses to respond. European arms factories lie idle awaiting orders, whilst the EU focuses on regulating the US tech economy. One might think they have bigger problems than that, or that maybe they should avoid directly attacking US interests given their perilous defence position, but the European political system is carefully set up to prevent people doing anything too dangerously democratic (like electing a Trump), so instead the appointee army fiddles whilst Ukraine burns.
Now the inevitable is happening - the Americans are getting tired of funding a war far from their shores to defend a part of the world that seems to prefer banning US products to actually make shells and tanks. Who could see this coming? Only Trump, apparently.
There's another twist to this story of democracy being smarter than non-democracy. During the Brexit campaign one of the (now mostly forgotten) campaigning points was that the EU wanted to develop an EU Army, which would duplicate and overlap with NATO in ways that made the latter largely ineffective. The UK was against such a proposal, recognizing that it was militarily nonsensical to try and defend Europe without the Americans, but the EU considered it a priority. Remain campaigners tried to do away with this issue by claiming plans for a non-NATO EU Army were "conspiracy theories" and a "dangerous fantasy that is simply not true" [2]. The lies here were all on the side of the undemocratic EU, because the creation of an EU Army was the very first topic of discussion at the very first EU leaders meeting after Brits voted to leave. Even with the UK and its objections out of the way though, they neither reinforced NATO nor built their own replacement.
So what we see here is that the people often described as stooges of Russia, or anti-democratic in some way, were actually the people warning most strongly about the failed European approach to defending against Russian invasion. They saw it coming years in advance. This is really an excellent advert for democracy, but people who hate it for ideological reasons will never accept this.
[1] https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/natosource/german-sold...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-26843996