Third, given the fact that the EU has almost as large a GDP and almost 200 million more people than the U.S., why isn’t Europe’s collective contribution to NATO’s military capability larger than the U.S.’? By contribution, I don’t simply mean money, but a suitably large, trained and equipped force able to support the wars that are being fought now.

This argument, and the accompanying graph, are fucking horsehit. How about this graph?

I will remind you that the argument is for "a suitably large, trained and equipped force". My counter argument is why the fuck do you guys spend so much fucking money in comparison to the next 10 put together, and only have "a suitably large, trained and equipped force". Your military's Budget is 54% of your government 's budget - And that's at it's current low of 3% of your GDP.

And don't cry "world's police" to me. For one, most of the world never sees your policing, and most of what was termed "policing" was just poxy war with the USSR and then Russia. I say "was" like it still isn't - See Syria right now.

Is NATO obsolete? I don't know, does the US still have proxy wars with Russia, and do the former Soviet states still fear being subsumed back into Russia?

The U.S. is not going to war in Ukraine, and Russia is not going to war there, either.

Russia didn't have to go to war. they just took created some political instability within the Ukrainian parliament, then walked in and took what they wanted from Ukraine - their warm water port, which Russia had been using for decades anyways - and no one had the political testicular fortitude to call their shit.

This article is just silly to me. It's like it's using the US's bloated defense spending as a way to say that no one else in NATO is pulling their weight. THEN it has the audacity to say that NATO didn't pull its weight after 9/11 because we all knew that the WMD's were bullshit and that the US was just going in after oil and to get rid of a leader that had worn out his usefulness.