[anigbrowl]

I'm European and completely agree with him. I grew up in Ireland (a constitutionally neutral country) and have lived and worked in the UK, Netherlands, Germany, and Spain as well as visiting several other European countries.

You would have to be living under a rock to ignore the long history of European internal wars, and equally to ignore the fact that European countries have been able to maintain a minimalist approach to defense spending because of the US security umbrella.

[pizza234]

You're mixing a couple of things here; we're not talking about defense in general, but specifically to the thesis that without US military presence, France/UK/Germany could/would go into conflict; this is just ridiculous, as much as thinking that US countries would go into a conflict as well, because they had a civil war in the past.