No, you got it all wrong - it's the end of the free lunch! It's the death of Uncle Sucker! The EU has twice the population of America and was once a bigger economy, so why should Americans have to fund the careless and luxurious lifestyle of Europeans?! Enough is enough!
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Because the US is an imperialist superpower and the way you remain an imperialist superpower is by making your vassal states dependent upon you. It's not a free lunch. The US gets unopposed military, cultural and financial hegemony. It gets the world's reserve currency. It gets to defy international law and bully half the world without consequence.
It's weird that the right seems to have forgotten all of this.
Also "the careless and luxurious lifestyle of Europeans?" WTF, do you think they all live in castles and eat pheasant under glass or some shit? What does that even mean?
Wrong! That was the past. Things are much different in 2025! The only way to remain a superpower is to share the carrot, not use the stick.
The carrot is exactly the thing you're complaining about - that other nations don't have to invest in military infrastructure and the US polices international shipping on everyone's behalf, and every now and then the US does a genocide to keep the Saudis happy and the oil flowing, and everyone lets them. It's the very set of agreements and obligations that Trump has thrown out the window because he wants to shake the world down for its pennies.
The rationale being forth here is simply naive. The US hasn't been getting a raw deal. If anything Trump's behavior is making it clear to the world how bad the deal has been for everyone else.
It's amazing how people think the world likes green paper with dead people's face on it "for no major reason"
Don't mix what used to be with what is and what it's going to be! The growth of China and the recovery of Russia changed things quite a bit!