Stanley McChrystal: belief

Transcript context

…If we’re trying, as American citizens, to understand the risk calculations of, say, EU, German, French policymakers — how they think about these risks, what’s the main thing we don’t understand about them? I don’t think you can generalize too much, but if you look at the European nations, each of them has an interesting calculus. There was a period in the Cold War where their dependence on the United States was comforting, and it was irritating — the idea that they needed the United States to be the 800-pound gorilla in NATO. They would like a measure of independence from that. At the same time, independence from that without enough national power or enough unity across the EU is pretty dangerous. I think the idea that, although Russia does not come close to what the Soviet Union’s power was, Russia — if they are aggressive in places like the Baltics or Ukraine and others — can really put the other European powers in a difficult position. Then economically — as I mentioned natural gas earlier — if the countries of the EU are put in a position where they are less powerful economically, and they don’t have political unity, then there’s that balkanization, where each individual country finds themselves not strong enough physically with material power, economic or military power, to feel they can stand up confidently, then it’s problematic for them. It’s a common view on the American right that Germany is not sufficiently afraid of Russia right now. Do you agree with that? Who’s making the risk miscalculation? The Germans, the American conservatives, someone else?…

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