Not really:
Europe is higher, but “significantly”? No. It’s about 20%. Granted, future commitments are rather lower in the US at this point.
And it’s mostly Northern Europe propping things up. As a fraction of GDP, Western Europe does quite poorly:
I’d say 20% is significant.
Actually I had these exact values in mind and did consider 20% more to be significantly higher (plus the unallocated aid). But it’s a loose term.
ETA: as Beowulff also says
The main point is that trump’s talking point of the US giving more, and/or Europe only giving aid as a loan, are both false.
Well, I suppose it’s open to interpretation, but I don’t consider 20% too significant in the context of a war that’s in Europe, not North America. And quite a few EU countries really aren’t remotely pulling their weight. Yeah, Finland and Sweden are doing a great job, but France doesn’t get to pretend they’re at the same level just because Europe as a whole is doing ok.
Considering that the ‘plan’ hasn’t fully been made fully public, there does exist the possibility of one or two thing Russia’s maximalist demands, and its position on the negotiations of ‘peace’ that TFG and Vance’s ‘plan’ doesn’t hand over to Russia on a silver platter. One is that Ukraine disarms, which I hope (possibly foolishly) that TFG’s plan doesn’t include. The other is that Ukraine hand over the territories in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts that Russia illegally ‘annexed’ in the 2022 ‘referendum’ but that Russia never actually occupied. That I would not put past TFG and Vance to include in their ‘peace proposal’, Vance has already suggested that such an agreement is within the realms of possibilities.
The idea of a ceasefire in place becoming a permanent peace settlement is absurd on its face. The Russian constitution considers the 4 oblasts it illegally annexed in the 2022 referendum as well as Crimea to be a permanent part of Russia, which again includes territory of Ukraine that Russia has never occupied. The Ukrainian constitution (and the entire international community barring Russia and a few others like Belarus and North Korea) considers those same territories to be a part of Ukraine, and under the Ukrainian constitution those territories can’t be unilaterally negotiated away by Zelensky in a peace deal, even if for some bizarre reason he wanted to.
Putin really is getting everything he wants out of these peace negotiations: division between the US and Europe on a scale never before seen, a weakening of US support for Ukraine, and no actual peace deal, which Putin has no interest in.
This would have been believable in the year 2022, the first year of invasion, but by this point it’s been over three years. The only possible explanation for a 600-million people alliance (NATO’s population minus the United States and Canada) with over $25 trillion GDP (NATO’s output minus the United States and Canada) still not being able to get their act together to give massive amounts of military aid to Ukraine by this point - in the third year - is a lack of resolve. Any production bottlenecks of the relatively-simple arms that Ukraine needs could have been well solved by now had there been the will for it. Things like artillery shells, drones, mortars, small arms, etc. aren’t complex. There is no realistic prospect of western Europe being invaded on land by any foe any time soon - the nations like the UK, Holland, Belgium, France, Spain, etc. could have given nearly all of their tanks and AFVs, artillery, etc. to Ukraine and suffered no loss to their national security while they slowly re-manufactured or re-acquired replacements.
The fact that you mentioned that the German army - now - even in 2025, three years after Russia invaded Ukraine - still has only enough ammunition for 3 days of full-scale war - shows a lack of earnestness and lack of taking the threat seriously.
Well we should start with being objective about the numbers, then we can add in our opinions about what we think they should be.
Russia is a threat to Europe but it remains a threat to the US too eg by supporting enemies of the US and infiltrating US media. And none of us want a world in which every small nation feels they need their own nuclear deterrent.
Yes ideally all European nations would pull equally, but we were speaking about Europe in total.
You might be surprised! Noah Smith (left-leaning economist) writes:
Japan and South Korea, and possibly also Poland, need to create their own nuclear deterrents.
Despite my name, I’m not exactly onboard with that. Still.
Can someone tell me again what concessions Russia is making in Trumps plan? Have any reporters asked this question directly (and repeatedly until there is an actual answer) to Trump or his minions? Especially, the elected ones.
Of all the things Trump is doing that piss me off, nothing ranks higher than his Ukraine policy. WTF is Trump’s rationale? Its inexplicable. What, if anything, did former administration insiders have to say about this? MAGA? How about defending democracies that have been invaded by a dictator? Wasn’t that one of the things that made America “great”?
I should probably be more concerned with what is going on at home but this blatant lying about what is taking place in Ukraine and the American public’s apathy or willful ignorance is something I’ll never understand. Its embarassing to be an American.
Russia has successfully infiltrated American conservative media (they did try liberal media too, but it didn’t take) both by directly paying influencers and also with the literal, original “fake news”.
I think this is the more significant factor than whether trump himself is a russian asset (though I think that’s likely too) because it explains why so much of the right has been anti Ukraine for so long.
They’re willing to stop killing Ukrainians. Oh wait, sorry, they’re not even willing to do that. They haven’t budged from their maximalist demands and have managed to have the President and Vice President of the United States scold Zelensky for being a roadblock to peace.
And yes, the infiltration of conservative media has been pretty successful. The TFGers I’ve run across tend to fall into one of two camps. One thinks that the bloodshed has been going on long enough and TFG is trying to bring peace to the region and don’t see any moral difference between Russia and Ukraine. The other disagree with TFG on Ukraine and somehow managed to be surprised by how pro-Putin he’s been, the same way that TFGers are somehow surprised about the tariffs and deportation ‘mistakes’. In other words, they were hearing what they wanted to hear rather than what he was actually saying during the entire election.