The Europeans are trying to project a united front on Ukraine, and I don’t blame them in principle.
They have invested a lot of political and material capital in weakening Putin for what they consider to be good strategic reasons. A weaker Russia is, in principle, in their interests. So far the Ukraine War has been a relatively cheap way to chip away at Putin’s military power, including manpower, weapons, and weapons platforms.
Russia is much poorer than Europe–the EU has 10x the GDP of Russia–so investing a $100 billion or two into destroying Russia’s military makes sense to them, especially if they can get the US to shoulder about the same amount without having as strong an interest in weakening Russia.
But whatever they say, Europe is not fighting this war (by proxy) in order to affirm some grand political vision of freedom and democracy; this is a…
