HEY,
@Grandpappy. You wanna know why it's even dumber? We kinda
wanted Europe to have less of a military post-WWI and post-WWII. We
wanted to be the big dog and we made sure it happened. If that meant paying some money alongside security guarantees, then that is what we wanted
because then we're the bigger shot callers.
Do you have the slightest understanding of geopolitical strategy? Plenty of stupid things have been done in it's name, yes, but plenty of very clever ones have as well. And the clever ones usually involve something that would be called stupid/weak by someone who simply doesn't see the big picture.
I guess it's been a few generations. How many DP users can claim to remember living through WWII, being at least old enough to have read the papers?
Avoiding
that was correctly deemed worth paying money, and paying money wasn't such a bad prospect given that Europe was laid waste, while Russia and China were beginning to eat themselves from the inside out with totalitarian dictatorship/oligarchies and an
actually socialist economy.
Do you really not understand why it might be in our greater geopolitical interest to provide those security guarantees and keep our military strong as hell? I'll say it again: it has to do with who calls the shots.
