As I mentioned earlier today and yesterday, Europe has a path forward that starts with collectivized debt to finance a major cooperative defense industrial buildup and includes rationalization of national armed forces into a coherent whole.

Now it would be too easy, and wrong, to say that European complacency is to blame for Europe being unprepared to secure itself without US assistance today. For years the US actively opposed an autonomous European defense capacity.

Which gets us to Europe's role in all this. Again, as I said at the outset, this day has been a long time coming. And throughout that time, a lot of people (many but not all of them French) have sounded the alarm, calling for European strategic autonomy.