Europe can’t stop anything

Michael Totten quotes a Serb:

“If Americans said they were no longer interested in Europe, it would be a catastrophe here.”

“You think?” Sean said.

“Yes,” David said, “because Europe can’t stop anything.”

The military weakness and incapacity of Europe in Serbia startled the Serbs, even more than America’s capacity stunned them. Since then, Europe’s martial weakness has been on display in one humiliating debacle after another. Recall Britain’s startling display of fear, weakness, cowardice, and dhimmitude in the Persian gulf.

All that wealth, and no capacity to defend it. The vultures are circling.

For a state to exist, it has to be able to destroy those that oppose it, or might oppose it, to inflict famine and ruin on hostile populations, has to be able burn the crops and flatten the cities, after the manner of General Sherman, and has to have confident belief, a belief shared by officers and men, that it is right to do so.

To do this, it needs some source of cohesion. It cannot provide its own cohesion. Pay and threats will not work to motivate soldiers, for when things go bad, when your soldiers most need motivation, these motivations cannot function, for nothing will motivate people impose the discipline.

The usual source or cohesion is ethnic identity: the nation state. Other sources of cohesion are religion, as for example the various theocratic states, such as the caliphate, and ideology, as for example the American revolution and the various communist coups.

So if a state’s cohesion came from ethnicity, then when it goes multicultural, then its soldiers and police are fighting for pay and pension and nothing more, and then it is are doomed. Similarly, when the last shreds of liberty are crushed out in the US, when the second amendment is utterly gone, and little left of the first amendment, US troops will be fighting for pay and pension and nothing more and then the US will be doomed.

Global Guerrilas reports that Mexico and Nigeria are falling, as bandits, revolutionaries, and suchlike take possession of the Mexican drug trade, and bandits, revolutionaries, Islamists, and suchlike take possession of Nigeria’s oil. But there is a lot more available for the stealing in Europe.

If the Nigerian or Mexican government goes, the Pentagon should secure the oil, but will not be able to do so without will and belief that it is right to do so. That would require an ideology that it reasonable to protect the private property rights of American and allied businessmen – which argument will not fly when they threw them to the wolves long ago, when long ago they allowed the oil and the oil rigs to be stolen by governments that are now failing.