Comment by rdm_blackhole

> The Europeans didn’t choose to be on the American side, they were forced to by circumstance of their own making.

Europeans choose to follow the US. Even recently Sweden joined NATO. If they wanted to develop their own inter-European military alliance, they could have done so but instead joined and alliance where the US calls the shots.

Also since the fall of the Soviet union, the European countries decided to basically gut their military budgets and redirect the money to other things, as seen by the fact that until very recently only a small fraction of the NATO countries actually met their 2% military budget targets.

De Gaulle after the war did not want to join NATO because he understood what that meant, alas his successors all be gave up on the concept of military independence.