Comment by jemmyw

The problem is that for a lot of these problems Europe hasn't had that much self determination over the last 75 years. The US had to intervene twice in world wars that started in Europe. And after WWII the US did, arguably, a reasonably noble thing in how it provided investment to rebuild Europe. No more wars out of Europe and a market to sell US goods to, and then a bit later a bulwark against the USSR. All these things meant a forced dependency. And the US still wants to sell its military equipment, and under Trump very very keen to sell more goods. I would argue that this situation also contributed to Europe losing it's initial developments in computing with brain drain to the US.

75 years just isn't that long in geopolitics, and it's a hard ship to turn around. Only 25 years ago the relationship between the US and Europe was still very strong and it didn't look like there was any pulling back.

You mention buying Russian gas. Again, it's very hard to suddenly stop that gas flow. Even Ukraine didn't shut down the gas pipelines going from Russian to Europe while they had existing contracts in place, it's happening this year. Gas from Russia was 40%, is now less than 11%, is forecast to drop much further this and next year. These kind of economic dependencies also continued for surprising long in previous wars between countries that were actually in hot wars with each other.

The kind of changes you're talking about are slow. The US also has it's dependencies on Asian manufacturing that it is also now trying to turn around, and that will also be slow.