I'll take the US state department over Russia any day, thank you. It's why most Eastern Europeans have no love for FDR and Churchill: they basically gave our countries to Stalin.
The US has long enough told the EU, specifically Germany, to ditch Russian gas and direct 2% of their GDP towards their militaries/NATO. Did Merkel listen? No. Only Poland and to some extent Romania listened. France already had the most capable military in the EU.
> The US has long enough told the EU, specifically Germany, to ditch Russian gas
That's kind of like telling the US to ditch China for manufacturing. It would make sense, it's just easier said than done. The issue is that it seems that Europe lacks gas reserves, Russia was a convenient and reliable source and it would have made no economic sense to diversify the same way it makes no economic sense for the US to bring back manufacturing from China.
> France already had the most capable military in the EU.
The answer to that is World War 2, the Germans were reluctant to militarise, for a while they were outright forbidden to.
Stalin was taking them anyway. Failed to take them away from Stalin yes, I suppose we could have started WW3 in 1945 and tried to nuke our way across Eastern Europe to Moscow.
