The reason there has been no European war outside the Balkans since 1945, after all, has nothing to do with the European Union. The reason is that the United States and the Soviet Union enforced peace on the quarrelsome subcontinent at gunpoint, and backed it up by occupying most European nations with their own troops, tanks, and planes. Neither imperial power, however, could maintain its presence indefinitely. The Soviet Union was forced to withdraw its troops from Europe by 1989, as it lurched toward its own collapse two years later. The United States—well, let’s just say that the recent events in Afghanistan demonstrate, for those who are paying attention, that a similar series of events is already well under way here. I don’t think that too many more years will pass before the United States no longer has troops in Europe, or anywhere else outside its own borders—if, that is, it still exists as a nation, which is anyone’s guess at this point.

He gets that the EU is just a latter day HRE, and equally useless.

Unfortunately for the future of Europe, nobody there seems to have gotten the memo that the US is going to bits. That’s a problem because there are two very good ways to make war happen. The first is to be arrogant, blustering, and unwilling to compromise. The second is to be militarily weak. The European Union is both.

If Serbia, let’s say, decides to adjust its current borders in its own favor the way that Azerbaijan did a little while ago, by force of arms, is the EU prepared to try to counter that on the battlefield? If not, the EU may never recover from the loss of prestige; quite a few people remember what happened in the 1930s when the League of Nations failed to back up its demands with anything stronger than verbiage. (Spoiler: the League of Nations no longer exists.) If the EU does intervene—well, then it’s up to the fortunes of war, and those may not go the way the EU thinks they should. One of the least remembered stories of the First World War is that in 1914, in the opening phases of the war, the Austro-Hungarian Empire launched its armies into Serbia in an attempt to conquer that tough and mountainous little country, and got driven back across the border in utter humiliation after a series of stinging defeats. Just how well the EU would survive a comparable embarrassment is anyone’s guess.

Srpska stronk.

ungary is roughly half its historic size, and there’s quite a bit of talk in that country about readjusting those borders, too. Poland has similar issues with its post-World War II borders, and is in the midst of a considerable military buildup. France has just signed a mutual-defense pact with Greece, committing each country to come to the other’s aid in war against any other country, whether or not that other country happens to be a member of NATO—and of course France and Britain are getting increasingly bellicose with each other over fishing rights and a flurry of other issues. All this is still being conducted in the language of diplomacy and public relations, but if you know the history of Europe between the two world wars, you know how this movie ends.

My personal bet is on the Greeks and Irish starting shit.