Ah yes, middle earth

The US is at the centre of western world order. The rest of the west is tied to the states ideologically, politically, economically, and militarily. The global hegemony that the US created in the 90s is now starting to unravel and that's having a negative economic impact on all western countries. Europe in particular has been hit very hard. And hence we're seeing political discontent running all across the west.

The EU countries had a chance to cleanly decouple from the USA and mostly continue being neocolonialist and subsidised in the same ways, before Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Probably could've corrected it with the correct diplomacy or just looking the other way. Now the integration with the USA has been strengthened and all the messaging needs to be slowly undone and pivoted if we don't want to sink together. And even then no one will be able to trust us. Trust matters more for financial and service industries than it does for manufacturing economies.

Maybe USA in their stupidity will try to cut us loose, and we can be forced into a miraculous late pivot just in time. Israel's genocide crusade was a perfect excuse to aggressively decouple, since by Oct 2023 it was obvious USA lost. But we didn't take it, getting to be Nazi's again was too nice a treat I guess. So it's perfectly possible USA starts exploiting us worse, and we just decide to cope with a lowered vassal tier status rather than actually clawing back some sovereignty. And the obvious result of that of course is more allies and members will want their own sovereignty enforced, and will break with or be pushed out of the EU-unity, which will make the remaining partners even weaker.