Shadowing Practice: Should America Leave NATO? - Learn English Speaking with Video

I'm just shocked the French and Brits are still getting along.

Should NATO exist?

It's a question I'm seeing more and more over the past few years, especially from the American side of things.

And it's a fair question, but I think people who ask that kind of question in

that way might not fully know how NATO actually works and what it does.

Because it ain't exactly the U.S just dropping pallets of money into European defense funds like some people imagine.

Recent geopolitical events have both strained and strengthened the alliance,

and why it exists in the first place has left a lot of people's working memory in the last few years.

So Article 5, the like and subscribe button, and let's talk about it.

Also, if this video gets 30,000 likes, I'll grow my mustache back.

Ah yes, NATO.

The thing people confuse with the UN and the European Union a lot for some reason.

And the source of those stupid AI videos, comparing if Montenegro, Albania, or North Macedonia would win in a war.

Leave your guess on the victor down in the comments.

But to start us off, I kind of want to frame how I want you to look at NATO.

I think it's useful to view the alliance first and foremost as just a simple set of guidelines.

If you want to be in the club, you gotta play by the rules.

And I want to frame it this way because I think it helps cut through the more, we'll call it passionate rhetoric a little bit.

Now that set of rules creates one thing, and it's the thing that actually gives NATO its teeth.

That one thing is called interoperability.

Interoperability, simply put, is the ability for country A's military and country B's military to fight together at the same time.

It's what makes two or more different armies fight as one, as opposed to them just coincidentally fighting the same set of bad guys at the same time.

And it is a much larger hurdle to get over than you might think, especially when your alliance is over 30 countries spread out over multiple continents.

I think a good example to give here would be Libya in 2011,

where a coalition of a dozen or so NATO members conducted a huge air campaign with just a few weeks' notice.

They shared fuel, ammo, and intel.

That kind of interoperability would not have been possible if not for a decades prior set of very,

very boring meetings and technical documents that are about as fun to read as point-blank shooting yourself in the hand.

To illustrate what I meant with a more up-to-date example, we're going to be talking about Sweden, one of the newest members having only officially joined in March of 2024.

I recently spent some time in the town of Lulea, home to a Swedish Air Force Base, and also candy stores that mostly just sold cigarettes for some reason.

And I got to follow along with their combat search and rescue teams, their version of American PJs, and also have very unflattering pictures of me taken.

When I went, I really wanted to know how things had changed since they finally joined NATO.

And the answer I got over and over was pretty much nothing.

Just kind of surprising, right?

You'd think

that joining what is arguably the most powerful military alliance to

ever exist in human history would come with at least a small highlight reel of events.

But for Sweden and many of the other recent inductees, such as Finland, not a ton has actually changed.

The reality is that all these countries were already working together extensively.

Really, the only thing that has changed from what I was told is

that they just had more opportunities to go train with other countries, but not countries they hadn't already been training with for years or decades already.

While NATO has, on paper, expanded, and that can drive certain discussions and criticisms,

the practical reality and the actual balance of power really hasn't.

If Russia decided it wanted to have a rematch with Finland prior to it of joining NATO, NATO would have joined in regardless,

even if the Finns aren't really as hot as Swedes or Norwegians.

So what does change when you join NATO, and why am I trying to make you think of it as a set of rules?

Well, mostly because that's kind of just what it is.

A good example of this is the thing I'm holding in my hand.

This was originally made to be slapped into an American M16, but if I wanted to, for some reason, I could fly over to the UK, fill it with British-made ammo,

grab a French rifle, and shoot it.

Perhaps at a guy from Portugal as payback for inventing Brazil.

NATO rules exist so

that the alliance can operate as one big military rather than a collection of countries

that all happen to be on the same side.

A big thing is logistics, obviously.

As illustrated by my metaphorical example where I murdered an innocent Portuguese man, NATO pushes for standard ammunition so that people can share ammo.

Standard petroleum types, so that the same fuel Italy uses in its tanks,

can also be used in a generator that some Czech dude is using to charge his personal morale-boosting equipment.

Whatever you think that thing was I just showed on screen, that's what it was.

But a lot more is standardized across the board, not just the things I mentioned.

Everything from unit symbols, how weather is reported, the size of screw heads, how batteries are labeled, and the shape

and size of mid-air refueling probe holes are all standardized so that everyone can use everyone else's stuff.

But there are other rules that have to do with specific capabilities,

and the one I was watching when I was over there was specifically how the Swedish combat search and rescue operated, from the language and specific words used over the radio,

to the sequence of events after the pilot was hauled back onto the bird.

After talking with these guys, they told me that the new NATO standard requirements they had to follow were actually more stringent than what they had before,

ultimately making them more effective.

This kind of standardization means that a Spanish fighter pilot, if he got shot down, could be rescued by a German rescue helicopter team,

even if the two countries had never actually practiced that kind of thing together.

So while if we're talking about practical real-world balances of power, joining NATO as a European country doesn't really shift the needle that much.

If the Swiss, I don't know, finally decided that neutrality is for cowards and magically join the alliance tomorrow,

I don't think anyone would take that as an aggressive, bloodthirsty war posture.

But what it does do, though, is make working together way easier or just possible to begin with.

A lot of that is because NATO members have easier access to things like shared classified information and technology.

Meaning, if you have a bunch of secret intelligence on bad guys, and you think, I don't know, Bulgaria really needs to see it for some reason,

there is an easy and already established line of communication to make that happen.

If, however, I wanted to tell Ireland this really cool fact I learned

while looking at a neat laptop with a red wire coming out of it, it would be much harder.

Take a lot more time, and by the time they did get that super cool fact, it might not be useful to them anymore.

Being in NATO allows access to combined friend or foe networks for your Air Force, and shared battlespace management software, radio encryption, and a mountain of other very,

very important things, but I don't want to get too much into the weeds

here before I lose even more of the audience with minute details.

The takeaway is that there are literally thousands of these examples.

The rules and sets make sure

that each military has a bare minimum level of performance and follows some standards that make interoperability possible.

So while the US could probably handle Russia without Estonia's help, we can stage our military in that country and already know

that we can use their jet fuel and talk on the same radio frequencies.

But probably one of the biggest questions right now is why NATO is a thing in a post-Cold War era.

What exactly is the point these days?

Neither the USSR or the Warsaw Pact, even exist anymore.

Even more to consider is that 10 countries

that would have fought against NATO in World War 3 just 40 years ago are now fully-fledged NATO members themselves.

Russia, the country NATO is always talking about fighting, can't even win a war against its neighbor,

so the idea that they'd be able to amass a horde and storm across Europe is basically laughable.

So why is the alliance spending trillions as if it's going to happen tomorrow?

It's a good criticism.

And unfortunately, the argument against that line of thinking is hard to quantify with a number

or a fact that's going to make everyone happy.

NATO was formed originally to deter Soviet expansion into Western Europe.

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And if that failed, at least hold the line and prevent communist territorial gains.

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In that sense, they were pretty successful.

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One of the big things

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that prevented more land wars in Europe after World War II was the fact

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that the Soviets were not guaranteed a win on the ground.

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There were enough tanks, planes, and dudes with rifles on the other side of the Iron

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Curtain to make Russian military planners think twice about pulling any triggers.

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So while one can argue that NATO did its job and helped prevent World War III, one can also argue that it spent decades

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and trillions getting guys really good at LARPing in the woods

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and spending their weekends pretending to do war stuff in the 1980s.

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And that's why it's hard to quantify.

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You can't show alternatives if deterrence is working.

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If World War III had kicked off and the Russians got spanked on day three,

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we could have all looked back and said that we really overdid it with the military spending stuff.

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Or if it had kicked off and not gone well for us, we could have said that we learned our lesson and this is what happens when you don't have strong enough militaries.

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But NATO has never gone toe-to-toe with Russia, and a big part of that is because the deterrence factor worked then and it's working now.

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The time, money, and energy put into NATO is maintaining just the status quo

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and we don't know what would have happened if we disbanded and saved all of our money after the USSR fell apart.

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It's hard to tell your population that you need to spend more on your military

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when the average person can't actually look around and point at something that got better by you doing that.

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You have to argue that something hypothetical never happened and that some hypothetical thing might happen in the future,

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and therefore, we need to spend less money on schools

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and more money on ammo that a conscript is just going to shoot into a plastic dummy target anyway.

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Thank you, kind citizens of NATO, for your 1.5 trillion annual investment.

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Here is a war that never happened.

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We do, however, know that Georgia, a non-NATO country, was invaded by Russia in 2008, and they are still there in 2026.

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Ukraine, also not in NATO,

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lost Crimea in 2014, and is currently still fighting tooth and nail to retake Russian-occupied territory after the 2022 invasion.

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Now those are hard data points to just take at face value though.

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Some have argued that these are direct results of NATO expansion in Europe,

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and that Russia has a justified goal of establishing a buffer between their federation and the alliance.

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But also worth looking at the fact that after both the Crimea takeover and the 2022 full-scale invasion,

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multiple countries, including those with strong neutrality agreements, rushed to join NATO.

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So even if you do argue that Russian aggression is a result of NATO expansion, the result has worsened Russia's security posture, not stabilized it.

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If you're a European country close to Putin's house and you don't want to have to redraw your borders anytime soon, a surefire way to prevent that,

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in 2026 at least, is to join NATO.

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Remember kids, militaries might be expensive, but so is hiring contractors to move the sign that says, now entering Poland, back a few dozen miles closer to the capital.

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All that is to say is that deterrence has worked

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so well that people forget why we're doing it in the first place.

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Also worth mentioning there that other countries than just Russia might want to pick a fight with a member of NATO,

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and we've seen numerous conflicts between countries not in the alliance, but in the region.

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And while I've said that being fully in the alliance doesn't necessarily move the power needle that much, it does have very real consequences.

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Azerbaijan, for example, partners with NATO countries all the time, but they aren't actually in NATO.

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And they also have a tendency to constantly be fighting with the Armenians.

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It's not hard to imagine that with NATO political leverage, those wars would probably not have been fought,

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both from deterring Armenia from trying to do anything and keeping those slippery Azerbaijanis on a leash.

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We all talk about how NATO prevented World War III, but I think we really need to appreciate

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that it's the only thing keeping the Turks and the Greeks from literally killing each other.

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While it's not exactly something in the world's living memory anymore,

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Europe literally could not stop fighting itself for like all of human history up until NATO was formed.

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And while the Cold War almost did go hot a few times, this is the longest old Europa has gone without everyone marching to their deaths in a hot minute.

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This is of course causing a lot of issues because most men of European descent,

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like myself, have a biological clock that demands we die violently in some random Prussian field before we turn 30.

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So having lived this long is feeling unnatural and this is what I blame the falling testosterone levels on.

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Now as an American, I always kind of had NATO as a side thought.

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It's something we're in and that we do most of the work.

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It's no secret that the United States military does provide a hefty or even majority chunk of the alliance's warfighting capabilities.

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This has led many in the US with a feeling like

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the rest of NATO is freeloading off of American taxpayer dollars

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and expecting our troops to go defend their country while their own populations aren't willing to do it themselves.

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But how true is this notion?

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Where does this idea come from?

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Well, probably the simplest thing to look at is money.

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Press releases and staged handshakes are one thing, but putting your literal money where your mouth is is another.

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In 2025, the collective NATO members spent about 1.5 trillion US dollars on defense.

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Zoom in a little bit though, and about $950 billion of that was the United States,

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and $550 billion came from the other 31 NATO countries all combined.

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From that number alone, it would be very easy to draw a simple straight line saying

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that the U.S is doing more than its fair share of the heavy financial lifting, combined with the fact

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that about a third of those in the alliance do not meet the current 2% GDP spending requirement

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that all countries in NATO are required to hit.

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Now, a decade ago, the number of countries not hitting their spending requirements was closer to literally all of them, but it still meant that in 2025 last year,

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one in three NATO members were not doing their fair share of putting taxpayer dollars in the fire pit

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that is military defense spending.

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And that is a valid metric, but it leaves out a lot of important information.

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First is that not every dollar the U.S spends on military stuff is directly to NATO's benefit.

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American troops are, by and large, paid significantly higher than their NATO counterparts and receive astronomically better benefits like education,

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healthcare, family support, housing, the list goes on, and the list is expensive.

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I'm not saying those are bad things to spend money on, but it does mean that, for example,

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it costs the US a lot more money to stick a guy in a submarine than it does France or the UK.

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Other things like domestic disaster relief, humanitarian missions, border security, or even just fixing potholes on a military base all cost billions in total

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and don't exactly work to the direct benefit of Europe's ability to defend itself.

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Our gear is also just way more expensive, and American F-35 costs more than a Eurofighter.

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One American aircraft carrier costs more than the entire British and French carrier fleet combined.

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We've decided to optimize our military for a level capability no one else is even trying to match, which makes our line item per soldier much bigger.

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That's a choice, and that choice has a price.

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But it's not really money spent on NATO, necessarily.

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It's also important to keep in mind that NATO is not the only alliance the U.S is part of.

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The ANZUS, which is the alliance between the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand, is also a major one.

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Mutual defense treaties with countries like Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines also drive American military spending and effort.

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Not to mention Israel, the Five Eyes arrangement,

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Taiwan, and the dozens and dozens of security cooperation missions we have quite literally in every corner of the globe,

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teaching local militaries which end of the rifle a bullet comes out of.

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Most NATO countries do have some level of dialogue and cooperation with those groups too, but not at the level and financial obligation as the United States.

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So while yes, even if we ignore the extra stuff, the United States does fill a disproportionate chunk of NATO's bill,

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but it's not intellectually honest to just look at the big raw numbers and draw decisive conclusions.

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I know saying something isn't intellectually honest is like the most pretentious way of phrasing that, but I could not think of a simpler way to put it because I am not that smart.

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But if we want to stick with the cynical American angle, what do we, the United States with our now 1.5 trillion dollar military budget,

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world-class warfighting abilities, and White House UFC fights, have to gain from what some Americans consider to be a

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bunch of weird European socialist freeloaders whose only recent contribution to human progress were plastic bottle lids

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that don't come off all the way and Ed Sheeran's musical catalog?

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Allow me to introduce the concept of soft power.

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Remember when you scared off the one girl willing to talk to you

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because you thought she cared you could leg press 300 pounds and you kept referring to women as females?

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This is what you need in your life.

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Soft power is all the leverage we have on other countries that don't involve pointing a gun at them.

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So even if you could make an argument

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that the U.S disproportionately keeps the war chest full compared to the rest of the NATO countries,

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that also gives us a ton of political and economic leverage, which is useful when you consider

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that Europe is the second largest economy in the world and has 107 million more people than the U.S.

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In the myriad shady and complex world of global geopolitics,

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where handing a kid a USAID-sponsored soccer ball in some remote African village has somehow dominoed us into threatening to invade Cuba,

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it doesn't take a lot of mental gymnastics to see how

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the United States having a strong role in Europe's defense would it lends us a few favors here and there,

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like strong-arming them into buying billions of dollars worth of F-35s and American-made explosive ammo.

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Now that's another thing I don't want to get too into the weeds on with this, but it is worth mentioning here.

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When you are the security backstop for an entire continent, basically, you also get bases on that continent.

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Bases in Germany, Italy, the UK, Spain, Turkey, Greece, the Netherlands, Poland, the Baltics.

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You also get forward intelligence stations, pre-positioned equipment, air refueling tracks.

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Kind of like your real dad, we get to just stick things in wherever we want.

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When the US struck Iran earlier this year during Epic Fury,

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a non-trivial chunk of the aircraft involved staged through bases on NATO soil and refueled in NATO airspace.

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None of that happens without the alliance framework already in place that lets us be there.

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If you wanted to renegotiate every one of those base and airspace agreements, country by country tomorrow, the prices would be very different.

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And by that, I mean have a couple zeros added to the end of them.

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Now, I would be doing you a disservice if I didn't also cover the actual downsides of NATO, because the alliance has plenty.

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It is, for one, organizationally incredibly slow.

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Anything official has to be agreed on by a consensus across 32 different countries

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that don't get along more often than they do, which means any one member can stop the entire group from acting on something.

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Hungary has used that veto power to do unhelpful things on multiple occasions.

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Turkey has used it to extract concessions out of new applicants, like some kind of grade school bully.

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And France occasionally uses it because France is French, and I shouldn't have to explain any further.

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NATO also has just a sheer mountain of redundancies.

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Every member country has its own military with its own staff and its own procurement.

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And then there's another layer of NATO joint planning sitting on top of it all, with its own staff, its own procurement,

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and its own priorities, and the two layers do not always speak smoothly to each other, to put it lightly.

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They can also, and this is important, drag the U.S into fights we don't want.

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If a tiny member country picks a fight with a big neighbor, Article 5, in theory, pulls everyone else in, including us.

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This is painfully relevant given the specific fight that NATO is actually preparing for.

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No one actually thinks 10 budge alien T-72s in flanker aircraft are going to be pouring over the border next week.

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The reality is that Russia is much more likely to attempt some kind of blitzkrieg-style play in a small,

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ethnically Russian section of a bordering country and hunker down after they take a chunk out of it, as they historically have.

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Outside of the whole, you know, going full send in 2022 and getting pee-pee slapped in Kiev, it would be very, very hard to explain to the American people,

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or really any population not that close to Russia or the country attacked, that we need to send our troops over to some corner of a country that most people

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couldn't even place on a map or even knew existed before the fighting started.

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NATO countries obviously know this, and it's led many countries closer to Russia to really try to incentivize greater cooperation from those farther away,

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like Spain, Greece, or the United States.

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The only time Article 5 was ever actually used was after 9-11, But going off to fight the flip-flop brigade with your country's best

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and brightest is a much easier sell than literally going to war with Russia.

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And it's an ask that many aren't actually sure would be answered these days.

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But hopefully we never find out.

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And the worst that comes out of this is that American troops complain that they're bored during their Poland rotational deployment.

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But for now, NATO is gonna NATO.

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And by that, I mean put a bunch of trenches

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and drones along the Russian border and post more of those MRE swap social media videos.

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But on that note, thank you for watching.

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I hope you enjoyed today's video.

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Please subscribe and I'll see you in the next one.

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Also remember, 30,000 likes.

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Mustache is back.

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Okay, bye.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “Should America Leave NATO?”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: Nato, countries, military. This video has 260 sentences and 4131 words to shadow. The speech runs for 22:40. The speaker talks fast, about 182 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 82% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.

Key vocabulary in this video

The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
ammo noun	/ˈæ.moʊ/	Ammunition.
interoperability noun	/ˌɪntəɹɒpəɹəˈbɪləti/	The capability of a product or system, to interact and function with others reciprocally.
chunk noun	/t͡ʃʌŋk/	A part of something that has been separated; a generally squat, thick, irregular piece of something, e.g. wood or stone.
deterrence noun	/dɪˈtɝɹəns/	The act of deterring, or the state of being deterred.
leverage noun	/ˈlɛv.(ə.)ɹɪd͡ʒ/	A force compounded by means of a lever rotating around a pivot.
capability noun	/ˌkeɪ.pəˈbɪl.ɪ.ti/	The power or ability to generate an outcome.
airspace noun		A specified portion of the atmosphere, especially that under the technical aviation control and/or jurisdiction of a particular state over which territory (and…
intellectually adverb		In an intellectual manner.
moustache noun	/ˈmʌstæʃ/	A growth of facial hair between the nose and the upper lip.
quantify verb	/ˈkwɑn.tɪˌfaɪ/	To assign a quantity to.
refuel verb	/ɹiːˈfjuːəl/	To refill with fuel.
warfighting noun		The fighting of a war.
hypothetical adjective	/ˌhaɪpəˈθɛtɪkəl/	Based upon a hypothesis; conjectural.
standardized adjective		Designed or constructed in a standard manner or according to an official standard.
posture noun	/ˈpɑst͡ʃɚ/	The way a person holds and positions their body.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Meaning
get along verb	To interact or coexist well, without argument or trouble.
get over verb	To overcome.
kick off verb	To make the first kick in a game or part of a game.
work together verb	To be coworkers with someone; to share a workspace with someone.
come off verb	To become detached.
cut through verb	To take a shortcut through.
fall apart verb	To disintegrate, to break into pieces.
find out verb	To discover, as by asking or investigating.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result	if this video gets 30,000 likes, I'll grow · if Montenegro, Albania, or North Macedonia would win
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	has left · has actually changed · has changed
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	is called · was told · be slapped
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	people who ask · match, which makes · ANZUS, which is

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 50 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, aren't, I'm. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: hypothetical /ˌhaɪpəˈθɛtɪkəl/, threaten /ˈθɹɛt.n̩/, tooth /tuθ/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: moustache /ˈmʌstæʃ/, ammunition /ˌæmjuˈnɪʃən/, sheer /ʃɪɚ/, obligation /ˌɑ.blɪˈɡeɪ.ʃn̩/, passionate /ˈpæʃənɪt/
Long words — get the stress right: interoperability /ˌɪntəɹɒpəɹəˈbɪləti/, capability /ˌkeɪ.pəˈbɪl.ɪ.ti/, hypothetical /ˌhaɪpəˈθɛtɪkəl/, neutrality /nuˈtɹæləti/, territorial /ˌtɛɹ.əˈtɔɹ.i.əl/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like ammo, interoperability, chunk.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

Key vocabulary in this video

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Grammar in this video

Pronunciation to watch

How to practise with this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?