Практика Shadowing: Should America Leave NATO? - Изучайте разговорный английский по видео
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I'm just shocked the French and Brits are still getting along.
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Should NATO exist?
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It's a question I'm seeing more and more over the past few years, especially from the American side of things.
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And it's a fair question, but I think people who ask that kind of question in
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that way might not fully know how NATO actually works and what it does.
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Because it ain't exactly the U.S just dropping pallets of money into European defense funds like some people imagine.
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Recent geopolitical events have both strained and strengthened the alliance,
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and why it exists in the first place has left a lot of people's working memory in the last few years.
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So Article 5, the like and subscribe button, and let's talk about it.
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Also, if this video gets 30,000 likes, I'll grow my mustache back.
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Ah yes, NATO.
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The thing people confuse with the UN and the European Union a lot for some reason.
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And the source of those stupid AI videos, comparing if Montenegro, Albania, or North Macedonia would win in a war.
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Leave your guess on the victor down in the comments.
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But to start us off, I kind of want to frame how I want you to look at NATO.
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I think it's useful to view the alliance first and foremost as just a simple set of guidelines.
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If you want to be in the club, you gotta play by the rules.
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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.
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Now that set of rules creates one thing, and it's the thing that actually gives NATO its teeth.
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That one thing is called interoperability.
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Interoperability, simply put, is the ability for country A's military and country B's military to fight together at the same time.
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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.
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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.
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I think a good example to give here would be Libya in 2011,
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where a coalition of a dozen or so NATO members conducted a huge air campaign with just a few weeks' notice.
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They shared fuel, ammo, and intel.
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That kind of interoperability would not have been possible if not for a decades prior set of very,
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very boring meetings and technical documents that are about as fun to read as point-blank shooting yourself in the hand.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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When I went, I really wanted to know how things had changed since they finally joined NATO.
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And the answer I got over and over was pretty much nothing.
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Just kind of surprising, right?
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You'd think
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that joining what is arguably the most powerful military alliance to
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ever exist in human history would come with at least a small highlight reel of events.
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But for Sweden and many of the other recent inductees, such as Finland, not a ton has actually changed.
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The reality is that all these countries were already working together extensively.
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Really, the only thing that has changed from what I was told is
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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.
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While NATO has, on paper, expanded, and that can drive certain discussions and criticisms,
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the practical reality and the actual balance of power really hasn't.
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If Russia decided it wanted to have a rematch with Finland prior to it of joining NATO, NATO would have joined in regardless,
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even if the Finns aren't really as hot as Swedes or Norwegians.
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So what does change when you join NATO, and why am I trying to make you think of it as a set of rules?
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Well, mostly because that's kind of just what it is.
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A good example of this is the thing I'm holding in my hand.
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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,
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grab a French rifle, and shoot it.
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Perhaps at a guy from Portugal as payback for inventing Brazil.
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NATO rules exist so
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that the alliance can operate as one big military rather than a collection of countries
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that all happen to be on the same side.
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A big thing is logistics, obviously.
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As illustrated by my metaphorical example where I murdered an innocent Portuguese man, NATO pushes for standard ammunition so that people can share ammo.
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Standard petroleum types, so that the same fuel Italy uses in its tanks,
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can also be used in a generator that some Czech dude is using to charge his personal morale-boosting equipment.
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Whatever you think that thing was I just showed on screen, that's what it was.
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But a lot more is standardized across the board, not just the things I mentioned.
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Everything from unit symbols, how weather is reported, the size of screw heads, how batteries are labeled, and the shape
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and size of mid-air refueling probe holes are all standardized so that everyone can use everyone else's stuff.
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But there are other rules that have to do with specific capabilities,
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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,
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to the sequence of events after the pilot was hauled back onto the bird.
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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,
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ultimately making them more effective.
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This kind of standardization means that a Spanish fighter pilot, if he got shot down, could be rescued by a German rescue helicopter team,
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even if the two countries had never actually practiced that kind of thing together.
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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.
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If the Swiss, I don't know, finally decided that neutrality is for cowards and magically join the alliance tomorrow,
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I don't think anyone would take that as an aggressive, bloodthirsty war posture.
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But what it does do, though, is make working together way easier or just possible to begin with.
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A lot of that is because NATO members have easier access to things like shared classified information and technology.
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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,
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there is an easy and already established line of communication to make that happen.
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If, however, I wanted to tell Ireland this really cool fact I learned
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while looking at a neat laptop with a red wire coming out of it, it would be much harder.
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Take a lot more time, and by the time they did get that super cool fact, it might not be useful to them anymore.
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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,
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very important things, but I don't want to get too much into the weeds
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here before I lose even more of the audience with minute details.
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The takeaway is that there are literally thousands of these examples.
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The rules and sets make sure
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that each military has a bare minimum level of performance and follows some standards that make interoperability possible.
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So while the US could probably handle Russia without Estonia's help, we can stage our military in that country and already know
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that we can use their jet fuel and talk on the same radio frequencies.
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But probably one of the biggest questions right now is why NATO is a thing in a post-Cold War era.
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What exactly is the point these days?
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Neither the USSR or the Warsaw Pact, even exist anymore.
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Even more to consider is that 10 countries
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that would have fought against NATO in World War 3 just 40 years ago are now fully-fledged NATO members themselves.
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Russia, the country NATO is always talking about fighting, can't even win a war against its neighbor,
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so the idea that they'd be able to amass a horde and storm across Europe is basically laughable.
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So why is the alliance spending trillions as if it's going to happen tomorrow?
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It's a good criticism.
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And unfortunately, the argument against that line of thinking is hard to quantify with a number
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or a fact that's going to make everyone happy.
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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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| Конструкция | В видео |
|---|---|
| Условные предложения if + предложение, will/would + глагол — условие и его результат | if this video gets 30,000 likes, I'll grow · if Montenegro, Albania, or North Macedonia would win |
| Present Perfect have/has + причастие прошедшего времени — прошлое действие, важное сейчас | has left · has actually changed · has changed |
| Пассивный залог be + причастие прошедшего времени — важно, что происходит, а не кто это делает | is called · was told · be slapped |
| Придаточные определительные who / which + предложение — уточнение о человеке или предмете | people who ask · match, which makes · ANZUS, which is |
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