re: "its band wagon"

2004 will do for a date, when Anglo-merican gov't executed a "pivot" away from NATO. Neither have been any good at alliances to begin with. I suppose, by then equivocation of the willing (the civilian rather than NATO careerists) in support of the QWOT effort, rising industrial and monetary rivalry (1998), not to mention tepid reception of the PNAC led by the other idiot, G.W. Bush, provoked it.

The Surge

Unilateral escalation of hostilities on the greater middle-east front and regression to red-baiting espionage on the western front foreshadowed a schism: This lede, I think, belongs to the section in a future chapter of an AP US-History-Opposed-to- European History textbook (Kindle edition), dedicated to "international relations." Tap to watch the alpha, "Either you're for us or against us," (2001) and the omega, "Fuck the EU" (2014). But how?

DNC Super Delegates Leap PNAC, GWOT, MAGA into 1951

Defamation. It's a comparatively cheap stimulus. The mess o'er Syria is winding down. And it's ballsy! Un-American Activities interrogation of 28 unfree, sovereign nations, 600M, to peel off, say, a couple hundred recruits for KAOS. VOA/NPR reports, "Democrats Detail Russian Election Interference In Europe."

Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are out with a new report [206 pp] detailing [!] Russian interference in 19 European countries. NPR's Steve Inskeep talks to Sen. Ben "Criminalize BDS" Cardin.
[...]
INSKEEP: ...I'd like to ask though, other than the United States, where the intelligence agencies did find Russia with substantial interference, has Russia actually changed the election results in very many places?
CARDIN: Well, that's impossible [!] to tell. We know that they were very active, as you pointed out, in France and Germany. We know in the U.K., they were active in the Brexit referendum. Did they influence the result? I don't think we'll ever know for sure. But we know that they did try to interfere with the democratic institutions of free elections.

The report is a masterpiece of WTF, revising 30 years of Putin hagiography, sifting through then refuting published US "intelligence community" RT marketing statistics (Chap. 3, Old Active Measures and Modern Malign Influence Operation), and so forth. The money quote:

Using the funding authorization outlined in the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act as policy guidance, the U.S. government [!] should increase this spending in Europe and Eurasia to at least $250 million over the next two fiscal years.

Beyond Eurozone: Chapter 6

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.