@SashoTodorov1 To be fair, France is hardly the only country struggling to cope with the apparent fact that the 'you must be this tall to ride' great power bar is apparently north of 150m people and $4trn nominal GDP.

@SashoTodorov1 But I think there's also just a problem here in that no one really expects France to go out on a limb for them...there's just no post-world-war history to suggest you should. Same for Germany.

@SashoTodorov1 I think the realist crowd really underestimates what a structural advantage a *century* of 'America Rides To the Rescue (Whether You Want or Need It Or Not)' is when it comes to forming alliances.

@SashoTodorov1 If you are not a US ally, that history isn't very comforting because we might suddenly decide - without much of a good reason - to 'rescue' you in the least helpful way possible.
But for a treaty ally or country with implicit security guarantee, that cowboy spirit is fantastic.

@SashoTodorov1 You'd have to be a maniac, for instance, to pin your hopes on France initiating a world-ending nuclear holocaust in order to defend your small, economically non-critical Baltic country.
We Americans, however, are just the right kind of crazy to do exactly that.