I'm honestly not particularly bothered by NATO defense expenditures. NATO member states could spend twice as much per capita, and I'd still be wondering why we insisted on continuing to occupy a major role in European defense.

My disinterest in economic and political entanglements with EU states (and many others) is fairly multivariate, but I'll briefly touch upon the largest reasons.

1st, I believe that the more multinational our companies are, the less financially, economically and culturally interested they become in America's domestic well-being.

Our most economically well-connected and well-to-do see themselves as global citizens who happen to live in the US. They are above petty things such as nationality, happily siphoning US subsidies, and leveraging American tax loopholes with no sense of loyalty or obligation to the country in-which they reside, where their success was made possible, even while their lobbyists do everything possible to keep the interests of American citizens on the backburner.

The few times they indulge in true charity, it's usually as some high-minded investment in the third world.

When they do get involved in domestic politics, it's often only to whine about how distrusting American's have become of the institutions they themselves deliberately compromised, or to push some ill-considered policy that sounds like it would make the country better, but benefits them in some indirect way while ignoring local cultures.

2nd, I think a clean civilizational break would be good for the US and the EU. I'm well aware of Europe's superior standards of living, as are America's liberals. Many people in the US have become disinterested in the national geography (culturally and spatially), and out of an abundance of envy for Europe's achievements and lack understanding for their origins, naively believe we could remap European models of governance, and social services onto the US with few negative consequences. We've become intellectually lazy about our own domestic development, and overly fobd of universalist philosophies towards governance.

We would rather argue over whether to parrot other nations we believe have reached the end of history, or abolish the government altogether (effectively) than we would take the time to consider the US within its own cultural, geographical, and historical context.

We should begin to regard the US as a civilization apart from the European West. Europe has wholesale adopted concepts of positive rights, and benevolent if universal governance, while we have historically been a land of negative rights, and minimal state involvement. The further into history we go, the more bifurcated our civilization's cultural mindsets become, and the earlier we (Amerixans) acknowledge these differences consciously, the sooner we (Americans) can begin to introspect and work around the advantages and limitations that this realizaton entails.

3rd, the longer we operate as a regional security garuntor, the more conflicts we're responsible for keeping frozen, the more interested the world is in our domestic affairs, and the less sovereignty we have in both our domestic and foreign affairs. My shorthand is to refer people to the Saudi, and Israeli lobbies as examples of how our international relations can have outsized effects on our domestic affairs.