Well, in all scenarios there is war:
We side with the US: war on our eastern front. We side with Russia: war on our western front. We stay on our own, like Afd, Hungary and RN wants: war on both sides.
It’s OK: we are Europeans, we have evolved an art of war, and we can take on foes. But we do need politicians with enough balls to announce the bad news.
Russia is the easiest foe to bring down, it has been economically ground to death by their current war. We can take their leadership out quite fast if it comes to that , we all know that , it’s just that no one had the balls to do it because naturally, nukes are frightening. But there isn’t much choice and the more we linger the higher the probability of nukes going of anyways (but by what will they be replaced and if we succeed, there has been 20 years of “z-patriots” brainwashing that will fast destroy anybody they don’t like at the top of Russia)
Then there is the US, they don’t like us but there has to be a way to at least make them back-off our territory.
I think the first thing to do is strike that new US empire economically (yeah, we’ll lose some feathers, but who cares about feathers when our dream of long lasting peace has been shattered in such a way that our own survival is in jeopardy (read again the first three sentences I wrote)).
The best weapon at-hand we have to kill influence from both countries is to ban (when I say “ban”, I mean it as totally cut off, no vpn’s, no DNS masquerading: this is serious business, not a music pirating site), so ban quite a few IM services and ban any crypto transaction on EU soil while forcing all our banks and companies to surrender all their crypto assets to the ECB to be used on a surprise attack, in the middle of one of the dips those crypto have from time to time. If influencers can’t be paid, then they won influence much apart from what we pay them to say. There will be hard, stupidly obvious propaganda to be made. And as Russia or the recent elections in the US show: most people are too dumb to notice brainwashing when it’s applied to them, so be it.
As far as real weapons go: apart from France, the EU is too dependant on US weapon tech to do anything meaningful against the US. So we’ve got French nukes (hurray!) but that’s all, and they cannot be used except if troops mass near the EU border. And France hasn’t got enough conventional weapons for everyone, their army is quite good but is, understandably, made to protect their borders, not the vast borders of the EU despite their relatively good logistics.
So our at-hand weapons are the size of our market and the ability to seriously fuck around with others economies. Let’s do that and go further if we really need to but we cannot count on big military manoeuvres for the foreseeable future (six months is the Max period on which we can test scenarios in these uncertain times).
Everyone looses. I’m extremely afraid of that scenario, but there is a non null probability of it happening. Meddling within the confines of the Kremlin intelligentsia can bring that kind of result but still remain necessary to achieve peace fast.
A nuclear war isn’t a war: it’s the end of it. France would be the one initiating it. They have a quite brutal doctrine: There is only one person to decide and validate the launch, no warning to be given (except if it’s troops amassing, then a 35Kton nuke is used on the massed troops to serve as a warning) , and no second wave, all weapons are fired in one wave, then pray. France is small compared to the US, Russia or China, their strategy is to tell those bigger armies that if they attack France, to expect to lose large swath of their civilian population. The French nukes are not targeted towards army bases or nuclear launch sites but population centres only, for that reason.