OK, first it was
the Swiss breaking away from the Euro (so far that is working for the Swiss and not so well for the Euro, and
this Jim Grant fella called it back in September, and now we have the ELA (Emergency Liquidation Assistance) activating in
Greece because Greeks are pulling fiat out and the Greeks are running out of collateral (actually I am surprised they have any left, must be land, eh?) and this will only strain the Euro and the ECB and weaken the EU as a whole at a time when NATO seems to be increasingly impotent to handle much of anything.
To that latter point, this excerpt from the comments made by Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves is interesting in a historical context -
I'll tell you something: May 8, 1945, the definitive answer to annex other territories because of the minority living there. Germany must understand Russia - this is a thought of blood and soil for us.
Q: Do you feel like an outsider in the Western Alliance?
Ilves: No, but we feel vindicated. For 20 years, us Eastern Europeans have been told to calm down, that Russia is a normal country. And now they see that we were right.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-15/putin-destroyed-new-world-order-according-estonias-president-ilvesI share his angst. It wasn't me or people like me. It is born of a refusal in the US by too many people to build upon the strength Reagan gave us and continue in that "trust but verify" mode and it started with Bush I and morphed into willfully blind naivitee under Clinton, and then into the surreal trust Bush II had in Vlad to the America in appeasement mode under Obama. And in Europe the Russian issue has been plagued by the same bug since the advent of the Czars - Russia is not quite European and has no history of unauthoritarian self rule and it is further complicated by recent wars of aggression each blames the other for and the old hatreds and resentments (while still present) have been dying off and the near perpetual dominance of left of center political rule has given rise to an environment of accomodation that the Russians have exploited and which now is playing itself out across the continent in economic conflicts, diplomatic sparring, military flexing and in the case of Ukraine direct military invasion and seizure of territory.
Europe is in flux, and instead of caught in it we should be looking to get out of it. It is too late to partner up because it will never be all-in for either party, and half-assed will get you just as dead.
We should sit out the third war brewing there...but I doubt we will.
An economic wipeout might be the only thing keeping us out.