Out of Europe to Save Europe

NATO expansion to include Ukraine was the primary cause of the war now ravaging eastern Ukraine , says Julian Zelizer .

Zelizer : U.S. membership in NATO has eroded republican foundations on which the country is based.

The American security blanket has allowed European security to atrophy, Zelizer says.

The time has come for the Trump administration to begin to think about what had been unthinkable.

May 9 marks 80 years since the end of the Second World War in Europe and could provide an opening for the administration to begin the long, arduous process of creating a whole, free Europe .

The task of repairing the badly frayed—if not completely broken—relations between Russia and Europe will need attention.

But the Europeans seem to have willfully forgotten who it was exactly who freed the camps—likely because they are trying to forget who set them up, then operated them, in the first place. It is in the American interest to have a semblance of comity on the continent. That requires, among other things, demilitarizing America ’s role in Europe . After Ukraine comes the hard work: that of peacemaking..