Stephen Bryen predicts the likely outcome of the upcoming NATO summit:
It will be very hard to get a NATO consensus on the road ahead, no matter how much arm twisting Washington uses on its European partners.
Europe is already in a recession thanks to both the COVID catastrophe, to the sanctions on Russian energy and the huge unemployment levels, impacting recent immigrants. The impact of all that is social unrest across Europe. France is already experiencing a serious revolt, and while the French situation has eased in the past few days, it will come back. Meanwhile the German government coalition​ is steadily losing popular support and the AfD, Germany’s right wing party, is now the second most popular party in the country. Sholtz and his coalition partners don’t know what to do: they may try banning AfD as a last ditch effort. Italy is also far from out of the mess, as the country already has a conservative leadership but is being battered by unprecedented waves of immigrants coming from the Middle East.
Europe is out of money and out of bullets. It is not in a mood to give a blank check to Ukraine or risk a bigger war that might spread into Europe.
concluding:
It will be interesting to see how Vilnius plays out. It will certainly be a propagandistic show, but there is a good chance Vilnius will be a flop.
I suspect our European allies will be delighted to see the U. S. contribute more to assisting the Ukrainians. Beyond that I won’t be surprised if there is little consensus.
I don’t expect anything concrete to come out of the meeting, just verbiage.
But the decision by the US to provide cluster bombs to Ukraine is a significant escalation. There is an international treaty to ban them, but the US did not sign. I don’t think Russia did either.
Every month there is a new escalation by the US and a tit-for-tat escalation by Russia. This has got to stop. The only possible endpoint is all-out nuclear war.
What sources are you following for what countries are contributing. Kiel now has Germany 2nd in total aid to Ukraine. As percent of GDP the US is about 12th at 0.3% tied with several other countries like Canada and Germany. (They update often while others I have seen do not but would be nice to compare with other sites.)
https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-support-tracker/
Steve