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Legionarii
No, Europe could not defend itself against a outside aggression if the US were to leave NATO, given how the US is the manpower behind the whole military pact. Europe as a whole can barely agree on anything nowadays, let alone put their focus on the NATO contracted commitments.
And i strongly disagree. The whole concept is bizarre to start with, Russia can´t wage a war against the whole of Europe. This isn´t 1940. But...
If ie. EU countries would combine all of their forces i am pretty certain of that Russia couldn´t win such a scenario. Yep, Russia has a lot of troops and equipment but that doesn´t mean they could use it all. A majority of all their forces aren´t battle ready- or even trained enough. While if you ONLY look at European countries and their ACTIVE forces, they will imho have an upper hand...by far.
Ie. just the small country of Finland has about 165000 active soldiers, and a staggering reserve of 900000(!). Germany has about 180000 soldiers. UK, Italy and France has about 100000 soldiers each. Not counting reserves. Further more most countries in the EU has modern equipment, while Russia has a really wide variety of both modern and obsolete equipment.
Finally, a Total War scenario is extremely unlikely anyhow. But if you just play with the thought, there is still a lot of things you have to consider. Ie. If Russia would like to start a war, they have to arm their troops and achieve some sort of readiness. In todays world, an armament like that is close to impossible to hide. You can´t move hundreds of thousands of troops, thousands of vehicles etc. The whole world would detect it. Even if they sped everything up as much as possible, bordering countries would also start to scramble their forces. And once the attack is finally released, the rest of Europe will have a lot of time to arm their forces to a complete maximum.
Neighbouring countries would have a really hard time, but it is still not a walk in the park. I highly doubt ie. Russia could just steamroll into Finland and win in a few days/weeks. It they would spread out on multiple flanks (towards other countries), it would render even Russia kind of weak.
