Europe

My guess is they need to fund big armies to suppress the periphery of their empire in the long term. It's not so much Russia threatening to expand. Ukraine is written down as a loss unofficially.

But now why would poor nations stay members of the EU when they are going to get drained of assets and economically exploited? They are at risk of leaving and trading with nations that have more economic activity.

The imperialists use the military when the economy is going terribly. The biggest demand for tanks is intimidating your civilians rolling around your own urban areas. The political puppets need military forces to strong arm their people.

The symptoms of a society in perpetual defeat, retreat and misery.

Bluster. They are trying to look decisive and like they have actual stances on anything that isn't drip-fed them through Israeli and US lobbyists, and capital interests. They want to cover up the fact that they have eviscerated their democracies, plundered their public sectors with generations of austerity, effectively banned any type of opposition to neoliberalism and determined to not act against Israel regardless of how profane the human cost of their crimes. These are not people with vision and purpose. They are circling the drain and trying to not raise any alarm that their whole society is circling with them. Whatever awaits Europe, it is not going to be a world power, let's be clear. Without colonies Europe has nothing. Which is whatever. The west is dying and it's about time.

For generations they’ve coasted on the rhetoric of moral superiority while riding the US’ imperial coattails. The EU as an institution was designed for and has always lived under this junior partner arrangement. I shouldn’t be surprised if they’ve lost the institutional knowledge for a broad swath of sovereign state skills. And the states are semi-devolved under a suprastate that itself was never designed to be a fully independent, sovereign player on the world stage.