Hey! Don't make fun of us! You'd get used to the bottle caps too. Not really that unnoying, except for smoothies, where a bit of the smoothie drips down on the bottleneck and makes everything sticky.

And about the reaction time - politics is in a way expression of the will of the masses. And that depends on how they are informed. They are maybe not yet on point, but they are getting there.

Nowadays people are slowly realizing that Merkel's "all refugees welcome" idea was stupid and can't work. Both ineffective as a means to help people - that's cheapest/most effective closer to their homes. And as immigration policy - getting more hands to work doesn't work with people who refuse to work and refuse to integrate. Part of that refusal comes from locals that are "pro immigrants" on social media, but refuse to live in same neighbourhoods as immigrants or hire them.

More and more people are also realizing that carbon neutrality was often green washing. People are waking up to the fact that execution of good willing ideas with disregard for economic circumstances, or just reality in general, doesn't have good results.

Only the Russian threat is not being realized soon enough. It's not like during cold war, Russia doesn't have the conventional army to conquer even the westernmost tip of Spain.

Or we think it doesn't? Look at how two Ukrainian drone squads owned two NATO battalions of combined tanks & mechanized infantry in latest war exercises. With no losses on their side. We can infer that russian capabilities are more or less similar.

But that drone event aside, the perception of threat in Europe is not uniform. Russia will likely only take everything east of Germany, (at least first, before rebuilding and attacking again). So Italy or Spain won't reduce their social spending to buy/ invest in defence to protect Poland, Czech or Romania.

There also is a slowly forming pro-russian coalition of Slovaks and Hungarians. Who still, to this day, keep buying Russian oil. Yeah, when Putin is laughing that Europe is still buying Russian oil, he's not mentioning that it's just the pro Russian Hungary. Whos prime minister, Orban, is now in threat of loosing next elections. But the USA support is there already, Rubio is helping Orban in campaign for 12th of april elections.

[sarcasm]So to sum up. Yeah, Europeans are waisting energy on bottle caps. But USA is funding pro-russian parties and helping pro-russian politicians. We in Europe can only hope that if Russia attacks, USA will not join the war, because it's becoming quite evident on whos side USA would fight. [/sarcasm]