Perhaps one of them is to keep bailing out Europe every time it stops defense spending in the name of peace and gets mauled by others.
FFS, the problem with Europe is that there was a war within it in every damn generation and current European project is aimed at stopping that. I fully support EU and want to see it go even more federal because we had war in 1990's.
Europe, as a whole, hasn't been mauled by a foreign force in more then a few centuries.
So, mauling Europe is pure bullshit. As for "Russian threat", there is no realistic threat to "Europe", there is a threat to Russian neighbours. EU can defend against Russia just fine even at current defence spending and has more than enough reserves to spend more. Russia is currently going through tough economic period that will get even worse because EU and US can wage war without shooting bullets, like sanctions.
Russian army is still pretty shitty and things going in Ukraine are no indication they can take EU or NATO because Ukrainian army was basically useless and they are just starting to work on it.
Russia needs to spend at least a decade modernizing their army to just get close to levels of modern western armies, not to mention tons of old Soviet equipment they need to scrap and buy new one. Their military spending has no foundations in their economy and with oil prices this low they will lose even more time before they are ready to even think of any kind of European conquest.
On the other hand, EU can start spending more any time it chooses. EU is currently outspending Russia so much that Russia can only dream to spend that much on their military toys, Russian budget is around 0 billion $, while EU combined is around 250 billion $.
Russia[a] 87.8 4.1
While:
France 61.2 2.2
United Kingdom 57.9 2.3
Germany[a] 48.8 1.4
Russia is already spending much higher percentage of GDP on military and can't even match top two countries in EU. Getting top three EU spenders to 3% would outspend current Russian budget by 3 to 1. Let this sink a bit .....
There is no fucking way "Europe" can be mauled by any country except US and that would also be debatable.