And nevertheless, with the USN having almost complete naval and air superiority in all three locations, they would all fall. I'm not saying it would be a complete cakewalk, but it wont be very hard either.
To be honest you're underating the ability of the EU to defend those locations. Even a few thousand entrenched light infantry can be a monumental pain in the ass to clear out if they really want to make a fight of it.
Look at the performance of the IDF in the Lebanon recently for an example there, even with gross military superiority they still had major problems.
The EU won't own the Med.
The Straits of Gibraltar are easily closed to shipping (heck they're so narrow you can do it with artillery) and any US vessels already in there are Conventional Submarine fodder as the USN Nuclear Subs are at a severe disadvantage in waters like that. Closing the Suez Canal isn't that difficult either assuming Egypt lets the USN use it anyway.
In the event of a great US-EU world war, Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia will cooperate with the US. Israel would do it willingly, and Egypt and Saudi Arabia are both American allies which received a lot of military help from the US so they would join too. Whatever qualms the latter two might have, 170,000 US troops in Iraq will be incentive enough.
Israel would have to be
insane not to stay neutral. It couldn't possibly risk pissing off the Europeans enough for them to say to various Arab countries "how would you like us to start shipping you high-tech NATO weaponry? Shall we say a couple of billion Euro's worth of Shoulder-Launched SAM's and Anti-Tank Missiles for a start?'
If we were facing US invasion we'd arm
Iran for pities sake for much the same reason that Israel helped them in the 1980's against Iraq.
Turkey will stay neutral until it has no choice.
Then it'll throw in its lot with Europe. Too much to lose.
With that, you have the Suez Canal and the Eastern Mediterranean all the way to Greece under American control on Day 1 of the war. Taking the rest of N. Africa will be a piece of cake, considering the fact that the only N. African army that's worth something is the Egyptian one. So the Med will be one huge warzone, with European control of the North and American control of the South. It would make for some great air battles.
How many warships would the USN have to lose to European Air and Submarine attacks before it started to think the Med was a bit too hot for it? They just don't have enough carriers in the area to possibly withstand the hundreds of aircraft that could be thrown at them once the Europeans get their act together even if they could magically sink all the subs hunting them.
Yes, but it's the EU's coasts that would be under fire, and it's the EU that will lose access to most of the world's markets. As already mentioned, the US has a total superiority in long range bombers and cruise missiles.
None of the US bomber fleet would survive raids into EU Airspace (we've got gear that can even track the B2A let alone B-1B's and B-52's) and the US doesn't actually have a fraction of the cruise missiles needed to more than irritate the Europeans, there's just too many damn targets.
Of course that EU military production will make a huge leap, but considering that the EU will be on the defensive from Day 1 and that, as you said, it's existing defense manufacturing infrastructure is under utilized, the US will be able to produce much more and much faster.
Even at full tilt production the US can't produce conventional munitions fast enough to cause sufficient damage to the EU to get the job done before the Europeans are ramping up their own lines. Once the USN submarines and surface vessels have run out of Cruise Missiles they'll have to be restocked and again there's far,
far more targets than missiles.
Let's be honest, the USAF doesn't even have enough bombs in storage to get the job done
Think of all the NATO air missions that had to be flown against Serbia only to find out afterwards they hadn't even destroyed a fraction of the equipment they thought they had. Scale that up to the whole EU and think about it again.
Again, it's true but it will be much harder for Europe to mobilize that it would be for the US. I'd wager that by the time Europe finally gets it's industries organized(not so easy with 25 countries speaking different languages and having different standards), an American invasion army will be already making it's first steps on European soil.
Existing EU military formations are more than sufficient to smash any conceivable US invasion. We're talking
millions of troops backed by thousands of tanks and artillery pieces where the Europeans are well trained professional soldiers not middle-eastern rabble and the technology gap isn't the gulf it was fighting against the Iraqi's either.
