Comment by ta20240528
7 days ago
"The golden prize for America's enemies is to remove the US dollar as a global reserve currency."
I would argue that for this to become even remotely possible, America's list of enemies must not automatically become everyone else's enemies too.
that is to say: the USA's secondary statutes have to become ineffective.
To do this, the EU's blocking statutes (to ignore secondary sanctions) have to be effective. Right now Europe's own companies just ignore the statutes to keep their US trade.
To make the blocking statues effective, the EU's own research recommended fines/sanctions/bans/… on licences for foreign (read US) banks, and companies that ignore the statue and don't serve EU companies trading with sanctioned countries.
But to do that, the EU would need alternatives to American services.
Power and influence follow sovereignty.
€0,02
Europeans have a lot of alternatives to American services, including building out their own.
What Europeans truly lack is the ability to defend itself without the U.S. They have the technical know how and can build the manufacturing capacity but that will take a decade at least.
Also, European financing is just not as strong.
However, with the U.S. voluntarily walking away from its role as the center of the world, this may not be a problem for too long.
Tech is the easiest service to replace considering American tech workers by insisting on WFH have already largely eliminated the geographical advantages American tech used to have.
Between three and five members of the EU could become nuclear powers complete with delivery systems within a year if there was political will. A couple of them in significantly less than a year. If the EU is truly responsible for its own defense, then it gets to choose how to go about that. There is only one way to do that in the time frame in which it will become necessary.
Nuclear is a bragging tool, but only useful in real war if things are going bad enough that you decide to end the world.
What will take Europe most of a decade is the combination of all the things you really want during war so you are not forced to end the world. Air defense - they have some but not near enough without the US. 5th generation fighter jets. Bombers. A navy - they have some great things but are missing many useful ships. They seem to have enough tanks, but are missing many other parts a modern army needs. And all of the above needs ammunition - they cannot provide Ukraine what is needed 3 years into that war - means they can't scale up to their owns needs if a war were to break out.
Fortunately war with Europe seems unlikely right now, but that can change fast and you need to be ready. Never has a battleship started during a war seen battle in that same war. (I don't know how to verify that claim, but it seems reasonable anyway)
6 replies →
> What Europeans truly lack is the ability to defend itself without the U.S.
Pushing this message is disinformation that has been particularly successful part of the OrangeMan administration.
Europe can defend itself. Combined they have huge military resources and technological replacements for most of what the US can provide.
So - Europe can defend itself. But it prefers to use money, allies and Ukrainian soldiers lives to avoid having to.
The Chinese have alternatives to American services. Europeans could have too if we wanted.
Unless you have a magic lamp, “wanting” is not enough to achieve effective change.
What Europeans need is pragmatic governments and politicians. In fact it might be easier to find a magic lamp than an honest politician.
US big tech companies are dominant because they are monopolies not because they are technological marvels.
If we were to ban US social media, European alternatives would emerge very fast.
The TikTok case in US might be a good playbook for the future. Require markets that US based companies have a near monopoly and require them to divest on EU and onshore operations. You solve tech hegemony and tax evasion in no time.
China has goods and services, but don't underestimate the language barrier for services. Language is a barrier between EU member nations providing each other services, even though machine translation is OK between those languages and most of us learned one of the other nation's languages in school; The gap between Chinese and Latin-Germanic languages is much larger.
I'd give an example, but every time I have previously shown an example of machine translated Chinese to demonstrate that AI is bad at translating English into Chinese, the responses miss the point of the example — criticising the translation whose very errors are meant to demonstrate how bad current AI is.
> Right now Europe's own companies just ignore the statutes to keep their US trade.
If it’s the trade keeping EU companies in line, isn’t the destruction of trade that these tariffs are intended to achieve precisely the kind of thing that will then prevent them from staying in line in the future?
If its like last time, European strategy (ex France maybe) will rise no higher than "let's just try ride out the next four years, then things will go back to normal".