Comment by buckle8017
8 hours ago
Europe would need to increase military spending to 20+% of GDP to plausibly defend themselves.
The EU is a vassal state through and through, they just haven't accepted this yet.
8 hours ago
Europe would need to increase military spending to 20+% of GDP to plausibly defend themselves.
The EU is a vassal state through and through, they just haven't accepted this yet.
Defend against what?
France has nukes, so those aren't a plausible threat. Any kind of land invasion is doomed to fail - the US didn't even manage to beat a bunch of goat herders in one of the poorest countries of the world. A naval blockade is the most likely to succeed - except for the whole "land bridge to Asia/Africa" part. And if the blockade does succeed and the continent starts to starve, there's the whole "France has nukes" part again...
Besides, do you really think China/India won't get involved? And do you really think the US public is going to accept their friends and family dying because some power-hungry politician got the braindead idea to send them against Europe? The reception will be worse than Vietnam!
> they just haven't accepted this yet.
What on earth are you talking about???
We have accepted that for a long time, and there are no plans to change it.
Why do you think there is zero movement to disentangle from any important US dependencies? Such as software. There is nothing whatsoever happening to be any less dependent on the US, part from defense, and that only after repeated urging and finally some real force-pressure to get the EU moving (even after Trump's first term little to nothing actually happened).
European countries are perfectly fine with where they are, if any less dependency on the US is to happen, it will only be after huge pressure from the US.
That is deliberate, they just don't see value in e.g. trying to recreate the Microsoft and other software ecosystems. After all, it already exists, so why compete at that point? It does not make economic sense. Also, it is not Europe's strength: Every country would, in practice, (have to) develop their own version, while in the US a company can easily scale across the entire nation. For Software, it makes no (economic) sense for Europe to compete in an area where this kind of scale is important.
And that strength argument, only some minor politicians, and some journalists, keep bringing up headlines such as "Can Germany save Europe?", or celebrating "Germany back on the world stage" when there is some minor meeting hosted by Germany (seen recently). The vast majority of people could not care less about being "number one" and "leading (anything, politically)".
Not trying to reinvent the wheel, or many wheels actually, out of some "pride" moment seems pretty foolish to me. If the US is good producing this or that, we get it from there, so what? Everybody, including the US, made even more far-reaching similar decisions with industry moved to China. Compared to that, European reliance on the US is not much, and pretty much unavoidable, unless one gives up lots of wealth.
EU is not a state, it's a union of states.