Comment by Quarrel
1 day ago
> Stop payment resulted in the US pulling from the pre payment for the F35s...
Which Switzerland then reluctantly agreed was allowed under the terms.
As you say, totally being taken to the cleaners, and it is unclear how they escape in the short term.
The more this happens though, the more deals like Italy's make senese, irrespective of the performance comparison of the two planes.
If the US is going to be an unreliable partner, that will filter through in many many ways, and the US can hardly blame anyone but themselves (well, I'm sure some fingers will get pointed internally).
It’s not just Europeans who are beginning to realize that the U.S. can’t be trusted; Australians are still waiting for a hypothetical delivery date for their AUKUS submarines.
The Gulf states find themselves with too few interceptor missiles and a war in Iran.
The Japanese and Koreans are building as many war ships as they can.
I don't understand why US weapons manufactures are not lobbying harder. They are losing the European market just as the largest rearmament since ww2 happens.
Maybe they are and its just a lost cause with the US administration.
> I don't understand why US weapons manufactures are not lobbying harder
It doesn’t really matter if your product is better or cheaper, if the customer thinks that service and spare parts might possibly be withdrawn in the future for political (or whatever) reasons they won’t buy your product.
That is what they need the political lobbying for. Obviously not to help their pricing.
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A major issue is that the US manufacturers cannot keep up with demand even as they scale up production capacity. The current order backlog of approved foreign military sales of US weapons systems is approaching $1T and growing faster than they can fill the orders.
This is creating secondary fallout as the orders from various countries get re-prioritized. It is not strictly first-come, first-served order fulfillment; you can find your order pushed back in the queue for reasons.
Don’t think of them as companies in the normal sense. There’s no meaningful competition anymore and they have rolled everything up. They are essentially national industries now.
itll be hard for US weapons manufacturers to win when a big part of the rearmament is going to be around deterring the US just as much as deterring Russia
The rearmament is mostly happening because the US has shown itself a bad unreliable partner that abuses interdependence.
No lobbying can change the risk assessment where America is the risk factor.
They're very scared of their boss and the CEOs are short sighted by virtue of their compensation packages.
You have to understand that the smartest people in the US didn’t vote for this administration and are just as horrified as everyone else with how inept and pathetic this administration is. Unfortunately we’re a minority, the senate’s design (Wyoming has the same number of senators as California even though a small city in CA may have more people than the whole state) and the US is so ridiculously gerrymandered.
Sorry everybody but we just have to wait this stupidity out.
This stupidity is not going to simply be waited out. It is becoming even further entrenched.
There are a lot of issues in the American political system but the structure of the Senate is not one of those.
It was explicitly created as a way to balance sovereignty of the states against populism, such as that enacted by MAGA or leftists.
If you are a small state like Vermont, you don’t want to just have California, New York, and Texas dictating all rules and laws for the country by sheer weight of their population sizes. That is expressed in the House, but the Senate serves to balance that and ensure that populists don’t run roughshod over the country.
Without such a structure states with less population would either band together and create their own super states - and you can see where this leads, or they wouldn’t have agreed to join the US in the first place.
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Waiting it out was the first strategy in Europe but it's clearly moving into something else.
> Sorry everybody but we just have to wait this stupidity out.
And the rest of the world has to suffer the consequences. It has been incredible watching americans shrugging off any responsibility.
Insufferable hypocrites.
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> the smartest people in the US didn’t vote for this administration
Trump has support from SV and Wall Street leaders, and the whole Republican Party.
> gerrymandered
Trump won the popular vote, and iirc the GOP got more total votes for the House of Representatives. What about for the Senate? Sure NY and CA are big, but so are FL and TX.
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You can’t lobby the Trump or “America First” crowd to not be themselves.