Comment by chasd00
5 days ago
Why would you rely on another nation for defense infrastructure? It makes zero sense for Europe to rely on starshield in the first place.
5 days ago
Why would you rely on another nation for defense infrastructure? It makes zero sense for Europe to rely on starshield in the first place.
Europe itself a collection of nations. The US was traditionally an ally and for the better part of a century we've been comfortably building out a host of projects together, from military to science to cultural goods. That the US has apparently stepped away from working cooperatively is genuinely surprising and disappointing, but we shouldn't let it normalise the idea that we can only ever trust others of our own nation. Especially in Europe where you obviously have countries like Belgium that aren't nation states to begin with.
Belgium absolutely is a nation state. They're as sovereign as the United States is. In some ways more sovereign.
If we're being pedantic, the US is not a nation-state (because the US doesn't really have a coherent "nation"), and I suspect for similar reasons you could claim that Belgium is not a coherent nation either, given the Flemish/Walloon divisions in the state.
That said, a lot of people use nation state as a synonym for sovereign state, and Belgium is as much a sovereign state as the US is.
1 reply →
Belgium is a state, and not a nation. "Nation state" has a specific meaning, separate from "state". Belgium has two major cultural groups (Walloon and Flemish) who tend to be at odds with each other, hence is not a nation. Contrast Kurdistan, which is a nation but not a state.
2 replies →
I never questioned Belgium's sovereignty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multinational_state
> Especially in Europe where you obviously have countries like Belgium that aren't nation states to begin with.
Belgium has been independent for almost 200 years, and is one of the founding members of the the UN. In what possible way is it not a nation state?
Belgium has no clear majority nation. It's a multinational state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multinational_state
Most countries are roughly the size of a US state. How many US states could be entirely self-sufficient on defense infrastructure?
All the ones that were doing so, before they started relying on the America. Believe it or not, the world still span before the USA.
I think you misread the question I asked.
Nonetheless, even today, the vast majority of countries are not self-sufficient on defense infrastructure, and this has been true for most of the modern era. The most obvious deficiency is in naval terms: the number of countries who have enough of a navy that they can do something about "my shipping is being attacked by pirates" without help from other people is plausibly at most five (US, UK, France, Russia, China), and I have my doubts about half of those.
1 reply →
All of them as long as they didn't keep spending money on bombing poor people.
Only if you ignore the last 100 years of geopolitics. But, fair point.
Not just infrastructure. Europe has depended on the US for its entire defense apparatus for decades. Everyone loves to scoff at the billions America throws away on fighter jets until Putin rolls out of bed and invades your nextdoor neighbor.
Europe has been forced to depend on the US. The UK particularly had a world-leading civil and military aviation industry until the US "suggested" this was unwelcome.
The UK signed an agreement with the US to supply research for the Manhattan Project, in the naive belief the results would be shared.
The US said "Nuh uh - that's classified" and the UK had to develop its own program from scratch.
Then the US lobbied to have that thrown away so the UK would be locked into Polaris and then Trident.
And so on. NATO has very much been a showroom for US arms sales, and competition has been discouraged - not always effectively, but the implied pressure has always been there.
> Europe has been forced to depend on the US.
It's been more carrots than the (non-zero) sticks.
I think it's under selling Europe's agency to characterise the relationship as 'forced'.
And now that the US is increasingly seen as unreliable, Europe is (slowly?) decoupling - which is what you'd expect as a mutually beneficial relationship sours.
> Germany reached the NATO baseline target of 2% of GDP in 2024 for the first time since 1991.
Because until a certain orangutang broke it, the new world order was doing rather nicely.
Powerful people got together and decided the world would be a nice place if everyone worked together. Their solution for ensuring that happened whilst taking human behaviours into account was global capitalism.
Despite its downsides (some of which we're only starting to see the consequences of) you have to admit that it was doing its job. Countries were cooperating because it was in their best interest. It was always a delicate thing though, and the orangutang broke the trust it relied on.
It might seem naive now, but "bro, of _course_ you can rely on us for service X, why are you even asking?" was an believable response before the orange.
One infinitely sad purported reason was that Starshield has "unparalleled end-to-end user data encryption".......
Because, yes, you get E2EE by having the operator do the encryption :facepalm: