If the deal was the best available then its not "selling out", its being realistic.
I'm glad the American people at least know how weak the EU is, we should elect someone next time that will bring those tariffs up to 100%, and the EU will have to take it because it's better than a 200% tariff alternative. That's just being realistic, right?
Trump tends to present trade as a zero sum game, but it very much isn’t; outside of limited scenarios (generally developing countries protecting otherwise unviable local industry with targeted tariffs), tariffs generally hurt both sides.
The real thinking is that being a net importer gives you more negotiating power so you can use that to get a better deal.
its well worth looking at what people like Miran and Bessent said (before they were in government) to see what is driving all this.
That sounds more like China backed down than the US did.
The EU is a lot weaker than China. China dominates critical areas of manufacturing, and does not have the level of dependence Europe (non-EU as well) has on the US - I hardly need remind people here of the dependence in IT systems.
I could offer a real life anecdote, but I am not certain where you are going with this conversation.
Trump is "making deals" by making the other option worse. But the problem is, if you take the current best option, that may not be the deal for long. He may do it again... and again...
"I am altering the deal. Pray that I do not alter it further."
When dealing with someone like this, don't play the game the first time.
It’s better than pretending for decades and then getting wiped out.
This was always going to happen eventually.
Ultimately it just reflects the EU's largely self-inflicted economic weakness.
Sure, that's why Germany was building NordStream-2. EU secretly just wants to buy Russian gas because it's cheap and easy.
I guarantee ~5 years after the war is over new deals will be made in place to start pumping gas from the biggest gas station in the world which is right next to EU.
It's no secret, reliable cheap source of the most important resource on the planet right now is essential for any economy today.
What do you expect us to do? Please enlighten me. Buy from ships for much higher prices because the US doesn't like Russia ?
There's a war on now and we are reducing our dependency greatly, did we get complacent, absolutely. Are we working towards getting away from it, absolutely.
Your attitude is just negative for negatives sake.
Then the war started and nordstream got blown up, so now the EU looks to other sources of LNG.
Meaning they require this from the US, so securing this is a win.
You know, trump is all about optics. If you have no idea what is actually going on it may well look like the mascot is the most important person on the field. Trump has made it its life purpose to be a mascot. In the meantime the collapse is brewing in the back.
None of this is specified -- on purpose -- to muddle the waters, because the reader will read into it what they want to read.
The really sad part... Argentina already went down this path with Peronism. They weren't a super-power, but they were economically very successful. And then they weren't.
My suspicion is that there's a quid-pro-quo regarding Ukraine. Economically, the EU is in a strong position, but militarily, a mercurial US has the EU over the barrel due to the Ukraine war.
I predict that Europe's notoriously hard-nosed negotiators (Brexit) will ramp up the pressure as the midterms get closer and if the situation in Ukraine improves.
Just as it was in the pre-WWII timeframe. Henry Ford could have taught Elon Musk a thing or two about racial purity. And if there's even a smidgen of truth to Smedley Butler's testimony about the so-called Business Plot...
None of what's happening now is new. We just forgot, that's all.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_collaboration_with_Na... [2]: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691183060/hi... [3]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/jun/24/terrorism [4]: https://archive.is/A3Gb1#selection-2423.27-2423.39
It buys time, the negotiators also have no power to force each country to implement the stuff , or make the agreement some law.
It would make sense to assume illegal tariffs will be declared illegal with 95% of the chance and just buy time and let the nariisit idiot think he won and go ahead and fuck with someone else for now.
European security depends on winning the Ukraine war.
Anders Puck Nielsen explains it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxapAZRYJ6I
This is why it makes sense to eat the tariffs as long as it keeps the weapons flowing from the US and why EU doesn't mind much paying for them.
This is absurd.
Before 2021 and people were told to "care" about it, Ukraine was a "Westworld" type place for Europeans and others.
If European security depends on Ukraine, why didn't Europe sent any troops there?
This is very new, we fight an existential war now without sending any troops, money should be enough.
Anyway the fact is almost 4 years in Ukraine is probably dead demographically. You can't really reboot a country after having so much of its "fighting age" male population dead. Especially because the one who will be left will be deranged, violent and addicted to all sort of things.
And then having this type of nightmare on or within your borders is another pandora box. So now whether the EU declares it wins or looses the war, it has lost anyway.
On the EU internal politics side, we are literally living in the Star Wars prequel trilogy. No need for much explanations.
You should actually look up the facts before making assumptions. Or, for example, actually visit Ukraine. Currently conscription is between ages 25 and 55; mobilization of younger men is not done specifically to ensure the next generation is not depleted, and men of all ages are fighting. You're actually more likely to get called up if you are in your 30's and 40's than if you are younger.
There's about five million males currently in Ukraine in that age range, of which under 100,000 have been killed and under 500,000 wounded. That's just not an existential crisis at all. Germany the country survived WW2, and about half of their male population died in the war.
This matches the on-the-ground reality: I've visited plenty of Ukrainian cities during the war, and there are plenty of males of all ages. Including young males. Any crisis they face is the same birthrate crisis that all developed countries face. And hopefully, the psychology of war will help reverse that --- Israel also has a notably high birthrate.
> Especially because the one who will be left will be deranged, violent and addicted to all sort of things.
I personally know quite a few Ukrainian soldiers who have seen action. They're all well functioning people. Combat when you're on the side of good rather than evil doesn't have the psychological toil people think it does. It's not nothing. But the supermajority of people recover just fine and go on to lead productive lives.
An important part of that is recognizing that Ukraine is up against an irredeemably evil enemy. You were killing orcs, not men.
> Germany the country survived WW2, and about half of their male population died in the war.
One way to see it is Germany and Europe did not really even survived WWI. The demographic shock and the trauma then lead directly to WWII. At the end Europe has been a shadow of itself since. Most of the problems Europe have today are rippling effects of the deep traumas of the two WW.
Let's say just a third or half the men between 25 and 55 are dead/badly wounded/traumatized/addicted, it will destroy the next generation and society.
Just look on much smaller scale at what the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did to the US in the last 20 years. Even the few professionals and volunteers who fought it abroad brought back a lot of problems still clearly visible in today american society.
This is why those type of wars need to be avoided or stopped at all cost.
Can't agree on this when I see what China managed to do starting way worse than Europe and with no marshal plan to help. You can't keep endlessly blaming the distant past. How far in the past does the blaming go?
In Europe for example I vaguely heard the French government collapsed again. One of the reasons is usually that for decades they can't reform their retirement system. This retirement system was designed for the lost and greatest generations demographics after the war but totally unsustainable after that.
After 80 years of "never again" because of the WWs Europe dangerously under invested in its military capabilities, now it is panicking and the pendulum is swinging in the other direction.
Wars create demographic and societal shock waves, this is one of the reason historian focus so much on them.
I don't have to trust the official numbers. I've been to Ukraine both before and after the full scale invasion. Yes, there are easily visible differences (like the big increase in the number of men you see with visible war wounds). But this isn't a society in collapse. Not yet. Overall, Ukraine is winning this fight and what they're getting in return for that sacrifice is a future.
> Let's say just a third or half the men between 25 and 55 are dead/badly wounded/traumatized/addicted, it will destroy the next generation and society.
Again, we've been through this before. It simply does not destroy society.
> Just look on much smaller scale at what the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did to the US in the last 20 years. Even the few professionals and volunteers who fought it abroad brought back a lot of problems still clearly visible in today american society.
No. America's biggest problems have nothing to do with veterans. It wasn't a veteran who killed that Ukrainian refugee...
> This is why those type of wars need to be avoided or stopped at all cost.
Do you have a better plan? Russia isn't invading Ukraine out of some religious dispute. They're just war criminals who just want to plunder and steal. Negotiations have been tried over and over before: Russia just violates every agreement ever made. The only solution is to defeat Russia. And the fastest way to do that is to crush Russia's economy... which is exactly what Ukraine is (finally!) doing with their strikes on oil and gas infrastructure.
If you want less harm to be done, help Ukraine win faster.
That was my point.
What I find disgusting is those type of proxy wars where one side say we fully support you but won't send any troops or really work on a diplomatic solution (see my original comment). So the war continues for years and kill the population.
Ukraine has exactly one choice: defend themselves, or be subjugated and killed. There is no diplomatic solution. It's very helpful that Ukraine has outside help. But that doesn't make it a proxy war. Regardless of whether or not Ukraine had outside help, they'd still be fighting.
The fact is that the #1 thing Ukraine is doing right now to win is destroying Russian industry with Ukrainian made weapons. They're doing that themselves. Again, that's not a proxy.
What kind of "action" did they see, pushing pencils? Because all soldiers who I saw coming out from action on the front line, meaning killing and seeing your friends get killed under firearms, drones and artillery shells, all had various forms of PTSD. There's no way sane normal people don't get affected witnessing that and can just bounce back to be "well functioning people" as you claim. So maybe they lied to you about their action.
> Combat when you're on the side of good rather than evil doesn't have the psychological toil people think it does.
Then why are so many men deserting and dodging the draft to leave the country, if fighting so chill? Some often almost die trying to cross the border to my country. That pretty much tells me everything.
Frontline trench warfare, including getting wounded.
A high % of the young male population saw combat in WW2. What followed was some of the most successful economic growth and society advancement in human history, especially the US. People are more resilient than you'd think, especially when society as a whole has your back.
This isn't Vietnam or Afghanistan. The mission is crystal clear and vital. Every day at 9am all of Ukraine stops to remember the dead. I've seen this first hand. Cars stop, people get out and stand, and they honor what soldiers are doing for them. It makes a big difference.
Sugarcoated way of saying "most of them died". I wonder what their opinion would be if the dead could speak.
>What followed was some of the most successful economic growth and society advancement in human history
So every 50-100 years or so, we need to kill a lot of people in a world war, so that whoever remains alive in the rubble, gets to see massive economic prosperity because of the labor shortage that follows? Basically, the same thing Mussolini and Hitler were advocating for in their speeches.
Not sure I'd sign up for that. You can keep your "economic growth", I'd rather live mediocre but not die in a war for the elites.
And how will Ukraine achieve this hypothetical growth when all of they're youths moved to Europe? Most Europeans didn't have this luxury of moving to a safe country during and after WW2 but they were forced to fight for their country and then stay and rebuild it. Most Ukrainians are not forced to stay or even if they are, they can smuggle/bribe their way out with money, skills, connection or sheer determination, and can just pack their bags and go shopping for the best country that fits their desires via the asylum system. There was no asylum system of this generosity for Europeans in WW2.
Compared to who/what/when? The US? China? Not a chance. Economically, the EU is as weak now as it ever was.
About 2 decades ago, EU had the same GDP as the US, or even slightly more. Now it's at half of the US and stagnating or even shrinking due to a series of issues it has no solution to, since a lot of it's economy hasn't recovered much post-2008 crash. The EU knows the economic deck is not staked in its favor so it has to bend over to the US now. 2 decades ago the EU would have been able to fend of such actions from a hostile US administration and even more so fron China. But it can't today because it's twice as weak and the US and China are much stronger.
And it's actually very easy to understand why we're here in this situation. If you look at the government budgets in most EU countries today, about a third everywhere is going to welfare and retirement spending with retirement spending dwarfing absolutely everything else in the country by far, with some pensions being higher than some full time wages, which is absurd IMHO. Now, caring for the people and the elderly is noble and all, but you can't win any competition against nations that take that third of GDP that you spend on retirees and they spend it on on economic and military development instead. You just can't win like this, straight up, the math doesn't math. Eventually over the long run, they'll economically or militarily conquer you. So you'll have to choose between spending on providing a cushy lifestyle for retirees, or ensuring a prosperous future for your country.
EU fell asleep at the wheel for over two decades and woke up today that it needs to start the fire again, but it has no money to do so because it's in a economic downturn, an energy crisis, a demographic crisis, a cost-of-living crisis, political extremism crisis left and right, and war next door needing to fight all these fires at once. Very bad timing for EU, and China, Putin and Trump know this and are taking full advantage of "buying the dip" now in Europe the same way European powers were "buying the dip" in their (former) colonies in Africa and across the world. All, and I really mean ALL countries, engage in economic imperialism every chance they get, and Europe somehow forgot its own lesson thinking they are somehow untouchable.
US got concrete economic concessions in writing in exchange for words about security.
EU policy about everything in a nutshell. We are not consulted or taken into account about absolutely anything. What would we even do about it?
It's unlikely to go through as even parties that support VDL are against this deal: https://www.politico.eu/article/european-socialists-come-out...
Obviously Europeans don't want to be the US's b*tch, but even more so they seem to want heavy regulations ensuring their right to relax and cripple growth, err, evil corporations.
I know this isn't popular, and I wish it was different too, but you can't have it both ways.
But the fact that US's diplomatic policy USED TO make us not want to do it.
Europe using US tech was a bonding measure between the two parties.
We can quickly and easy build european "FAANG" overnight, even now more with AI search making it easy to replace Google.
We even already have it: think Ecosia, Protonmail etc. There are tons of those.
The same is for social media. It would be very easy to flip a social media app akin to Instagram, or FB.
The issue is getting users and have alignment that this would be the "european version".
We never had to do this, or think of it, because US had a very benevolent and good relationship with Europe, and US big tech used to make us feel even more connected.
Wups
Did everyone forget after WW 2 central Europe had to rebuild basically all of its infrastructure ?
The hubris in this chat today is deafening.
The internet economy started in the early 90s, 45 years after the war ended in Europe.
GP is correct the EU rested on it's laurels, it wrongly thought that the US would always be there in case of crisis. This was a big mistake and now the chicken have come home to roost.
The EU didn't rest on it's laurels, it spent and is STILL spending time ensuring no MORE wars happen internally. That involves a LOT of negotiating between countries, cultures and goverments. The US didn't have any of that. Do you know how complicated and long it took to get even Ireland into the EU, even when the UK left, there is so much beuracracy between Ireland and the UK it was one of the blocking points.
How, when the EU was an infant in the 90's are we as a block supposed to start throwing investment collectively into a new thing nobody's heard about before, and then convince the newly joined countries, who are struggling to adapt to a Union, balancing individual currencies at the time also.
People clearly have absolutely no idea about the history of the EU and Europe in general and therefore should take a step back from giving their opinions as if it's some kind of insight.
> It wrongly thought that the US would always be there in case of crisis. This was a big mistake and now the chicken have come home to roost.
Again, it was not an assumption, it was an agreement. After WW2. Yet again you're showing either your ignorance or unwillingness to consider what you're saying.
> The EU didn't rest on it's laurels, it spent and is STILL spending time ensuring no MORE wars happen internally. That involves a LOT of negotiating between countries, cultures and governments. The US didn't have any of that. Do you know how complicated and long it took to get even Ireland into the EU, even when the UK left, there is so much bureaucracy between Ireland and the UK it was one of the blocking points.
First you claim that the lack of tech companies rivaling with the US ones is because the EU countries had to rebuild themselves after the war and now you claim that is because the EU itself was just a baby back in the 90s and that somehow stopped Europe from producing these types of companies.
> People clearly have absolutely no idea about the history of the EU and Europe in general and therefore should take a step back from giving their opinions as if it's some kind of insight
People who claim to have all the answers should refrain from engaging with other people as their feelings could get hurt in the face of reality.
The fact of the matter is that Google, AWS, Microsoft an consorts have existed for multiple decades at this stage. The fact is also that the EU has been preaching about digital sovereignty for the last 10 years++ and that barely anything has come out of it.
The same can be said for the defense of the EU countries which basically has consisted in the EU countries joining NATO because they decided that outsourcing their own defense was cheaper instead of building a proper European military alliance between themselves.
The reason is the same, this military alliance would have required to actually invest in their own armies and taken cash away from other things.
> Again, it was not an assumption, it was an agreement. After WW2. Yet again you're showing either your ignorance or unwillingness to consider what you're saying.
Is the agreement, the article 5 from NATO? Because if it is, this is an agreement for countries to support each other militarily in case of aggression but the agreement never stipulated that the EU should become completely reliant on the US goodwill to insure it's territorial sovereignty.
In fact the NATO agreement specifically stipulates that all member countries need to invest a set amount each year in their own defense and guess what, only a few of them actually fulfill the term of this agreement. So who is at fault here?
If I make contract with you and you don't fulfill your end, am I wrong to think that it is null and void?
The EU is waking up with it's pants down after multiple decades of under investment in many strategic sectors but instead of taking the blame and trying to fix the issue, we just point fingers and claim some sort of wrongdoing. That is the problem here.
It's time for the EU leaders to grow up and make amends and course correct or be relegated to the dustbin of history.
There are more than one single reason for things to happen, again highlighting that the EU had other priorities at the time.
> The same can be said for the defense of the EU countries which basically has consisted in the EU countries joining NATO because they decided that outsourcing their own defense was cheaper instead of building a proper European military alliance between themselves.
I completely agree with you here, NATO is our saving grace but really even this feels uncertain these days.
> In fact the NATO agreement specifically stipulates that all member countries need to invest a set amount each year in their own defense and guess what, only a few of them actually fulfill the term of this agreement. So who is at fault here?
Complete complacency and thinking that there will not be any war once everyone is economically dependant on eachother and the US is always there. Agreed.
> It's time for the EU leaders to grow up and make amends and course correct or be relegated to the dustbin of history.
Again I agree with you, I'm not saying there wasn't some complacency, but it's not as simple to get things to move in EU, which again, is both a blessing (everyone is 'kind of' catered for) and a curse, things move unacceptably slow. The sentiment seems to be changing and I have to be optimistic about it and push my local politicians to get the finger out. I don't accept the nihilism I'm seeing though.
I really am not saying that the EU did everything right, just that it's not as simple for the EU to get everything done as it seems to people. I would have much preferred we had our defense infrastructure in place properly before we started investing in tech.
By 1980, Europe was rebuilt. What did they do then? Continue to depend on the US for both tech and military.
No it wasn't, and also the EU wasn't even in it's crawling stages. Negotiations were still taking place about EU memberships so no, you are objectively wrong.
> Continue to depend on the US for both tech and military.
In what sense? For the cold war? That was benefiting who?
And I'm astonished Hetzner hasn't built a proper AWS competitor already.
Best what europe could hope for is finding different tech path than SV. That path most likely won't be as profitable but that might be OK. In a way companies like Hetzner might already be on that path of not trying to replace AWS.
What is much more likely is that europe will just become even more reliant on US tech. But it will be because of politic not for technical inability.
> Under the presidency of Charles de Gaulle, France pursued diplomatic independence and promoted a vision of European collective security that conflicted with American leadership in NATO, especially regarding the integration of member states' armed forces under a US-led unified command and the control of NATO’s nuclear arsenal.
Charles de Gaulle believed that France and the EU countries should stay out of NATO so that it could foster it's own military defense, yet the French leaders and their other EU countreparts decided that it was much more convenient to have the US as a back-stop because they needed the cash that should have gone to their armies for other purposes. This has been happening for decades.
That lead to the situation that we are in today where most of the EU's defense strategy is in fact subsidized by the US. The NATO EU countries despite signing the treaties have barely managed to keep up with the minimum NATO required spending on their own defenses.
This was entirely the doing of Europe.
Technically, we can do it.
But unless we go the Chinese route of blocking US vendors, a lot of people will always flock to the better product that has the bigger marketing budget. And there I do not see how Ecosia could compete with Google, Xing with LinkedIn, Mistral with OpenAI, OHV/IONOS with AWS, or Hetzner with GCP.
Even mentioning Ecosia in the context of FAANG alternatives is embarrasing. Ecosia is a wrapper around Bing and has less than 200 employees.
Even in just economical sense it never really made sense when you have local companies like SUSE that could give you well functioning IT infrastructure. The money would at minimum stay in EU. It probably made sense for export of the talent (which countries don't make money on) but you just locks yourself to infinite Microsoft payments.
There are many conservative european corporations (like postal services) that never were on Microsoft stack. It was always hailed as the "poor" economical but secure solution. They probably still reap benefits. But afaik it was always uphill battle with governments because of the strong lobby from US.
Imagine if the europe started to switch to something like SUSE. It would make so many peoples skills immediately outdated. So many will fight this.
All the things that Europe prides itself on having transcended, are the things needed to build theses industries. So while it's totally physically possible, and Europeans are both smart and industrious (well they ancestors were industrious at least), the knife in the side of Europe is the prevailing psyche of low-work/high-benefits as a human right.
Germany had to reduce its army as part of the reunification deal and is now criticized for not having a big army. Only France has nuclear weapons and the incentive to spend huge amounts on defense while being dependent on leased and US controlled nukes is not great. Do you prefer that all EU countries get their own nukes?
The EU has real tech like ASML, Airbus, Siemens, Alsthom etc. What the US calls "tech" is not regarded as vital in the EU and somewhat belittled. This kind of "tech" is only possible with US hype and massively speculative investments.
The US is begging (and blackmailing with tariffs) countries from all over the world to build factories in the US. That doesn't sound like a great success.
Energy? The US tries to control all energy choke points of energy flow to the EU. The Nord Stream sabotage was hailed as a great operation, enabling the US to sell overpriced LNG to the EU. The US leased a corridor from Azerbaijan to Turkey to control vast amounts of natural gas from Turkmenistan. A Trump adjacent billionaire floated the idea to buy and revive Nord Stream.
What exactly should the EU do? Switch to nuclear energy and buy uranium from Russia like the US does (the US also buys fertilizer)?
How do you get people to work 50 more days a year without mass voting to keep (or even "improve") the status quo?
And this doesn't even touch on the heavy regulatory side, which just makes the EU a generally unattractive place to invest.
Companies are free to pay overtime, and the salaries would still be less than in SV. So you could absolutely found a software company in the EU with the same amount of work hours in a competitive manner and still pay less than in the US (under the assumption that the hours are really needed, which I doubt).
The real advantage that the US has is that they can more easily exploit users because there are no privacy laws.
Americas golden child of 1960 now sucks, oh well. In other news Nvidia has a market cap that nearly eclipses the GDP of Germany. Ah! ASML makes the machines for those chips! But then why isn't the EU reaping the fruit...
The EU was sold as tool that would bring prosperity to the EU countries and this is less and less the case as the years go by. Sure, you have a few bright spots here and there but those are few and far between.
Spain, Italy, Greece and the other sick "countries" of Europe were sacrificed in the 2010s to save the Euro and now France and Germany are going through some tough soul-searching.
Then there is the the growth of many Euro septic parties throughout Europe which are gathering steam year after year.
The EU needs to reform itself very quickly because for a lot of people, the question that is being asked is: do we really need it?
Countries don't need EU to survive, but growth and development is better in the union. Try to travel somewhere outside the EU. Get a visa, exchange money, get health insurance, get sim for roaming.
Everyone is so accustomed to benefits of the union that forgot how it was without it.
That's the essence of normalcy to them. They cannot imagine any alternative to the US foreign department dictated world order - or they just don't want to imagine it.
They rose in a system where imagination in foreign policy matters -- well, if they had it, they wouldn't have risen to the top in this system. The height of irresponsibility to them is to imagine something outside the present order (such as Varoufakis making practical plans for leaving the Euro during the Greek debt crisis). The very action of imagining things threatens the stability which is the base of everything they actually value, which is little more than peer prestige and comfort for themselves.
> They cannot imagine any alternative to the US foreign department dictated world order - or they just don't want to imagine it.
Dictated or not, you're missing the main point that we are 'aligned'. Why would we not embrace an open and free market. That's what works for the EU itself and so when a world leader also shared the same policies, naturally we would embrace that and vice versa. It's not some dictator sitting in the US, a good example of this are how many products are not allowed to be sold in the EU from the US due to health risks we asses as unacceptable. We decide that, free market.
> The height of irresponsibility to them is to imagine something outside the present order (such as Varoufakis making practical plans for leaving the Euro during the Greek debt crisis)
Again you are assuming that mitigations and considerations haven't been considered, there are MANY provisions for leaving the EU, but why would we focus primarily on those situations when we as a union have a parliment to come together and work together. That is always the priority. We don't have one overarching federal system. We have a collection trading block who internally are independant and externally we can negotiate trade deals as one union, meaning better deals. That's it.
> The very action of imagining things threatens the stability which is the base of everything they actually value, which is little more than peer prestige and comfort for themselves.
This makes no sense and it's purely conjecture. Is the EU perfect, no, does anyone think it is, nope. Is it constantly in flux to improve, absolutely.
I'm sure they have considered a very limited number of mitigations, but nothing radical. But they always end up with the default choice. Do you disagree? If so, tell me when they did something the slightest bit imaginative or radical, or even surprising. I don't think you even disagree with me, you just think it's good that they don't.
> Why would we not embrace an open and free market.
Because it's not actually on the table when dealing with Trump?
Their gamble did not pay off because they mis-underestimated Russia.
Now the check has come due, but it was inevitable assuming Russia was always going to do this.
Regardless, this is the result of the Russian invasion.
Like all economies we depend primarily on fossil fuels. It's unfortunate that we can get it ridiculously cheap from Russia but that's the free market. We are working more than anyone else to remove all dependency, but don't start pointing fingers at us just because we purchased the cheapest fossil fuel we could for ourselves. We don't all have the luxury of invading oil rich countries, or have massive reserves ourselves.
Should have EU relied less on US and actually spend those agreed upon 2%+ of GDP like Poland, Finland and others have and be self reliant? Yes. Very much so.
Perun has an interesting video about it EU reliance of US military support: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFoJGHZEqAk
Still, it is the lesser of the possible evils.
Trump needs to be "managed" until Russia goes back to pretend to play nicely with the European neighborhood.
don't hold your breath. /s
We are building amoebas, with US technology made in China. We have a looong way to spines.
No.
jleyank•5mo ago