Europe preps huge defense package in boost to Ukraine: "Never been seen"
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Well, there are some in the EU who are hoping to bargain with Trump so that we reduce our import taxes on American cars (US has them at 2.5%, we have them at 10%, so we've been doing exactly what Trump is trying to do, at a smaller scale), buy more weaponry from them and as the US ramps up its' gas production, we could buy more of that from them as well - if Trump in return does not put 25% tariffs on everything made in the EU.
It's not a bad deal for either side, really, though it sorta defers the whole making more of our own weaponry part of trying to be more independent of the US. And I'm sure both the automakers and MIC would do what's in their power to persuade Trump to take it.
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Destitute communities come with a lot of political instability which probably has to be channeled into something, which despite what everyone's been thinking so far, has sort of been, to mixed or poor success with basically every succeeding administration. The protests keep getting bigger, basically. You get a big or well-organized enough one of those, and then there's a chance that you get something much more serious than chaz, or you get a politically galvanizing one-sided massacre, or something else to that effect.
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Package.... and will EU also print new soldiers on its factories? Even properly and sufficiently training the existing ones takes years.
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I mean, if you're assuming the worst, a nuclear strike could pretty much wipe israel almost entirely off the map. With a more conservative and realistic positioning, you know, one singular, small nuke, probably sourced from somewhere else, then you'd still be looking at probably 20,000 people dead or injured if it were to hit the downtown of any city. You know, ten times the amount of october 7th. That would be a huge international incident, especially seeing as how the nuke would have to be provided by some other foreign government, which means that there could be a chance of a probably unpreventable follow-up attack at almost any time. It would be a pretty big deal, even if they were credibly threatened. I mean, that's part of why Iran isn't allowed to have a nuclear program.
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Please factor in Putin. The EU is under a two prong attack from the USA and Russia and any reasonable or fair deals will be ignored. When you examine the US auto manufacturers, they have nothing to offer for the majority of consumers in the EU. We could apply 0% tariffs to US manufactured automobiles and they would end up sitting at the dealerships.
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This is great but IMHO they really need to start building industrial capacity to produce millitary stuff as well. Money's no use when nobody wants to sell you weapons for it...
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The sooner the rest of the civilised world decouples from that insanity, and hopefully bands together around the common ideals that the US used to (at least pretend to) represent - the better.
The problem is that I feel the rest of the civilized world is going down the same path, and is just several big steps behind...
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Hofreiter (Greens) put it quite well ... something like ... not our ideals have changed, but the world has changed, brutally so.
Now that's the kind of Greens I like to see.
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Just curious, how can a right wing-green coalition be viable? Don't they clash on many major issues? Or to they succeed at walking the narrow tightrope of compromise?
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But why did Europe wait for America to bail before suddenly pulling a trillion dollars out of their pocket?
If Ukraine was supposed to win Europe should have thought about ponying up that cash a bit sooner.
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Honestly 0.7 US defence budgets is quite an impressive sum of money for the EU to be able to cough up overnight.
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Because as soon as you propose spending billions of dollars on defending another country, people will generally say "but I don't wanna pay more taxes or lose out on any comforts", which causes you to lose your position of power in case of a democracy. It all comes down to selfishness in the end.
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buying the weapons Turkey and Greece have in reserve for each other
Ok, this one amuses me
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Realistically, the only actual solution to this problem in any long term would probably involve stationing nukes, which nobody really wants to do. A combination of not wanting to risk pissing off putin, because everyone thinks that he's an insane trump-level idiot that will engage in mutual self-destruction over ukraine, combined with the post-soviet destruction and hollowing out of the ukranian economy into private enterprise, an economy which wasn't exactly doing hot before. So it's pretty clear that most everyone doesn't actually give a fuck about ukraine or the ukranian people at all. Everyone's just gonna use this as an opportunity, as with every conflict, to pawn off old military hardware, bury the receiving country in a huge amount of IMF bank loan debt, and scale up their own domestic military production while paying off a bunch of private contractors which are, hmm, suspiciously close to the levers of power inside the real government. Weird how that happens. What a noble sacrifice.
I dunno, the wheels turn.
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subsequently, raking the global market (including the US) for weapons that come loose for money
Ultimately they will have to come round to producing their own, no?
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That well may be the case, all we can do is hope that the rest of the world can bulwark against the rise of Fascism long enough to watch it fail in the US - at which point, it should hopefully diminish its allure.
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Errrm, 5 of the worlds largest exporters are European
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so what would you think hamas do with nukes?
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Because of this:
Every single European country with a shared border with Russia has mandatory military service (that red exception on the map is Latvia, which also reinstated it in 2024). This is how much Russia is trusted.
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When you examine the US auto manufacturers, they have nothing to offer for the majority of consumers in the EU.
Yeah, they've shot themselves entirely in the foot. Used to be every other car was a Ford Sierra, then later Ford Mondeo... Opel was pretty big, but GM sold them so now it's a Stellantis brand and Stellantis is more French/Italian than American...
Still, there's market for muscle cars and trucks. And Teslas in recent history, but probably no longer.
