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Comment by jariel | Hacker News Reader

"Why would the United States be the one to decide if Germany is allowed to build a pipeline to Russia or not?"

Because America provides defence for Germany, and Russia has 1000 nuclear warheads pointed at Germany, the US and others, and they are an antagonising state, actively trying to disrupt the governments in Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine, etc.

All these issues are quite fundamentally related, so it matters.

That said, I don't think a pipeline will matter that much.

The premise of the article is problematic because there are almost no alternatives for the USD outside the Euro, and possibly the Pound for a few things. The RMB can't effectively be a global currency until it becomes transparent, which means the CCP would have to give up control, which they won't do.

There is really nothing on the horizon - no digital/fintech/blockchain anything that will change the playing field.

If anything - as 5B people on planet earth go from $1/day to $20/day and come into the global economy, the USD will have even greater seigneuriage power.

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What is this protection that the US provides other than ensuring the US would be drawn into a war between the EU and Russia? France has enough nukes to provide MAD protection.

We had 200,000 US soldiers in Germany until reunification, and still have 40,0000. Germany saves money maintaining a significantly smaller military force. The benefit to Germany is such that US presidents use the idea of moving US troops to, say, Poland as a prod to encourage the German government to spend more on defense: https://www.euractiv.com/section/defence-and-security/news/w...

In response to Trump’s threats to pull out of NATO, Germany’s reaction was not “oh, good, those useless Americans will leave.” It was: https://www.dw.com/en/merkel-vows-to-hit-2-nato-spending-tar...

> Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday underscored her commitment to NATO, pledging to raise Germany's defense spending to the alliance's 2% target "by the early 2030s."

> "The preservation of NATO is in our own interest, more than during the Cold War," Merkel said while addressing lawmakers in German parliament.

> "At the moment, Europe is unable to defend itself," she added, urging the bloc to stay together.

40000 and not 40,0000.

Much is for the US and their military adventures, not for NATO or NATO-related things. It supports the US war machine. Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, North Africa, ... Much of that has nothing to do with defending Germany, defending the US or defending NATO...

The US and its allies/friendly countries currently outspend Russia approximitely fifteen times.

If Germany would spend 2% of its GPP on military, then it would approach Russia in absolute numbers, That would be crazy.

What we really need is LESS military spending and less military adventures of the US (Iraq, Syrian, Libya, ...). The US has destabilized the whole middle east and north africa. The refugees are going to Europe, not the US...

The US will stay in south germany for the near future, because it provides excellent logistics for US wars in middle east, asia and africa.

Obviously since Germany isn’t currently under attack, German bases are used for other operations. But the German government doesn’t seem eager to get the US military out of the country, and has reacted negatively to Trump’s signaling in that direction.

Recent events have convinced me that I was at least partly wrong about my previous view of the United States having bases all around the world. Europeans love to complain about America, but when Trump threatened to pull out of NATO, in the face of an ascendant Russia, the European reaction certainly wasn’t “don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” Likewise in Asia, while the Taiwanese and Japanese have always been warm to American military support, the growing power of China has definitely sparked discussions about America’s continued commitment to obligations in that region.

I don't think you have much insight into thoughts of European countries. What you claim was a response to Trump, is actually much more complex. There are different views in different countries and within them.

Germany is also no longer the front to the communist block - which no longer exists and only Russia is left as direct opponent. So it may make sense to have NATO defense moving east. Many Germans think that the US politics against Russia leads to nothing good.

What Trump does/says is fully inconsistent. NATo is obsolete. Then it is great. He wants to reduce military. Then record money flows into the military. He wants to get out of Iraq, then he blackmails Iraq to let the US stay. He uses kurds to fight against ISIS and then he hands them over to Assad...

The main political reaction in Germany to him is to have not too much changed and hope for a more rational US government.

"If Germany would spend 2% of its GPP on military, then it would approach Russia in absolute numbers, That would be crazy."

It is her contractual obligation. Currently Germany does not have an Army anymore but a museum. How many tanks are operational? 100? Russia has 10.000...

There is no contract about it.

Tanks? Not sure that this is our biggest concern right now.

Nato Membership is a contract.

Yes, Indeed. tanks are not the biggest problem. https://consortiumnews.com/2019/12/21/pepe-escobar-you-say-y...

PS: "Germany is only one of 19 NATO members that have not met the 2% GDP spending goal set at the 2014 NATO summit in Wales."

and the contract says nothing about what you claim.

PS. : the spending goal is in the future: 2025. It‘s also a political goal, not a contract.

And the current data can be seen here:

https://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/pdf_2019_...

Look at the numbers, they are vastly different from what you claim.

"Look at the numbers, they are vastly different from what you claim. "

They are "vastly different" because most countries don't share their fair burden. Trump may be wrong in many things, here he is right.

In the PDF you provided "NATO guideline 2%" But hey, why spent it on the military? Let the US spent/fight for us.

Well, you claim that there is a contract which binds NATO countries to spend 2% of their budget on military and that only Germany is not spending 2%.

Everything of that is wrong, There is no contract. The goal of 2% is set for 2025, not now. Currently a bunch of countries spend less than 2%.

And: large parts of the US military spending is completely unrelated to NATO.

Next you need to ask yourself if these approximate numbers make sense:

Europe minus Russia, without the US: defense spending of 350 billion USD. NATO has defense spending of 950 billion dollar. Russia: defense spending: 65 billion USD.

Europe is already outspending Russia five times. NATO is outspending Russia by 15 times.

This looks like lack of money is not the actual problem NATO has.

Your comparison is fatally flawed. If someone declared that the US/Europe doesn’t need to spend so much on social welfare or transit, because Russia and China spend much less in nominal dollars/euro, one would quite rightly point out that a dollar buys much more food or miles of subway tunnel in Russia than the United States.

The same is true for Military spending. The military is labor heavy, and production is mostly domestic. If you don’t adjust for purchasing power, you’re comparing apples and oranges: https://warontherocks.com/2019/12/why-russian-military-expen...

> Perhaps most importantly, the more methodologically sound approach to comparing defense spending based on PPP illustrates that the gap between U.S. expenditure on the one hand and that of Russia and China on the other has closed dramatically over the past 15 years. Today, when taken together, spending by Russia and China is roughly equal to U.S. defense expenditure, with Russia representing a much larger share than previously recognized.

Moreover, even PPP probably doesn’t accurately depict the difference. Beijing spends about a billion dollars a year to operate a subway serving a city of 20 million people. New York spends ten times as much for a system half the length and half the ridership. Moscow spends 1/7 as much as New York to operate a larger system with more ridership.

Military expenditures probably scale much closer to something like a subway system than the overall PPP basket of goods. In that case, we are probably looking at less than a factor of two advantage in what that spending actually buys.

> The military is labor heavy, and production is mostly domestic.

Russia is decades behind in high-tech and has only limited access to western technology in many areas. The country largely lives of selling natural resources. There is a many years ongoing embargo on high-tech in many areas - also from the EU. There is basically limited technological cooperation with Russia in many high-tech sectors right now.

The result is that Russia has only a few somewhat competitive areas in military technology and needs to invest a lot of money into those: Nuclear weapons, rockets, space technology, etc. Selling those weapons helps their industry a bit.

This affects for example how much money they have to deploy even tanks:

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/22600/russia-cant-affo...

For example they have only a single old aircraft carrier:

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-admiral-kuznetsov-murmansk-f...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmUpZDb3W0Q

The US OTOH has none or ten whole carrier fleets...

Russia has submarines and a lot of nuclear technology. From time to time an old one sinks. The older ones are rotting somewhere...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48897468

That Russia has cheap clothes for their soldiers, or can mass produce tanks for their soldiers does not help them, if they don't have a competitive high-tech industry. Keeping the nuclear weapons (rockets, submarines, launchers, spy satellites, ...) is extremely expensive and where the money goes.

For the West it's much easier to cooperate on technology and weapons.

See the list of carriers: most of them are from US, NATO or allies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_in_s...

It's clear that 65 billions USD doesn't buy much on the world market, even though the costs at home are low. The rest of the economy does not support their high-tech needs...

It's not that Russia has no competitive weapons, but the breadth and depth is simply not there. Russia selectively chooses areas where they develop competitive weapons with their more limited resources.

True, the Russians don't reveal the full scale of military costs. But the US does the same:

https://www.thenation.com/article/tom-dispatch-america-defen...

"There is no contract about it."

You are disingenuously arguing against the wind.

Yes, there is, a kind of contract.

When nations agree to targets, and they did a long time ago, its material. That it's not technically part of the treaty is relevant, but not so important.

The 2% target was established long ago, there's a renewed 'agreement' since Trump took office, but it's along the same lines: European states will wait for Trump to be out of office and then ignore it.

The fact remains America provides defence for Europe, and Europe is willing to let that happen because, well, it's very expensive, among other things.

> When nations agree to targets

Which are in the future. The target is for 2025.

> remains America provides defence for Europe

The fact remains that NATO is not an US security organization where other Nations buy protection. Trump may think that, since he knows the Mafia from his real-estate business.

Nobody has asked German citizens yet, if we want to invest 2% of the GDP into defense and where it should be invested.

Basically a military & governments have decided that for us, which is entirely undemocratic and a fully un-controlled process.

It's great that the military-industrial complex can on its own decide how much to spend, without any outside interference. This leads to a situation, like in the US where roughly a trillion USD is spend on military, which is an insane amount of money.

For one thing it keeps European countries within NATO from invading each other.

NATO isn’t just there to defend against Russia, it is effectively an unbroken continuous occupation of Europe by the US.

"What is this protection that the US provides"

The US has bases all over Europe, they spend a fortune on their own defensive tech, capabilities and leadership which Germany et. al. depend on, which acts as a massive deterrent, but also provides security partners with 'almost free R&D'. Also, the US specialises and practices so many things that are just far beyond the reach of pretty much all European forces.

The ability to put bases, air support of all kinds, intelligence, drones, etc. pretty much anywhere is basically beyond most of Europe. When a war broke out on their border (Libya), for better or worse there was an intervention. Obama reluctantly agreed and didn't want to play a lead role, but without US drones, AWACS, and electronic warfare, special forces on the ground, the UK and French fighters wouldn't have been able to do anything at all. This is actually quite a good demonstration of how specific capabilities are huge enablers of others.

Trump's NATO talking point about partners not spending enough is very fair, and most European nations are in violation of the treaty, which is doubly problematic because while NATO is strategically beneficial to the US, it's basically vital to European integrity -> they need it more than the US and spend only 1/2 of what was agreed upon.

If the US simply 'did not exist' - Russian Imperialism would reach just about as far as in the Soviet era. Basically, Poland would be back to being the 'buffer' between Germany and Russia.

Everyone in the 1990's thought all of that would melt with the cold war, unfortunately, neither China nor Russia moved along the expected path, so here we are.

American sanctions of Iran are not remotely big enough to make a dent in currency issues.

I do however think that as finance spreads into different areas, Americans will have more difficulty with said sanctions. Dubai exists as a financial centre basically because it's outside the direct influence or insight of American or European agencies. It's basically an entire micro-economy of dirty money.

? Dirty money is welcome anywhere. The whole overpriced apartment ghost towns that spread in most popular american cities are basically storage for dirty money.

Yes, I would like to see a more specific breakdown of what crimes Dubai will protect specifically and what crimes the US will and what crimes the EU does.

I would not be surprised to hear there is some qualitative difference, but I think it should be explained before we accept either “Dubai is dirtier” or “everywhere is equally dirty” premise.

>If the US simply 'did not exist' - Russian Imperialism would reach just about as far as in the Soviet era

We can speculate a lot, but that's a this is, speculation. This comment and a lot of others smell of American exceptionalism to me as a non US citizen.

If there was no Cold War, or there was one that Russia would've won against Western Europe, half of Europe would still be occupied as the USSR wouldn't have fallen.

Alternate history is fun to think about, but again, nothing more than speculation and fiction.

> The ability to put bases, air support of all kinds, intelligence, drones, etc. pretty much anywhere is basically beyond most of Europe. When a war broke out on their border (Libya), for better or worse there was an intervention. Obama reluctantly agreed and didn't want to play a lead role, but without US drones, AWACS, and electronic warfare, special forces on the ground, the UK and French fighters wouldn't have been able to do anything at all. This is actually quite a good demonstration of how specific capabilities are huge enablers of others.

I'm not sure this can really be considered an instance of "protection" provided by the US. As far as I remember, the Libyan war was more of an instance of civilian unrest that the government was equipped to and on the verge of dealing with when American intervention toppled it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_...), thus causing the present state where no one faction is strong enough to control the whole country. In fact, it is hard to think of any protracted armed conflict on Europe's periphery in the past two decades that was not either directly instigated or least comes with a strong case of having been surreptitiously promoted by the US.

First, I was indicating that this 'ability to project force' is protection, I wasn't indicating that the war in Libya was a form of protection.

Second, I don't think it's fair to say the conflicts in Europe's periphery are surreptitiously promoted by the us: the war in Crimea, Russia invasion of Georgia, conflict in Yugoslavia, 'Troubles' in Ireland etc. - these were not 'made in the USA'. Neither was the Arab Spring.

Why would the US be drawn into that war? Why are we helping EU in the first place especially when they are russia main trading partners.

Because that's what being the leader of the free world means. The U.S. has the economic and military resources to give freedom a fighting chance of survival. If we choose not to counterbalance the influence of autocracies, that freedom won't last long.

You left out the asterisk on free.

EDIT: I don't prefer autocracies, live in EU, and I do appreciate the need for counterbalance. Yes, in many important ways you are (more) free.

Yet, while USA has 2 parties instead of 1, both are beholden to capital interests, including their healthcare, monopolized internet, schools, and even their military has vast ties with capital interests. Citizens are significantly dependent on their "credit scores" while banks easily give loans in their names to other people (so called identity theft). People start saving for their children's education even before they are born and still end up with college debt. 0.7% of the population is in prison, and cops can legally rob you (asset forfeiture).

Let's not forget overthrowing the first democratically elected government when they nationalize their oil sector, instating a dictator, and then invading the country. That's what sharing free¹dom means.

But isn't the premise that no one wants the US to be the leader anymore.

Baltic states are great trading partners offering a range of highly valued products and services from white birch plywood that is ideal for laser cutting to security software development. If Russia moved on the Baltics the US would meet them at the border, NATO or not.

Europeans killing each other is bad for international trade, and threatens nations we are more ideologically aligned with than others.

We’re there to prevent them from killing each other more than we are there to prevent The One True Enemy (whoever it might be today) from invading wily nilly. We don’t want them killing each other, because when they do, it is bad for business and diplomatic relations. More importantly, if we allow their natural tendencies towards hot European on European action to occur today, there really is a global threat because these are advanced economies that could easily pump out nukes and lob them at each other which is generally not great for the health of anyone on the planet.

In short, by serving European interests, we actually are serving our own interests because in some very important ways, our interests are in complete alignment. Germany is generally more at peace with the world than Japan at any given moment, but give them cause to build up their military and the time to do it and they could easily be a bigger threat to the United States than Russia, but they have no inclination towards treating us as an enemy so long as they’re under a system that protects them equally from France as it does from Russia or Costa Rica or Sealand.

If MAD were all that you actually needed, NATO wouldn't exist.

It's entirely reasonable to believe that France is not going to commit national nuclear suicide merely to defend Czech or Poland from a Russian invasion. MAD - mutual assured suicide - would only be utilized in a case where their own existence were threatened.

That's where a very powerful traditional military comes into play.

That's why NATO exists instead of merely relying on having a stockpile of nukes to point at Russia. You might actually have to stand off Russia in a real military confrontation or at a minimium give the strong impression that you can if necessary. Russia can gamble that France isn't going to commit suicide via nuclear weapons to save Lithuania, and it would be a correct bet, at which point it's down to traditional military vs military.

"France has enough nukes to provide MAD protection."

It's never so simple.

First, does France have the ability to deliver them? Under what conditions? With what warning, etc. etc.

Second, is the fact that nukes are the biggest hammer in retaliation, and most things need to be proportional.

Would France use nukes on Russia if Poland was invaded?

What if Russia tried to 'pull a Crimea' in E. Germany i.e. small forces without uniforms, supporting insurgencies, disrupting communications. Tons of money pouring in changing elections, disrupting governance. Would that be a case for nukes?

It's far more complicated, and Europe cannot defend itself - this is the tacit admission of their own leaders. So America still provides baseline defence capabilities.

The unfortunate reality is that Europe actually could defend itself, but it's not willing to either spend what's necessary, or to coordinate along those lines, which might be even harder as the EU doesn't provide for that and it's a really big existential deal. The reason there isn't material progress on it is because it's really, really expensive and nobody wants to pay bills if America will continue to pay it form them.

Trump is a loathsome figure, but he's exactly right on this issue. European leaders will make some happy talk, public statements, but really they're just waiting for Trump to be gone so they can go back to what they hope will be the status quo.

France won't fire nukes over Russia annexing a Baltic country. US might actually do something about it as they showed many times they are willing to go to war to defend their interest.

>Because America provides defence for Germany, and Russia has 1000 nuclear warheads pointed at Germany, the US and others, and they are an antagonising state, actively trying to disrupt the governments in Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine, etc.

Those have been there for a long time, even before the "disruption". Besides France has nukes too, so not much win there.

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