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Comment by Causality1 | Hacker News Reader

This is going to completely shatter the US' political power in the region while simultaneously doing absolutely nothing for Europe's real defense. Europeans throw violent protests if they have one less vacation day a year; there's no way they would tolerate giving up 15% of their taxes, i.e., 15% of their entitlements, to build and maintain a real military force capable of taking on the likes of Russia.

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France, alone, spends more on their military than Russia. Overall, the 28 countries currently in the EU have a combined military budget about 3.5 times the size of Russia’s.

(I’m sure there’s a better metric for military power than mere budget, but I don’t know enough to find out what that might be).

Is that PPP-adjusted? It's easy to imagine that a smaller Russian budget might translate to more (poorly paid) troops, more (cheaply manufactured) vehicles and so on.

If the whole EU's sole objective was to counteract Russia it would be ridiculously cheap, nowhere near union-wide 2% spending.

The US has an entire Western hemisphere it can and should be doing more to unify and improve.

Like Trump said in 2016, it's time to turn our resources back home. Rebuild our own infrastructure, social programs, etc.

>Like Trump said in 2016, it's time to turn our resources back home. Rebuild our own infrastructure, social programs, etc.

Like a lot of Trump's rhetoric, this sounds nice, but the proof is in the pudding. I don't think we were spending infrastructure and social welfare resources on our military to begin with, so not doing so doesn't necessarily free up resources. The US is fully capable of doing all of these things, it's not short on resources.

Also, it's now 2020, and Trump is toying with war in Iran, moving new troops into Iraq, increasing military expenditure by billions of dollars, repealing and cutting funding for social programs and AFAIK not actually rebuilding our infrastructure at all in any significant way.

Not even one wall...

But we're not doing that. We're just spending more on the military.

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