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Comment by ansn | Hacker News Reader

European governments should respond in kind. The United States must not be allowed to get away with such domineering tactics.

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To me it looks like Germany did this before the US even considered Covid-19 a real problem.

Germany Faces Backlash From Neighbors Over Mask Export Ban[1].

> Since January, Taiwan, India and Thailand, all of which also make face masks, have banned their export, although, to help China, India later temporarily revoked its restriction. South Korea also banned the export of masks, as will Indonesia soon.

Outside Asia, Russia, Germany and the Czech Republic also stopped exports in early March. So did Kenya, where the first case of coronavirus was confirmed on March 13.[2]

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-09/germany-f...

[2] http://theconversation.com/the-global-effort-to-tackle-the-c...

So, as some countries took measures to protect their stock (while the US did not care about preparing at that moment), it is normal now that the US hijack other nations shipment ?

Germany was one of the first countries to ban mask exports to the rest of the world, including to other European countries like Italy during the depths of their coronavirus crisis when the healthcare system there was collapsing. They were eventually strong-armed into sharing their masks within the EU, but even that took a long time to convince them to do. This was particularly bad because they're one of the main manufacturers of N95 masks in Europe. In a sense, this is an example of the US responding in kind to something that Europe has already done.

For what it's worth, Germany is currently taking patients from Italy[1] and sending ventilators to Spain[2] to help them out. I think it just took some time to go from "scrambling to prepare" to cooperation between EU countries.

[1] https://dw.com/en/coronavirus-treating-european-patients-in-...

[2] https://www.efe.com/efe/english/portada/berlin-sends-ventila...

Also taking patients from France (we are grateful)

It remains to be seen whether such gestures are just PR though.

I think that the French and Italian patients being taken in charge by the German hospital won't give a f* that it is PR or not. They just want to survive and they sure will remember the german hand. Europe is a land of memory. We will not forget either the US actions.

The US intercepted a shipment in Thailand and tried the same in Singapore. That is a very different level than an export ban.

There will be hell to pay when this is over

> In a sense, this is an example of the US responding in kind to something that Europe has already done.

Is this meant to be funny ? /s

Seems like a kiddy moral statement. Europe has done so many bad things in the past, but US currently has the lead !

This affair learns us some interesting things :

1) nation states are the current structure that defends people, a statement which was challenged by the creation of EU, and will try to protect their people before others.

2) Global trade cannot abolish the aforementioned statements.

Pick your conclusion. Mine currently is :

States have lost self-reliance based on global trade doctrine and this trend should be reversed. Chicago school has made enough ravages.

Based on the current actions, it would appear that moving away from global trade results in piracy ( and likely other unilateral actions ). If this moment teaches us anything, it is that globalization ( I hate myself for using this argument already ) is actually a net good for us as a human kind.

So no, I believe your conclusion is incorrect. That trend should not be reversed as we need sufficiently interconnected world so that all interested parties think long and hard before they press the wrong button. MAD at its finest.

If globalization is a net positive, does the same logic hold for centralization of internet services? Here at HN we are largely proponents of decentralization, arguing it leads to a stronger whole. And yet when speaking of geopolitics we seem to have a blindspot and the same logic does not apply. I wonder why this is.

It is a valid point, but I have no answer other that different type of systems may follow different types of rules ( as in, centralization may not be good for every system ).

Dont know about manufacturing, but 3M European distribution center in in DE, so banning exports meant confiscating whole European 3M inventory.

And then ban was lifted shortly afterwards.

To be precise, it was never banned. It was regulated. So every export had to approved. And an export regulation is something different from seizing products outside the US, which were produced outside the US. It is also something different from rerouting ships to be able to seize their cargo.

Can Europe do this? Trump could then respond by blocking Google,Microsoft and other software services to serve Europe. A trade war will have many consequences, hopefully more smarter politician or diplomats could solve this disagreements and also Europe should consider reducing dependencies on US for critical stuff.

> Can Europe do this?

No. But it should recognize that it is currently a province in the US empire. If it wants to be sovereign, it should change that, if it doesn't, it should cut out their administrative overhead.

Europe outside of Germany has no advanced industrial capabilities at all. They can choose to do anything they want to, however they have three major industrial options to choose from: Germany, the US, China.

Germany can't make enough of anything to satisfy all of Europe's demand. That leaves having to deal with the US and China.

The first thing Germany did was shift to self-preservation mode, abandon their EU and Eurozone partners, and lock down their exports. Germany has been able to hyper test their own population, while the rest of Europe was left running at low rates of testing, including Britain, France, Spain and Italy, along with all of Eastern Europe.

This is partially why Italy's case mortality rate is now a shocking 12%, the Netherlands is 10%, the UK is 10%, Spain is near 10%, France is 8%, Belgium is 7%, Sweden is 6%. And these numbers keep getting worse. Mortality rates like this should never happen in developed nations (Canada's case mortality rate by contrast is a mere 1.5%, Germany is 1.4%). None of them are testing anywhere close to enough. People expect incompetence out of the US healthcare system, however Britain and France are supposed to be among the best in the world and they have completely failed (England's Deputy Chief Medical Officer just said yesterday that there's no need for the healthy general public to wear masks).

The reason why even France and Britain can't test their own populations properly, despite months of lead time, is they have no industrial capabilities to match what Germany can do. Europe is largely left helpless and with the EU collapsing - there is no scenario where Italy and Spain will ever trust the EU again - the infighting and bickering is likely to continue indefinitely.

>Europe outside of Germany has no advanced industrial capabilities at all

Could you at least google about this topic before going on building a whole theory on top of an absurd statement?

So France, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden etc in the EU have no "advanced industrial capabilities at all", nor have the UK or Switzerland outside the EU, really?

As a German, I have to add there is not a single country in the EU without significant industrial capabilities.

I think the vision is a bit caricatural : France and Italy still have an important industry. Car, planes, drugs, luxury goods, trains, space launches, fin-mechanics and I miss a lot... Fr and IT are 6th and 7th economies in the world : you cannot achieve that without an important industrial layer. But of course Germany is the biggest industrial actor in Europe and among the biggests in the world.

> Germany has been able to hyper test their own population, while the rest of Europe was left running at low rates of testing, including Britain, France, Spain and Italy, along with all of Eastern Europe

This has almost nothing to do with industrial strength. This is about having lots of distributed, independent, competent laboratories. It certainly helped that the test was developed in Germany in January. Afterwards the developers started immediately to spread the knowledge about the test to the other laboratories. This shows the strength of decentralized laboratories. Other countries organized that differently. Sometimes centralization is more efficient, but often decentralization combined with distributed competence is more capable to adapt to change.

> there is no scenario where Italy and Spain will ever trust the EU again - the infighting and bickering is likely to continue indefinitely.

I can see politicians would try to blame China or Germany for the fact their country was not prepared but I hope the majority is not that stupid. I can see and believe my country was not prepared and is in bad shape but there is no reason to blame others when the fault is internal.

And let them experience the European Kurzarbeitsgeld and they will change their mind. Additionally, Trumps behavior is indirectly strengthening the European idea by contrast.

> with the EU collapsing

Are there real signs of the EU collapsing?

Well, there is an argument to be made that the unity of the nation states was weakened somewhat with Brexit and rumblings of Polexit. So it is not really collapsing, but there is a nonzero chance of dissolving.

Personal opinion, not unlike with the internet, we seem to be intent on fracturing previously somewhat open fora, the global order from previous iteration to 'everyone for themselves' model, which served so well in the past.

edit: made last sentence clearer

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