Why would we have to give two damns about American demands, I don't see that having any chance.
Such private data should never be collected in the first place. You may as well stack up gold bars in your home, in plain view of street-level windows. Such concentrations of data/wealth are asking for trouble. Get rid of it now and you won't have to worry about keeping it secure in the future, no matter what world events may unfold.
Things usually don't change that fast, but nobody can truly predict the geopolitical landscape even half a year into the future.
Europeans want to vacation in the US. The US demands biometric authentication upon crossing the border. So you either give them that data or the US stops letting Europeans in.
And I doubt Europe is going to be any better at not demanding biometric data than the US is, because Europe has the same underlying incentives to do so (i.e. a restrictive immigration system, a large portion of the population who want to NIMBY entire races of people, and a large body of laws to enforce).
Have no plans to visit the US still expect my government would fold like napkin if US county police faxed over a request.
The US tapped even NATO ally governments if they want fingerprints they'll get them.
At any rate don't you have to sign, fingerprint and stand infront of a camera to pass most countries passport control?
If people want to share with a third party, it's their business.
But for US to just access some database and lift them is ridiculous
Will the relationship being more difficult if not yielding to the demands? Ok then. We are not made of cotton candy to melt in a drop of rain that easily when some difficulty comes along, especially if it is a bureaucracy thingy. The vacations will be a bit more difficult - for those attracted by the US instead of beautiful spots elsewhere. Business relations too, of course, but that one has double edge actually.
I would have thought HN is more on the small government political spectrum, it appears this does not count for foreign policy?
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/mopo/implement/liquidity_lines/htm...
Without a swap line banks couldn't just treat EUR as USD whenever an entity needs to keep USD for import/export purposes.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.TRD.GNFS.ZS?most_rec...
I am inside the US and have been inside and lived in many countries. As an immigrant from Asia, I am happy most in the US and so are millions of permanent immigrants including tens of thousands from Europe every year :)
I spent some time traveling in various parts of the world and EU works best for me.
What group of people are controlling everything? Please don't let it be Jews...
Even the current moral panic and conspiracy complex around transgendered people leads to anti-semitism if you follow the strings and thumbtacks.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/991680.The_Anglo_America...
https://archive.org/details/pdfy-A7-BNmZpG-RLOXZZ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carroll_Quigley
-- preface snippet (1981) ---
The Rhodes Scholarships, established by the terms of Cecil Rhodes's seventh will, are known to everyone. What is not so widely known is that Rhodes in five previous wills left his fortune to form a secret society, which was to devote itself to the preservation and expansion of the British Empire. And what does not seem to be known to anyone is that this secret society was created by Rhodes and his principal trustee, Lord Milner, and continues to exist to this day. To be sure, this secret society is not a childish thing like the Ku Klux Klan, and it does not have any secret robes, secret handclasps, or secret passwords. It does not need any of these, since its members know each other intimately. It probably has no oaths of secrecy nor any formal procedure of initiation. It does, however, exist and holds secret meetings, over which the senior member present presides. At various times since 1891, these meetings have been presided over by Rhodes, Lord Milner, Lord Selborne, Sir Patrick Duncan, Field Marshal Jan Smuts, Lord Lothian, and Lord Brand. They have been held in all the British Dominions, starting in South Africa about 1903; in various places in London, chiefly 175 Piccadilly; at various colleges at Oxford, chiefly All Souls; and at many English country houses such as Tring Park, Blickling Hall, Cliveden, and others.
This society has been known at various times as Milner's Kindergarten, as the Round Table Group, as the Rhodes crowd, as The Times crowd, as the All Souls group, and as the Cliveden set. All of these terms are unsatisfactory, for one reason or another, and I have chosen to call it the Milner Group. Those persons who have used the other terms, or heard them used, have not generally been aware that all these various terms referred to the same Group.
It is not easy for an outsider to write the history of a secret group of this kind, but, since no insider is going to do it, an outsider must attempt it. It should be done, for this Group is, as I shall show, one of the most important historical facts of the twentieth century. Indeed, the Group is of such significance that evidence of its existence is not hard to find, if one knows where to look. This evidence I have sought to point out without overly burdening this volume with footnotes and bibliographical references. While such evidences of scholarship are kept at a minimum, I believe I have given the source of every fact which I mention. Some of these facts came to me from sources which I am not permitted to name, and I have mentioned them only where I can produce documentary evidence available to everyone. Nevertheless, it would have been very difficult to write this book if I had not received a certain amount of assistance of a personal nature from persons close to the Group. For obvious reasons, I cannot reveal the names of such persons, so I have not made reference to any information derived from them unless it was information readily available from other sources.
...
I should say a few words about my general attitude toward this subject. I approached the subject as a historian. This attitude I have kept. I have tried to describe or to analyze, not to praise or to condemn. I hope that in the book itself this attitude is maintained. Of course I have an attitude, and it would be only fair to state it here. In general, I agree with the goals and aims of the Milner Group. I feel that the British way of life and the British Commonwealth of Nations are among the great achievements of all history. I feel that the destruction of either of them would be a terrible disaster to mankind.
...
William Engdahl's book Gods of Money [ch. 18 - Theft of a Nation] addresses the period you mention and what was happening. There was also an ideological shift in this period, since after the end of Cold War, Neo-Conservatives have been (and remain) in ideological charge. The Wolfowitz Doctrine always struck me as decidedly un-Anglo given its willfully provocative stance, lacking any nuance or subtlety. In fact the behavior of US post Cold War remains somewhat perplexing, even in terms of purely American national interests. There may have been a regime change.
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/08/world/us-strategy-plan-ca...
The 20th century saw the rise of American military, economic, and cultural imperialism, which carried Anglo-American culture further as the British Empire declined relatively.
Sure, I'll concede that there are shady people in government trying to do things that are broadly objectionable and sometimes illegal, but to think this means certain individuals or secret societies have a "stranglehold" on global politics or economics goes much too far. There are far too many factors at play for a small group of people to wield the level of outsize power necessary to guide these processes. It's really a very large and ever-changing group of people who "control everything", and this happens in a highly uncoordinated manner.
This might be true on military/nato matters, but economically, Europe and the EU can quite take care of themselves.
As for america, who has a stranglehold there?
If we leave conspiracy theories out of the equation, it is always the 2 parties un power and their corporate or institutional buddies.
I do not think anyone is thelling Trump or Bidens team who to invade or bombard next.
The US is the remaining superpower and thats all there really is.
Look at Musk, richest guy in the world, Trump was making fun of him.
It is not the people with money who have the power, money is a pre requisite to even be allowed near power.
The people with power un the us are simply the people with....power.
USA, with all its flaws, is nobodys vassal state.
tldr: USA is the current world empire; EU are their vassals
Homework: (1) find how many European military bases there are on US soil; (2) find how many US military bases there are on European soil;
To do what? Counter the Canadian threat to US American territorial integrity? Prevent war between California and ethnic Nevadans? Monitor unmanaged flows of migrants from unstable regions? Hmm, well maybe that one.
But really, one of the great blessings of the US is a lack of any home-front excitement, which makes this comparison pretty silly. Not that that disagrees with the hypotheses that the US is a world empire and the EU's present existence is predicated on US military size and operations.
Random citizen asking obviously does nothing, but foreign base COs are always desperately trying to keep their forces on best behavior to minimize frustration. That's not easy when you import a bunch of guys in the age range that most often causes trouble, give them significant spending money, and remove them from past anchoring influences. It's worse when the receiving society is more orderly; I have Japan in mind.
Fighting against those problems is that all political leadership generally benefits from the arrangements. The foreign host nation gets economic activity and some amount of bargaining power, and the US gets a location that obviously is helpful for some strategic objective.
>Right, so what for are the US military bases on European soil then? (Please spare me the part about protecting Europe from outside threats story).
An anomalous, peaceful Europe is the water that you're swimming in, and I'm trying to point out that it's wet. I recognize the limited prospects of the endeavor. Though, if it's the outside part you're rejecting, I'll acknowledge my imprecise wording. Russia is the outside threat, being outside the Western European culture that is defended, but threats come from within Europe too.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Naval_Base_Subic_Bay
They've been plenty of protests in Europe over this matter this year, but they won't show them on CNN, that's for sure.
oh, so why are you replying?
You're ridiculous and watch Fox news too much.
History contradicts you. I'm an European myself if that wasn't clear enough, so this wasn't an American telling you, an European, you are our vassals.
> EU has no realistic military opponents on its borders
Fully agree on this.
> You're ridiculous and watch Fox news too much.
I might be ridiculous to your eyes, but I certainly don't watch FoxNews.
In the last 20 years the USA has involved its allies into multiple pointless unwinnable wars. Human rights in the USA have been significantly eroded, and many values essential to modern society are currently being undermined. Additionally, Trump's presidency has done significant damage to a large number of diplomatic relations and resulted not only in widespread doubt about its democratic process, but a genuine coup attempt.
Meanwhile, during the same 20 years the European Union and China have risen in power significantly - and both are making significant effort to curtail the power the USA has over them. Those military bases exist because the USA is still somewhat of an ally and the EU has real threats right on its border - as long as the USA is not actively hostile towards the EU, having direct access to the firepower of a gun-drunk nation is quite convenient.