Somehow people around here in the balkans have been getting the feeling that pretty much every thing every EU country did in the last year, has been favorable to US and detrimental to european citizens... Be it Scholz, Macron, ursula, etc. Whatever move they do, people of europe lose, and US gains something.
Considering the last year includes the announcement of the Digital Markets and Services Acts, which will heavy hurt big oligopolistic companies by forcing them to be interoperable, and most of those are American, that's a weird take and the only explanation i can find is shitty media consumption blaming the US for Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
You're conflating the interests of a bunch of - maybe large but overall not that important - US corporations and the geopolitical interests of US as a nation.
These simply aren't on the same scale.
Things like the Digital Markets and Services Acts are at most mild irritants to the US.
They're also useful in the sense that they allow the EU to believe they're still in control of their destiny.
War-in-Ukraine level geopolitical events are what ultimately matter to the US as a country, not things that make Google grumpy.
Honest question, not arguing. I live in California, and don't have much contact with the zeitgeist of the Balkans/Europe in general.
Here's an example:
The EU has backed the Ukraine, a war that was mostly created by the US pushing NATO boundaries outwards and backing Russia's dictator into a completely untenable corner.
The EU did this at its own detriment, with very questionable legitimacy (the EU was never given a mandate to deal in such geopolitical issues) plunging the entire continent into an energy crisis the like of which hasn't been seen since the oil crisis in the 70s.
Ask any small to medium company in Germany how they plan to pay their gas bills in the coming 2 years other that declaring bankruptcy.
The War in Ukraine was entirely created by Russia pushing Russia’s boundaries.
In any case, the US hasn’t pushed NATO’s boundaries, Eastern European countries applying to join NATO have “pushed” it. The US has mostly slowed that process more than the applying countries want to assure readiness (which, in part, is I guess a long-picture contributor to the war, since long before Putin decided NATO expansion was an affront to Russia, he was demanding Russia be admitted to NATO without the usual readiness process.)
and now, 60 years laters:
https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-business-cuba-israel-...
> UN votes overwhelmingly to condemn US embargo of Cuba
> The vote in the 193-member General Assembly was 185 countries supporting the condemnation, the United States and Israel opposing it, and Brazil and Ukraine abstaining.
(let's not forget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods )
What does Cuba have to do with this?
European (well, roman) law is based on a set of rules and treating everyone by those rules, and american (case) law is based on historic cases and how we treated those.
So yeah, history matters.
However again.. how is this relevant. Russia signed a treaty guaranteeing Ukrainian neutrality and independence in the 90s. Which they totally threw away at the first signs of Ukraine actually becoming neutral rather than an Russian puppet state.
This is a curiously uninformed take that ignores the reality of Russia invading other sovereign countries.
The difference now (for us, europeans) is, that because of this specific occupation, which isn't done by "us" or "our friends" (we would help with the occupation if it was), our politicians are willing to screw massively with our economies, degrade the quality of life for normal people, endanger basically everyone in the world with looming prospects of WW3, conduct possibly internal terrorism (nord steam) and kill a bunch of people who'd prefer living normal lives... and all of that for what? Because nato (mostly americans) are in a dick measuring contest with putin, or maybe as a 'revenge', because of cuba, or who knows.... in the end, politicans stay rich, military industrial complex gets a lot richer, normal people in europe get fucked, ad soldiers die.
more like a bi-decadal occurrence. Then again nuance seems like an entirely foreign concept to you.
> untenable
what exactly was untenable about it? Russia could have easily come to some sort of an agreement more or less acceptable to all of the sides back in 2014. They had no interest in that. Neutral Ukraine was never an acceptable option to Putin…
Generally, for us ukraine is just another afghanistan mixed with cuba... there are some geopolitical interests and on the other hand, a "foreign superpower" is stepping on the front yard of nother superpower. A short war with maybe a regime change, maybe some lines on the map move, some angry stares, and that's it.
I live in a small eu country (slovenia), and even we helped with afghanistan, and our army is almost nonexistant. Also with syria. Other european countries did the same, lybia, iraq, etc. France is occupying or atleast strongly interfering with a bunch of african countries... and israel-palestine conflict is such a daily thing, noone even remembres it's happening anymore (except the people who die.. well, the people who lose friends and relatives due to it).
And now... instead of angry stares and maybe some basic sanctions, the european economy is getting fucked, we're at the brink of WW3, the german minister directly said that "we're at war with russia", energy prices are skyrocketing, industry is closing down, a food crisis is coming, and instead of a few dead and some destroyed vehicles, we're in six-digit numbers not even couting the wounded. Someone also destroyed the nord stream, it wasn't the russians, and somehow the media has forgotten about that.. the politicians either don't know and don't care who did it (very bad), or know and don't want to tell their people (even worse). And the "normal people" get fucked the most, as always.
Europe could have let putin have this and instead build an inpenetrable defensive wall at the eastern eu border as a response to that... but instead, we're at the brink of WW3. On the other hand, we're sending weapons and replacing them with new ones, we cannot afford... mostly from americans, buying gas at too-high prices... from americans, and getting deindustrialized and demilitarized in turn.
No it’s not.
> inpenetrable defensive wall
modern conflicts don’t work that way. This was already useless as a deterrence prior to WW2 (a wall and having Germany have Czechoslovakia did sure protect France from an invasion didn’t it?)
> food crisis
sure.. let’s just spam random nonsense
Sure it is.. why not? Russia doesn't want nato on its borders the same way as us didn't want the soviets there.
> sure.. let’s just spam random nonsense
https://fortune.com/2023/01/26/global-food-crisis-fertilizer...
https://www.politico.eu/article/fertilizer-soil-ukraine-war-...
....