No, it's not.
It's ASML looking out for its largest customer. It's Amsterdam looking out for its shipping lanes, as well as for its Nine Eyes partner. Washington absolutely strong arms Europe, but it's strategically aligned with the Netherlands.
Like, just think about the guy coming into the White House. What about him screams quiet, behind-the-scenes diplomatic win taker?
More powers involved the better for me even as an American.
I don't think this is really good for the US or anybody else in the long term.
Europe should arm up, but US should cultivate a friendly relationship. If Europe would arm up and the US keeps pushing it'll either end up with escalation or US will have to start dismantling European cohesion, both out comes would be bloody.
Plus, If this tragedy happens, China would have an easier time dominating.
Plenty of countries don't think the same things and are not at war, and they're not even allies...
Russia is already in that position, so you are already dealing with an assertive opponent who only believe in power. And you got war.
So I'm not saying that Putin's rhetoric is correct. but it is a fact that it causes war. In Europe's case it's avoidable if you don't go that route.
The sensible thing would be to pull NATO back to more reasonable boundaries and leave the Russians alone. Maybe ally with them to oppose the Chinese or support India against China. Point them East instead of forcing them to militarise to the West.
What actually happened only really makes sense in context of the famous and rather concerning Trump-Biden debate. If that is the quality of the US's diplomatic head then it is easy to explain why the US policy went so far astray.
Without NATO more countries than Ukraine and Georgia would be at risk of war with Russia.
Russia is not going to ally with the US against China even if we let them rape and murder Ukraine to their black hearts content. They want to dominate Europe and share the values of our authoritarian adversaries.
The sensible thing would be to bleed Russia to death. Regardless of whether they manage to hold on to some part of Ukraine for a while, Russia's ability to threaten their other neighbors and project conventional power beyond their borders is being rapidly, irreversibly ground down. Their low birth rate, and declines in their educational system and industrial base, are going to take them off the board as significant players for decades. Most of their major infrastructure and industrial plant is either a remnant of Soviet times or was built largely by foreign experts who have now left for good; there just aren't many young Russians left who still know how to build anything.
Russia has nothing that we need. China can be contained without any help from Russia. China isn't self sufficient in energy or food, and are facing their own demographic time bomb. So it's enough to keep them bottled up behind the first island chain and prevent them from securing their sea lines of communication. Keep the pressure on and eventually they'll have another revolution or civil war; those have been a frequent occurrence throughout Chinese history. As for India, sure let's have good relations with them but they're going to pursue their own interests and have zero interest in being sucked into some kind of entangling alliance.
This does nothing to address the core issue of Russia viewing over 100 million Europeans across more than 10 countries as "lost colonies" that must be reconquered and subjugated under a Russian supremacist ideology.
It is us, not Russia, that must be left alone. In February 2022, European tanks did not roll into Russia; Russian tanks rolled into Europe.
Disagreement?
People do that all the time.
To avoid this outcome being common, we created a monopoly on violence inside states so disagreements have to be solved via courts and not violence.
We don't have this in geo politics.
There is no reason for EU-US war, as there is no possibility of gaining anything. Neither can invade the territory of the other.
Militarism and aggression from the EU would presumably be directed east.
> In 1997, ASML began studying a shift to using extreme ultraviolet and in 1999 joined a consortium, including Intel and two other U.S. chipmakers, in order to exploit fundamental research conducted by the US Department of Energy. Because the CRADA it operates under is funded by the US taxpayer, licensing must be approved by Congress. It collaborated with the Belgian IMEC and Sematech and turned to Carl Zeiss in Germany for its need of mirrors.[25]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML_Holding
Before aiming to not be pushovers, EU should probably study the history of their own companies.
No. ASML started as a spinoff of ASMI and Philips in 1984. It became hugely successful and effectively a global monopoly in chip production before any of its EUV products shipped.
Also, taxpayer money funds lots of research everywhere, and this is then used by companies to make money. Most of that research is public, done at universities. That the US chose to stick an "ours!!" label on some of it doesn't really make that research more special than other taxpayer funded research, in moral terms.
That said, its a price we should pay instead of relying on the US as a partner.
It's true that Europe and Canada need to invest more in defense, but the balance is currently 755 billion USD (US) vs. 430 billion USD (EU) [1]. So it's certainly not like the MAGA rhetoric pretends. The US has the benefit of being a large nuclear power, but for a long time the US preferred being the nuclear protector to avoid too much proliferation on the continent.
Another annoying part of the 'they gotta pay up' Trump/MAGA discourse is that it's starting to sound like a mob wanting protection money. This is not how the NATO agreement works. Countries have to spend 2% of their GDP on defense, but it's not a payment to the US. They could buy Saab Grippens if they wanted to.
[1] https://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/2024/6/pd...
It is still sad though. At any rate, it fits the pattern. During his first term he was also more interested in cozying up with autocrats.
History called our bluff. Event after event, Financial crisis (remember that?), the Brexit implosion of the UK, the Syrian war / migration crisis, the Pandemic, the Russian invasion, the Trumpist implosion of the US, the Adtech invasion, the Energy transition disruption from China etc. An endless list of setbacks that is not going to end anytime soon.
The old continent is shaken to the very core but somehow we are still in the denial phase.
I am not sure we are in denial. Have you seen defense spending since the invasion of Ukraine? Moscow failed blackmailing member states using gas. There was pretty good collective purchasing and distribution of COVID vaccinations, etc.
It's just a very slow process with 27 member states. But it seems that every crisis so far as accelerated European integration, which is a win.
There is indeed some evidence of this but this is not a cause to celebrate.
It is a reactive response and minimalist in scope. Once the crisis is somehow mitigated, everybody is back singing their old tunes. E.g., the various proclamations for banking and capital markets union are still in deep freeze, two decades after the financial crisis. The first response to the Covid and migrant crises was to close internal borders etc.
> It's just a very slow process with 27 member states.
Yes, and we should always celebrate and prioritise preserving that individuality - when it is not hindering the collective survival of our cultures and values.
The beauty of the European project is that it doesnt follow a known pattern. It must invent the needed mechanisms. At this juncture it feels there is a need for drastic such invention. To stop running after disasters and have some confidence in our future.
If that no longer holds, then we enter a new era where non-proliferation will be history.
Many of the countries already have certified delivery platforms, or have ordered them.
Of course, we're treading in new waters and it's completely unknown if any existing contracts and treaties will be honoured anymore, but that concern will be secondary to this, I think.
I say it is a secondary concern because 1. basically any European nation can put together a delivery system, ballistic or cruising, should they have to; and 2. creating the weapon itself is not really that big of an undertaking for a modern high-technology nation state level actor.
YouTube channels that follow the Russian narrative suddenly amplify this and pivoted from "the US is to blame" to "the EU is to blame".
The US narrative (at least online) seems to shift similarly: The US wasn't that important for the conflict, it is the Brits, the French and the Eastern European states who are the real hawks and who have to pay for the war.
Since the EU will be left out of talks between Trump and Putin, one wonders what the game is here and if secret agreements have already been made.
This is defeatist. Europe isn't bound by talks it's left out of.
With the full text of the law implemented, several of these companies came up with compliance plans that don’t run afoul of the letter of the law, but the EC has repeatedly and continued to say “not good enough”, effectively inserting itself in the design process of new products and services from these companies going forward.
I’m against using NATO Article 5 as a bargaining chip too, but seeing what popular support crappy extremely targeted and extremely bureaucratically-minded laws like this has, has me questioning how much the EU is really an ally these days. It’s a given that a lot of you feel this way about the election of Donald Trump (twice), so I get it, but it cuts both ways across the Atlantic right now.
Reality is the value that the US brings is lower than it was. Ukraine has chewed up the old Soviet-era WW2 style tank divisions, but we’ve also seen that 4th generation fighters can’t survive in contested airspace and traditional Navy ships need to stay offshore (for now) to avoid being sunk by drone jetskis. Kinda a problem where we have limited inventory of 5th generation aircraft in either of our air forces.
The Navy sort of figured this out, but instead of building submarines built stealth ships with no weapons.
We need a reappraisal of US military force structure, based on the technology of 2026 vs 1986, as we’re on the path to end up like the Russians.
Starting to sound like a mob? He's been at this for his whole adult life.
I'm sceptical Russia has this kind of power anymore, beyond being a proxy for China..
Honestly it feels like the US is also becoming a Russian sattelite with Trump & Elon having quiet gettogethers w Putin.
5% is what Sweden needed in the 1980s to defend itself from the whole Soviet Union + Warsaw Pact, without the EU and without NATO.
The significant geopolitical shake-up of the past few years should serve as a clear warning to Europeans to prioritize their own defense instead of depending on the USA.