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Comment by jlaporte | Hacker News Reader

Macron has been advocating for a European Army for around a decade. With the recent EU defence spending announcements the idea of a unified command structure in Europe is becoming likely.

The French offer to extend their nuclear umbrella seems to me to have two purposes:

1. Deal with the immediate vulnerability opened by questions over U.S. Article 5 commitments to NATO

2. Try to get ahead of potential nuclear weapons proliferation among other EU states

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Also selling weapons. What this idiot of Trump seems to have missed is that countries have been purchasing weapons to the US to actually purchase US protection (like Australia did when they cancelled the submarine purchase they did to France to purchase US ones instead). Now that the US has announced being an unreliable protector, there is probably good business opportunities for all the countries that are nuclear powers and big arm dealers (such as France).

Depends on the weapons.

Certainly France is competitive when it comes to ships and many expendable munitions, but they aren't selling F-35s and the US is, and so far it seems that the juice is worth the substantial squeeze when it comes to that jet. The race is largely for second, because first place (the Lightning) is so far in front of the pack.

That juice is poisonous. The plane may be alright, but it is no longer a wise strategy to build security using US equipment, unless you are the US.

We have ITAR-free Rafale. And for better or worse, we don't "vendor lock-in" our planes.

European countries like Germany have been purchasing F-35 for the main reason that it's the only plane which can carry US nuclear weapons, which is mandatory for Germany to carry its obligations to participate to NATO nuclear defense [1]

They will hopefully purchase Eurofighter or Rafale or whatever else in the future.

[1] (fr) https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2022/03/15/la-d...

The F-35 is an expensive, very criticised (even inside the US) plane and the US notoriously have some kind of backdoor to it. It makes no sense to me that the EU would buy F-35 other than as a way to give money to the US ("buying protection").

F-35 is cheaper than the f14 converting, so not a good argument, the high selling numbers of it help drive the price down

My point was that the F-35 is more expensive than European planes which don't have a US backdoor.

In fact I think it was the US army that complained about the F-35 being way too expensive.

3. Repair the French economy with "defense" industry $pending.

I don't think (2) would really work out in practice. I have hard time believing that France would use nuclear weapons if one of the smaller states gets attacked. At the end of the day, when SHTF, you're on your own and Putin or some other aggressor might well call their bluff.

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