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LAC-Tech

The speed at which EU defense integration precedes is dizzying. In only:

- one month after the US openly said it won't be the primary security guarantor of Europe

- a month and a half after the second inauguration of a NATO sceptical president

- three years after the start of a major european land war bordering the EU

- 14 years after another US administration formally announced it's "Pivot to Asia"

... a European country has announced it's "open to discussion" about extending its nuclear umbrella. Not that it's offering the umbrella. Not that it has discussed offering the umbrella. But that it's open to start those discussions.

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I really think too many people inside America do not properly understand how much the world now thinks it’s at risk from the US. The world sees what has happened as us turning into an autocracy that is now adversarial to democratic countries.

Words are actions in politics. They aren’t jokes or memes. We are threatening our neighbors. And for actions we have flipped on Ukraine and now withdrawn all aid, including intelligence, and just reported turned off their ability to target with GMLRS. We have even turned off our cybersecurity activities as it relates to Russia. Writing is very clear to people outside the US.

A few days ago the press secretary of the White House closed the session by commenting on a hockey game to be played that night between the US and "our soon-to-be 51st state", whilst grinning.

A declaration of war packaged as a prank.

To say it bluntly, everybody hates the US right now. I think that too many people inside the US do not really understand that.

I think you might have meant to respond to another comment.

Tbf, nuclear proliferation really sucks for a number of reasons, and shifting priorities in democratically elected non-authoritarian regimes with checks and balances typically means pushing such an unpopular policy forward is going to take a while.

Yep, ridiculously slow to reach the melting temperature on decision making. But the transition could now be quick.

You know the more I think about it, the more I consider that even without US support, their primary adversary has already demonstrated their impotence as an offensive military power. Maybe they simply don't need to do much more than they're already doing.

> their primary adversary has already demonstrated their impotence

…the call is coming from inside the house. Europe’s existential risk has shifted from Russia to a Russo-American alliance.

A slight thawing of relations is a long way away from an alliance. Even then, would Russia take it? They might see more value in their current arrangement with China.

Still, long term maybe you're right. It does make geopolitical sense for the US to be more closely aligned with Russia. In a pivot to Asia it's much more useful to sow-discord in the Sino-Russian relationship, than it is to prop up the EU.

> It does make geopolitical sense for the US to be more closely aligned with Russia. In a pivot to Asia it's much more useful to sow-discord in the Sino-Russian relationship, than it is to prop up the EU

The EU have been loyal allies. Their defence production is also nothing to be sneezed at. If we found ourselves in a war of attrition with China and either Japan or Korea stood neutral, an America with Europe has a much higher chance of succeeding than an America alone.

And if we surrender to Xi the way Trump has to Putin, that puts the American homeland at direct risk in the next conflict from both sides.

This entire enterprise comes down to some Silicon Valley types not liking the EU. It's personal and irrational and unfortunately, with Trump an ersatz monarch for two years, an example of why extreme power concentration sacrifices the immortal goals of a nation for the personal whims of a mortal leader.

I think if we take the recency bias, emotion and partisanship out of this, we can see that the United States has been trying to pivot away from Europe, under both democratic and republican administrations, for over a decade now.

The fact is Europe can afford to defend itself. This isn't the cold war were the soviet military was 800km from Paris. It's 2025, where the shell of the Russian army is struggling to capture territory 2,400km from Paris.

If the USA in the 70s was willing to thaw relations with China to offset the USSR, it will surely thaw relations was the Russian Federation now to offset China. I do not think European arms production is a significant factor in any US/China conflict; any "Taiwan Emergency" will just by a factor of geography not be a long protracted conflict, and has much more potential to flair up into alarming levels than even this one.

Macron has been advocating for tighter European collaboration for years, insisting that there should be an integrated European army in 2018 and calling NATO "brain-dead" in 2019. The question is whether other European countries want to be integrated, and thus far the answer has been that they do not.

This is what people outside of Europe do not understand. We are not one country. We are 27 sovereign countries with their own parliament and their own final decisions that must coin a common European policy. This is an immense effort.

It makes it slow, but it also means that the EU cannot turn authoritarian with one election, like the US did.

I think this is rapidly changing, now that the US is essentially a hostile foreign nation.

Even if you grant that perception of the US (which UK at least has explicitly stated it doesn't agree with), it doesn't resolve the practical obstacles where different member states don't necessarily agree on military action. One good example came up just today; France and the UK want to deploy peacekeeping troops to Ukraine to enforce a ceasefire, but Italy does not. In a unified European military, does Italy get a veto, or does the command structure somehow require Italian divisions to deploy somewhere the Italian government doesn't want them to go?

Well, the UK does not belong to the EU. So it really doesn't matter in this conversation all that much.

As for the EU, I imagine it will eventually create more integration tiers above the ones that currently exist. If I am not terribly mistaken Macron advocates for such a thing. Not a bad idea to be frank.

Absolutely fair points. He's at least trying. But it's the tragic comedy of the point at which he has to start from, and the date on the calendar...

I suspect EU leaders started drawing up plans in 2017, and dusted them off in November.

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