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Comment by iammjm | Hacker News Reader

Europeans were perfectly happy to buy American tech und military exports, thus earning U.S. money and making EU technologically and politically dependent from the U.S. - it really was perfect for the U.S. But the US decided that it was actually a BAD DEAL and they wanted to extort even more money and dependence from EU. So now EU is investing in their own tech and military, thus reducing the amount of money US is getting and also reducing EU's dependency on the US, thus forcing EU to invest in their own tech & military, thus becoming a competitor to the US products. Your boy trump did do deliver, is the US now GREAT enough for you yet?

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There is a weird attitude among European elites where on the one hand, they point out how European countries have always been in a subservient position within the American sphere of influence, but then, instead of cheering that this era is ending, they seem to be all upset about it and want their collar to be put back on. Help me understand this. To me it seems that maybe the interests of EU elites differ from the interests of the EU common classes. The EU elites seem to have considered themselves as basically equivalent to American citizens in all but name, and were quite happy selling out their native countries in return for access to America.

I don't recognize this attitude at all. But I'm no elite anywhere.

Thinking about it, it's not so weird? We beat the nazis together, we've generally enjoyed world peace, freedom, and the joys of neocolonialism. Things were sailing along just fine.

Now things are all weird and fucked up and we have to worry about fucking russia, defense spending in general, the fate of greenland, cloud computing and all that shit?

Putting it like that, I'd like things to go back to the way they were too...

> We beat the nazis together

If you by "we" mean Britain, the United States, and Russia. And by "we" mean the people living 2 generations earlier, then I agree with your statement.

As a side note, people who were 18 in 1940, would be 103 today. So most people who fought in the second world war have unfortunately passed away.

I personally would never say "We beat the nazis together". The only thing I did was benefit from the war that generations before me have won.

You’re forgetting Canada. You’re also glossing over the fact that despite losing to the nazis, the occupied countries didn’t exactly just roll over when they got attacked. And during occupation there were resistance movements in those countries too. So there’s definitely a “we” here.

And while of course most of those people are dead now, they were all part of cultures that still hold many of the same norms and values as they do today.

This comment is either bad taste trolling or simply insulting to anyone outside these theee countries that gave their lives to fight sgainst nazis… in Germany too there were people fighting the nazis, just as an example.

I'm from Brazil. My grandfather, along with 25 THOUSAND other Brazilians, went to fight in WW2. He saw a best friend die gruesomely next to him, and came back to traumas that affected him, my father and even me to some extent. Go learn some history before spewing nonsense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

Can't say I disagree.

An important distinction is that US and EU interests aligned on many important areas up until recently. So it was less of a subservient relationship, and more of a mutually beneficial one. Now that the US wants to turn it into a subservient relationship, the EU is naturally looking for other options.

No, Europe is a de facto vassal state to US since WW2.

What Europe didn’t understand or didn’t want to understand was the US agenda differs from Europe agenda , always has. But now they start to wake up facing this reality.

> What Europe didn’t understand or didn’t want to understand was the US agenda differs from Europe agenda , always has.

France would disagree with the "didn't understand" part. They have been continuously ridiculed for holding that view, until very, very recently.

Agree, France is somewhat of an exception.

I remember during the Chirac presidency how viciously France was attacked by the other European countries, especially my own Sweden, for doing nuclear weapons testing in the South Pacific.

Jump forward today and France is seen as a protector of Europe, especially in Sweden, because of its nuclear arsenal.

> doing nuclear weapons testing in the South Pacific.

That was not the most glorious moment of Chirac's presidency, no..

However, as someone involved in numerical simulations, the argument that it was needed to calibrate their numerical models does hold (some..) water..

But Chirac did partly redeem himself by refusing to invade Iraq on bogus US claims of WMDs..

In fairness, he did so in part because this was going to go against Total's interests (see Oil, Power and War for that part of the story), but yeah, it was still the right stance to have and history proved him right.

As opposed to invading in order to support the interests of Halliburton? Tough choice..

Let's also not forget the absolutely absurd intervention of Colin Powell at the UN Security Council, holding up a vial containing the ultimate "proof" of WMD.

Good thing he didn't drop it.. /s

I think Europe was of the understanding that the "ongoing deal" was mutually beneficial.

The US paid by far the most for defense and so had by far the most influence and power in the world, and the peace (at least in the Western world) that US defense brought made sure both the US and the EU could freely trade and benefit financially.

What now changed is that apparently the US thinks it does not need this hegemony anymore (by forcing the EU to become a competing military power), or that they can replace the role the EU played with some other combination of countries. Or alternatively, the US is just looking for some "splendid isolation".

To European spectators, the above seems ridiculous. But who knows, maybe Trump is correct... Either way, the US had a good thing going and is now abandoning that. Not strange that Europe is surprised by that move.

>The US paid by far the most for defense and so had by far the most influence and power in the world

That's the thing, Americans have become very skeptical of our own influence and power, for good reason. Look what we did to the Middle East. Look at the shenanigans we were funding with USAID. There isn't actually a constituency for this imperialism stuff in the US. US voters don't like it.

In any case -- if we had so much influence, why were previous presidents like Bush and Obama unsuccessful in influencing the EU to fund its own defense?

>forcing the EU to become a competing military power

It's not about competition, it's about Europe taking responsibility for itself.

You want a global cop? How about you do it yourself for a bit? It's a terrible job. Maybe you should take a turn at it.

> unsuccessful in influencing the EU to fund its own defense

We did cut down too much on our defence, especially after the Cold war (not all European countries though, like Finland). But, many European countries have bought plenty of expensive US military equipment like fighter aircraft, helicopters, anti aircraft systems, etc. It’s not like those were a gift.

Yes, I agree the US should service those contracts. But Europeans shouldn't feel obligated to buy from the US over any other vendor.

Ok, let’s hope you are right on the anti-imperialism front and that the US citizens will not tolerate all that saber rattling against Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal…

or maybe you are just misunderstanding and rationalizing what’s going on to tell yourself that everything is going fine on the US politics side of things while the rest of the world is waking up to the fact that you voted a narcissistic authoritarian into office.

Let’s hope you are right!

>A "vassal state" is a state that has a mutual obligation to a superior state or empire, similar to a vassal in the feudal system, often involving tribute payments

Europe is not like that - we don't pay taxes to the US to defend us. The US kindly did so free of charge for many years which is a different thing, more of an alliance I guess.

Now the US is kind of switching allegiances we are having to recalculate.

The “tax” is enabling total American dominance economically and politically, not to mention huge leverage over all of Europe's military with vendor lock in.

Yeah, I don't understand how those people use reason (or maybe they don't). If you look at the biggest/richest companies, it's all about US tech industry and associated, even though we have fronted a lot of the research and education.

And we ask them to pay taxes fairly they complain, and they don't want to open their stuff, they even work hard on malicious compliance. It's a pretty bad deal.

What's a "de facto vassal state"? That's a pretty vague notion, one could fill it with any meaning. What Trump has shown is that Europe is not as dependent as to follow US politics whatever it is.

Germany is still occupied by US without a formal peace treaty, hence de facto.

The occupation of Germany ended with the two plus four treaty coming into force in 1991. It is not occupied, and there is a formal treaty.

That is the unification treaty. If you accept that as a peace treaty then you need to at least accept that Germany, and as a consequence Europe, was vassal state until 1991. Thus the idea that Europe were equal partners with US is false.

> That is the unification treaty.

Yes, among other things. It is the "Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany", and thing it finally settles is WW2 and the subsequent temporary arrangements.

> If you accept that as a peace treaty

The ~1955 treaties between the respective occupying powers and West and East Germany separately, which ended most of the powers of occupation but could not formally end the Potsdam arrangement because the Western allies weren't going to formalize the situation with East Germany and the USSR wasn't going to do the same for West Germany, effectively (but not completely formally) ended the occupation and were essentially peace treaties (but obviously neither addressed the whole of Germany or the whole of the belligerents against Germany in WW2.) Between 1955 and reunification, each of the Germanies was technically occupied as a consequence of the Cold War. But West Germany was generally treated as as much of an equal partner as other major Western nations with the US.

I only pointed to the 1991 treaty because it is simple and irrefutable and the most straightforward, uncomplicated way to rebut your originally clearly-wrong claim that Germany was currently occupied without any peace treaty.

How can you be an equal partner if you are occupied?

West Germany wasn't, practically, occupied post-1955. It was formally occupied because the Cold War meant the USSR had no interest in signing off on the Western settlement with West Germany, just as the Western powers didn't with East Germany, and given the Potsdam Arrangement actually formally ending the occupation required that.

You have to be either naive or a shill if you believe the US didn't leverage any political control over (West) Germany with that kind of large occupational force.

See, this gets to the point others have made in this thread. Your reasoning implies that you should be happy if the US pulls out of NATO and leaves Europe, since Europe would no longer be "occupied" and would thus be an "equal partner".

Europeans are just impossible to satisfy, from my perspective. They will complain no matter what the US does.

> Europe is a de facto vassal state to US since WW2

OP's point is this nonsense rhetoric doesn't make sense with European frustration with American retrenchment.

I'm the “European elite” you're thinking of. Well, not “elite” in the sense of being rich, I'm not rich, but I'm also not stupid.

It's simple: global trade is good, isolationism is bad. It's as simple as that.

The “EU common classes” don't want higher prices or poorer services. This is a fact that the US's elites in power will soon discover. And it's easy to see why this trend is a train wreck in progress: unemployment, in both the US and EU, is at an all-time low, and if you significantly lower imports via tariffs and economic wars, who do you think will work on those local products and services? Never mind that US's investments and exports are also crashing as a direct result of this administration's policies, so I'm guessing they rely on future software developers that end up unemployed to become lumberjacks.

But yes, now that the US is no longer a trustworthy ally, I want the EU to cut its tech dependencies from it for as much as possible, while strengthening ties with all of our other allies, such as Canada, Australia, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, India. There's no conflict in this reasoning.

Employment stats in the EU are a complete joke and don't reflect at all real work/value creation. It's all about moving numbers from one box to another. Just because you made one more bureaucrat bullshit job does not mean you are creating any value, quite the contrary.

You seem to conveniently forget that all of this was "possible" only with heavy borrowing, and it looks like many countries won't be able to even pay the principal soon enough. When you take this into account, the "growth" has been negative for over 10 years, and it was barely stagnant for quite a while before. We exported the growth and manipulated money, now the truth appear. You can only pretend for so long.

The reality is that the value creating has been quite low in most of the EU and now that the economic engine that was Germany has stalled, everything is grinding to a halt. Germany had heavy reliance on cheap Russian gas for its chemical industry and premium car market, both are getting disrupted massively. It's actually a perfect example on why we should avoid too much reliance on other countries. The hilarious part is that in the meantime, Germany was giving "ecology" lessons to all their neighbors and the world at large. In typical arrogant German fashion, they had everything figured out, until they didn't, that is. They actually hold a lot of responsibility for their terrible leadership on the EU.

What is weird about not liking that former powerful ally is becoming a hostile entity actively trying to harm you? They are not cheering, because what is happening is loose loose situation and they dont like the loose part. Also, buying American tech und military exports in the past was not exactly something shameful. The way you write about it, as if trade was "being slave with a humiliating collar" is weird thinking.

> To me it seems that maybe the interests of EU elites differ from the interests of the EU common classes.

Common classes in EU are not benefiting from trade war, they are not benefiting from USA annexation threats and they are not benefiting from Russia expanding.

> The EU elites seem to have considered themselves as basically equivalent to American citizens in all but name, and were quite happy selling out their native countries in return for access to America.

This is nonsensical. You are making stuff up, big time. How is buying American arms a symbol of "considering themselves to be Americans"? I cant recall any call or push to be more America.

Relying on the US for military protection allowed many European countries to save billions of their own money for years. Undoing this going to be very, very expensive and there is no good understanding where all this money is supposed come from, the main idea right now seems to be massive amounts of debt, which can get very ugly in the long run. It absolutely needs to happen, but I can clearly see why many politicians are not thrilled about the whole thing

Looking at defense spending, I do not think it saved so much money. It mostly ensured that the US would be the only major nuclear power in the West - so the "military protection" was more something like a moat for the nuclear monopoly.

And monopolies are something the US loves (think of big tech, Comcast, etc.) and the EU dislikes ;-)

With the US stepping away from its monopoly, it is only a matter of time until more European states will enter the nuclear protection market.

> the main idea right now seems to be massive amounts of debt, which can get very ugly in the long run

The economy, unlike one's personal finances, is a circle. Unless the Europeans buy abroad, all that money is going to stay in Europe, circulating and stimulating the economy.

Even if it's "only" arms, spending it to maintain industry is way better than many alternatives. Manufacturing infrastructure and lots of skilled jobs and workers, sounds good to me to have.

"Debt" is just a number, and if you are in a strong enough position you can always change policies around the purely virtual "money".

Finance/money is supposed to be the virtual control system, and the real world thing it is supposed to help to steer is everything real and what we actually care about. In all other areas we would never accept that the control system becomes the target!! The target is always the real thing, and we will adjust the control system to achieve the desired outcomes.

Not so with finance! It has taken on a life of its own, and the vast majority of people will gladly and unthinkingly subordinate the real world to its whims. Something that makes at least a little bit of sense for the individual makes no sense for the economy though.

We have people in charge who know all and care about the control system first of all, the real world outcomes be damned. If the control system says we need high unemployment and homelessness and less high paying jobs there is nothing we can do, because the purely virtual human-invented finance system is the god. But hey, religion has been on the decline for a long time at least in the modern world, right (/s)?

> which can get very ugly in the long run

Only when the people in charge think like described.

>Even if it's "only" arms, spending it to maintain industry is way better than many alternatives. Manufacturing infrastructure and lots of skilled jobs and workers, sounds good to me to have.

As Eisenhower warned, every Euro spent turning steel into an artillery shell is one NOT spent turning steel into high-speed rail. Every worker in a factory building armored vehicles is a worker NOT being re-trained to be an elder caregiver for Europe's aging demographics. There are immense trade-offs that come with dumping capital, both human and material, into making Europe's war machine rise from the grave.

>"Debt" is just a number, and if you are in a strong enough position you can always change policies around the purely virtual "money".

Key phrase there is "if you are in a strong enough position"....and Europe isn't. Because it cut itself off from cheap Russian energy imports, the entire industrial sector is no longer cost-competitive. With the exception of highly-specialized difficult-to-copy stuff like ASML or maybe Carl Zeiss optics, etc... the European economy writ large is in a really weak position compared to the cost efficiency of China or compared to the still-large (but diminishing) political-military leverage of the US. Also, Europe looks like it is getting closer and closer to handing over the frozen Russian assets in Euroclear to Ukraine. You can expect a massive capital flight from Chinese, Mid-East, or Global South investors if that ever happens.

That's exactly the same reasoning we heard during Covid, injecting massive amounts of money into the economy was supposed to be perfectly safe and even a good thing. Definitely not supposed to lead to any inflation. Guess what happened next.

The argument during COVID wasn't that it was "perfectly safe", but that it was better than the alternative of leaving all the people living paycheck to paycheck get laid off and starve.

People just have short memories and see the bad outcome we did get (high inflation) and not the bad outcomes we avoided (unmitigated COVID, economic collapse).

There was this "end of history" idea where Europe, elites or not, believed that democracy would follow globalization and free trade. This turned out to be very naive but still common belief. Now Europe will have to fend for it self. In the long run I think this will benefit both US and Europe, but short term it will hurt both. Also I don´t think Europe will pivot away from US, we still understand that at least half of US shares our values, but US can´t be trusted to stand up for these values anymore. Same as Hungary, Turkey. I personally see it as a good opportunity to get some action going in Europe, as I discuss here in the context of building digital infrastructure: https://lnkd.in/dRNSYPWC

The people i know (except for the tankie ones such as my high school philosphy professor, that guy was goat) would have preferred a less abrupt usa exit and not one that potentially puts europe security at risk. I do not know enough about the elites to talk about it tho

I don't support Trump, but you really can't claim that Europe wasn't warned here. Russia first invaded Ukraine back in 2014. And here's Trump back in 2018, warning about German dependence on Russian gas, and stating that Europe needed to step up defense spending "immediately":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nu57D9YcIk0

This has hardly been "abrupt". Even Obama and Bush were telling Europe to step up defense spending.

Or the Russo-Georgian war of 2008. European leaders have had plenty of time to react.

Just take the President of the EU commission, Ursula von der Leyen. She was Germany's minister of defence from 2013 to 2019.

Honestly, Trump has said so many things that you can probably find everything and the opposite of everything coming out of his mind.

Yes, I do agree that we had been warned and since the Ukrainian invasion defense budgets of European countries increased. I also think such an abrupt change of mind from the US hurts both sides and nobody earns anything from it. Except Russia.

Even if European cointries increased spending before, the situation is changing in such a way that even nuclear weapons - something that almost no European country would have wanted if they already hadn't had them - are being taken into consideration to be developed as a nuclear umbrella from France towards other European countries.

>Honestly, Trump has said so many things that you can probably find everything and the opposite of everything coming out of his mind.

I think he's been pretty consistent on the issue of European defense spending, actually. In any case, if Trump is inconsistent, that itself can be considered a warning -- that sometimes the US elects inconsistent presidents.

>I also think such an abrupt change of mind from the US hurts both sides and nobody earns anything from it.

Nothing short of this "abrupt change" has been successful in getting Europe to take responsibility for its own security. As I said, US presidents have been complaining about this for ages. I hope you finally listen, because my enthusiasm for defending Europe (as an American and a registered Democrat even) is currently quite low: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43459774

>nuclear umbrella from France towards other European countries

We'll see if France actually commits to that, or if it is all talk. If Nation A extends its nuclear umbrella over Nation B, that basically means that Nation A is putting its own cities at risk in case of nuclear retaliation, for the sake of Nation B. As an American, it sort of boggled my mind when I learned that we were putting our own cities at risk for the sake of our allies this way.

And it seems that Europe's way of thanking us is to make fun of our healthcare system, accuse us of the non-crime of "cultural imperialism", etc... See what I'm saying about enthusiasm to defend you guys? Something needs to change in the relationship.

The issue is not only usa getting far from europe - which on itself is ok imho -, just the fact that given an existing alliance - for which europeans fought war for the us in middle east and died as well - could have been reshaped with a slower rollout. It is unclear how much and how fast things will change, and unpredictability is worse than expecting a certain outcome (just like the markets don't like trump's unpredictability in economy).

I do not see why usa should be "thanked". We have been allies for decades and now this relations are being reshaped in a way that favors no one, while a slower approach to such sensitive issues might have yielded better results (i don't know how many countries still want to buy us weapons right now in europe, maybe a different approach would have meant stronger collaboration between ue/usa companies or maybe not)

>It is unclear how much and how fast things will change, and unpredictability is worse than expecting a certain outcome

So you would prefer that the US just withdraws from NATO now, to reduce the unpredictability? That's fine by me. If unpredictability is your issue, Trump should be able to address that by withdrawing tomorrow.

>I do not see why usa should be "thanked".

If you think our involvement in Europe over the past 80 years has been positive, you should acknowledge that. If all you do is complain, it's natural for Americans to think "well, maybe our involvement in the continent isn't positive... perhaps it's time to pull out and see if they stop complaining about everything". You're not complaining about Brazil, Australia, Switzerland, or China the way you complain about the US. I think we need a reset to make the US/Europe relationship more like the Brazil/Europe relationship.

Unpredictability is the issue when paired with a us alienation from eu, and a us nato exit would make the situation more unpredictable for eu

i'm not complaining about the us just like i'm not thanking germany for being one of our commercial and sometimes political partners. Perhaps it's something more present in us discourse but most of the time we're not "thankful" to other countries, even if allied ones. It's something that doesn't really have a meaning here, even if i do agree that the usa have been important partners of europe in the past (and probably will in the future as well, although less than before)

The US isn't just a "partner", it does the vast majority of spending among NATO countries, even though NATO is an alliance that Europe benefits from way more: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/...

I'm not in principle opposed to this sort of altruism in US foreign policy. I just don't want to have an altruistic foreign policy towards people that resent me. For people who resent me, I want fairness at the very least. Europe gets most of the benefit from NATO, so Europe should pay most of the cost. Currently we are very far from that.

This is not altruism. This strange american "look how we suffer for you"-thing is just utterly weird.

Why do you think the US has global power projection capabilities? Why do you think they can control world trade? Why is the dollar still the reserve currency?

The military "altruistic" peacekeeping is a major benefit, from better access to trade agreements to bases everywhere and military support from dozens of countries.

Nothing of that would be possible otherwise. Ending the US' protection also means taking away a massive piece of global influence the US had and turning into a "normal" country, not one the world seems to revolve around.

That's the trade-off. You can't keep the soft power without having partners who rely on you and are going to have a much, much harder stand in future negotiations.

Also, US military spending goes directly back into the US economy. This is absolutely not the same as paying other countries, it's a hidden, long-running stimulus for the MIC.

I don't want to project power globally. I don't want to control world trade. I don't want to have bases everywhere. I don't want to influence everywhere. I'm tired of this empire stuff. We aren't good at being an empire. We suck at it. I want to be a normal country, thanks. I'm tired of foreigners obsessively following our politics, offering their commentary, and resenting us no matter what we do. I want to be normal.

Switzerland is very wealthy without being a global empire. They are well-regarded and have more soft power than the US. Their currency is trusted. No one is telling them they have an obligation to support Ukraine. They have better relations with the EU. Their military is focused on self-defense. We should be more like Switzerland.

>Also, US military spending goes directly back into the US economy. This is absolutely not the same as paying other countries, it's a hidden, long-running stimulus for the MIC.

We could easily spend in a better way which also goes back into the economy -- for example, government healthcare, like Europeans are always bragging they have. Also, I don't want a massive military-industrial complex either. I favor peace.

We call a partner that spends the majority on an alliance, a partner. Just like Germany is a partner to italy, France, Spain and vice versa

>Nothing short of this "abrupt change" has been successful in getting Europe to take responsibility for its own security.

I think Europe always had the capacity for that. Russia is a nuclear armed state but as far as it's proportional spending goes it's worth noting it's economy is smaller than Italy. What it was lacking was political will and the urge to deal with fragmentation and unanimity. Especially wrt germany being slow to send weapons systems, cutting gas, Shroeder, etc All that spending on American jets or the like clearly paled in comparison to the bloc's willingness to commit and to deal with economic dependencies and would still matter less if everyone increased spending. It also lacks the push for a proper foreign policy that benefits the whole. Not letting Russia pull price politics and fighting its influence in important alternative gas routes would be huge.

>And it seems that Europe's way of thanking us is to make fun of our healthcare system, accuse us of the non-crime of "cultural imperialism", etc... See what I'm saying about enthusiasm to defend you guys? Something needs to change in the relationship.

Are your view of it on the comments of people online?

>Are your view of it on the comments of people online?

Yes, I'm noting that uniquely among US allies, the internet is full of Europeans expressing anti-Americanism. And this has reduced American enthusiasm for the transatlantic alliance. There's no sense in trying to please someone who complains about you no matter what you do.

I don't think it is just online, but the internet made it very clear to the US how Europeans feel about us. Naturally, conservatives are going to react more to that since they are more patriotic. That's why Trump has been driving the reset to the relationship.

I could argue the very same about americans towards Europe. With Europe aiding the US in tradewars against japan, etc. actual wars in iraq, afghanistan, dealing with the fallout of that, etc Going against it's own foreign policy desires to appease the whims of [insert new administration] like a good set of vasals.

But basing your foreign policy on internet commenters is so deeply incredibly inane.

And get this. If you're hegemon you attract more slack no matter what you do. In many ways it involves being the geopolitical schoolyard bully and trump just makes that overtly clear. But it's not like protecting the dollars reserve currency status or any other such thing was something that didn't happen before and is now just being done to spite BRICS internet commenters.

Like what's next? Want to go to war in the middle east again because they dislike you?

>I could argue the very same about americans towards Europe. With Europe aiding the US in tradewars against japan, etc. actual wars in iraq, afghanistan, dealing with the fallout of that, etc Going against it's own foreign policy desires to appease the whims of [insert new administration] like a good set of vasals.

If you were such good vassals, why didn't you increase defense spending back when Bush and Obama requested that?

>But basing your foreign policy on internet commenters is so deeply incredibly inane.

I don't see other Europeans arguing against the internet commenters we are talking about. I think these comments are rather representative of European opinion, actually. In any case, I think if Europe wants to repair the relationship, it would be good to know that internet discourse is contributing a lot to the current situation. European users were in the habit of insulting the US long before American users started insulting Europe.

It's not just me who thinks this way. Here's a post I happened to see on Substack just the other day: https://terry264.substack.com/p/europe-youre-on-your-own

Do you think Trump administration officials like Pete Hegseth and JD Vance aren't reading this stuff? They're part of the younger generation that lives on social media. They read it, and they draw inferences about how their counterparts in Europe regard the transatlantic relationship.

>And get this. If you're hegemon you attract more slack no matter what you do. In many ways it involves being the geopolitical schoolyard bully and trump just makes that overtly clear. But it's not like protecting the dollars reserve currency status or any other such thing was something that didn't happen before and is now just being done to spite BRICS internet commenters.

I'm allowed to want to stop being hegemon. Maybe Europe can be hegemon next. You can see how much fun it is ;-)

>Like what's next? Want to go to war in the middle east again because they dislike you?

No, I don't want to go to war. I just don't believe in voluntarily supporting people who disdain me.

Sorry, but I'm must write that: "the internet is full of Europeans expressing anti-Americanism" This strongly sound like Russian "the others country is Russophobic".

Internet mems site are not trustworthy, I'm saying this as Polish, basing on this kind of site I've should be the racist, but I'm not.

Poland was strongly pro american (at least in the last 35 year). Unfortunately, internet in this time must be readed with "grain of salt", there is too many trolls, bots and boring kids.

"I don't think it is just online, but the internet made it very clear to the US how Europeans feel about us." In my opinion there is somekind of "disinformation attack" to quarrel europe with USA, unfortunately, successfully because I see a lot annoyed people on both site.

Information which comes to us via media (tv, local news, etc.) probably are diffrents that this whats you get, so probably this is why you can feel that we're anti-american, but in my opion Europe and USA was in symbiosis not only economically.

I'm also want to mark that Trump from my perspective starting "false flag" operation on greenland, like Putin did that with Ukraine, what woring me because I just don't want a war :)

Sorry, for my English, but for me it's 2:18

I don't think it is internet trolls. It's been going on for a long time. I don't think a disinformation attack would be used on Hacker News. The accounts I'm arguing with have significant karma. And I don't see other Europeans arguing with the ones who express anti-Americanism, or downvoting those comments. That suggests they silently agree.

I don't think the US should be invading other countries. I agree that justifies anti-Americanism, as I stated elsewhere in this thread.

Unfortunately, it's a "bobble", politican topics always cause emotions and annoying, a lot of (if not the most) peoples when see this kind of discussion mostly don't read them for peace of mind.

My wife when is bored, usually, reading twitter and after 15min I'm hearing her crying how people are cruel for animals, but she doing that herself everytime.

The best what you can do is temporary cut off yourself from "bubble", but basing on how intesive news was last time it can be hard.

Human under emotions doesn't thing clear.

Among my friends, the feeling is that the USA used to be seen as a valued ally, and now it has shown itself as a fickle and untrustworthy ally. Yes people are various shades of upset, and yes people now value European countries splitting from the USA. These two views are compatible, and have nothing to do with class.

Can you give some examples of this attitude? I'm not sure I've seen that behaviour anywhere, and it's very difficult to look up examples when your description is so vague.

How about the consequences of US proxy wars? Not a word about the reasons mediterranean european countries keep getting floods of displaced refugees.

Maybe if the US stopped bombing their countries, we'd stop getting so many.

The bombing of Libya was a full NATO operation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_i...

But yes, the War On Terror completely destabilized such a large area including Syria that it's been a disaster for Europe.

Correct, and that is why I argue that Europe is an vassal state, i.e. taking actions against its best interest because the overlord tells them to.

The internal refugees in Syria occurred because of multi-year drought. Burma, 2008, was a cyclone. Leaving out some theories on proxy war is like leaving out any other kind of challenge.

If the US wasn't fighting these "proxy" wars, Euroland would have a lot bigger problems. Refugees are a simple problem to fix. Don't take any.

Lol. Just listen to any ‘opinion maker’ on European media - they whine about it 24/7. They’re ‘not happy’ - to say the least - that the status quo has changed.

With Nord Stream, the elites tried to gaslight their population using the media into believeng an stupid made-up story about how Russia blowed up their own pipe.

Very convenient for the US, not so for the EU

Only if it were Russia can Trump stay quiet about Nord Stream, which he has.

The driver for this is clear, surely? It's that we're now unsure where the USA stands viz-a-viz Russia.

> instead of cheering that this era is ending, they seem to be all upset about it and want their collar to be put back on.

> Help me understand this

The answer is money.

All the get-rich-quick schemes/scams are coming from the US. For a very current example, look not further than Tesla vs Volkswagen valuation.

That level of dollars valuations that are completely detach from reality, and the capacity of getting real, tangible, value out of the scheme before it collapses as a house of card, is orders of magnitude above what you can get elsewhere in the world.

Hence the elites want to continue having access to that market, domestic market be damned.

Deep down the elites know this is the best thing that could possibly happen for Europe long term. Shed the dependency on the US, build your own defence economy and the myriad of parallel non military economic benefits that come from defence investment. Yes a painful transition in the short term so you have to whine about it a bit to try and limit the damage, but this US adminstration is the single best thing that has happened to Europe and the UK. This is where Europe gets reborn. In 20-30 years Europe will be a proper superpower again.

What do you do, if one of your social acquaintances goes full Kanye West?

"Anger in Greenland over visits this week by Usha Vance and Mike Waltz" - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/24/greenland-usha...

It's not necessarily about being content to submit to the US, but more an ideology of globalism too good to be true. Most of the leaders in EU have some sort of collectivist mindset (either right or left, just what and the amount differ) and they apply this worldview to everything.

So when they see other countries taking the load/lead on things they don't think it's an "us vs them" situation, they think it will stay us, as in together. When everything is working ok, when everyone feel like they are getting their fair share, it works fine; but when the world becomes unstable, and they are tensions about resources and power it all breaks down.

This is the mindset that created the biggest providence state that ever was. But the problem is that it was always a lie. The thing was built on power imbalance between countries, and just because they accepted the deal when they were weak doesn't mean it will stay that way forever.

The only reason it worked in the first place is that they sold the newer generation's future, borrowing aggressively to fund a way of life that wasn't sustainable If they had thought long term, they would never have given so much power to other countries, the USA is one of them, but it's the same for China, and Russia to a lower extent. Now that those big countries are fighting for domination, they find themselves in the crossfire, just now figuring out that we are too dependent and don't have that much say because we don't have a lot of power.

You cannot solve a problem with the mind that created it, and that's the issue we face. We desperately need to think differently that what got us there, but they cannot erase their "programming", for them, it's the "right" way, it's basically the only way.

The US will fare a bit better for a while, precisely because they control important stuff, like the tech industry, decent army power and are still the de facto reserve currency. But in reality, they will face the same problems down the line if they don't change as well. The protectionism is because at the rate it's going, we will all be under China's rule before long. You can trade stuff, but never make yourself completely dependent on another country. You may be friends, until you are not. Things change, politics are unpredictable, it's a bad idea to hope for mercy when a big power is rising.

After WW2, Europe, Germany and especially France, tried to create the precursor of the European Union with a defense component. There should have been a common European army with European nuclear weapons a common command structure and soldiers from all members. When this didn't work out, NATO was intended as a European defensive alliance, without the US at first.

Why didn't those two things happen? Because of US influence: The US actively prevented any kind of military unification e.g. by preventing West Germany from going in that direction (as the occupier they could do so) and by alienating France and bribing and distracting the UK (by sharing plans for weapons such as nukes and submarines). When the NATO idea came up, the US offered their membership, but with a twist: NATO troops would always be under USian command. At every opportunity, the US made themselves indispensible for European defense and prevented any kinds of European political initiatives in that direction. That is why France rejected the NATO command structure for quite some time and was only "half a member".

This "arragement" had a downside of increased dependence and an upside of decreased spending and responsibility for the Europeans, and they got used to it. For the promise of US protection, Europe would give up its independence in that regard. Europe would be dependent on US-controlled military infrastructure such as AWACS, SOSUS, PATRIOT, and satellite coms and surveilance. Europe would be dependent on US-delivered weapons and weapons components. In many suppossedly national/european military hardware, there are some indispensable USian components like radars, engines or GPS, which is a double advantage for the US: they could sell something and have a means to stop any kind of use they dislike, either by withholding spare parts and support or by builtin remote shutdown switches. Europe participated in the occasional war on behalf of the US like Iraq or Afghanistan, and the US cleaned up some European messes like Yugoslavia.

It all seemed like a dependence that was one-sided, but still somewhat beneficial to the Europeans.

Now, the US are walking back on their promises and are actively breaking their side of the deal by e.g. questioning their future adherence to the mutual defense obligation in NATO article 5. This is a much bigger deal than it sounds at first: When you read the game theory of it, promises of mutual defense must be unwavering, there must not be any doubt in the mind of a potential enemy. If the rockets are flying, a red button must be pressed, no questions asked. Any kind of doubt will be exploited by an enemy, as can be seen by current Russian propaganda threatening Europe. In former times, the US would be first to condemn such threats and issue counter-threats. Nowadays: silence.

This means that the US effectively ended NATO. Mutual defense obligations and promises of defense from the US are now worthless. Of course nobody is cheery about that. A European common defense is years and billions (long scale) away. Of course nobody is cheery about that. After the Europeans dutifully obliged the US and accepted their declaration of article 5 after 9/11 (the only occasion where article 5 was ever invoked), the US now declare their ingratitude and unwillingness to ever reciprocate. Of course nobody is cheery about that.

same people who are convinced russia is going to lose the ukraine war and go bankrupt while at the same time endangering europe.

it's all about rhetorics being used to manipulate for personal gains of a small elite. the kind of elite who makes billion dollar contracts via sms and then accidentally loses such sms.

Those elites have known nothing but subservience. They simply can't imagine anything else.

What Trump did was to pull out the rug under the European establishment, which have all built their political existence on the transatlantic cooperation.

Who is to blame? European establishment wants of course the citizens of Europe to blame Trump and not them for not preparing for this eventuality.

But the truth is that almost all of them are responsible for neglecting what is the best interest of Europe. Thus they play this game.

Hard times are ahead if nations start to care only about their best interest and not about what is the best interest of the whole world.

Globalization died with Covid when it became obvious that the old order no longer functioned in a world with lockdowns and pandemics, it disrupted the entire supply chain.

Then globalization died a second time with the Russia’s war in Ukraine, with the emergence of BRICS and the consequences of sanctions and the breakdown of the global monetary system.

Covid was a hiccup for global trade. The just in time supply chains created by the constant whittling/looting of the MBA class were the problem.

Globalization died when the small minded monster Republicans had been farming for decades escaped its talk radio cage and found Trump. Trump (and his loser-mentality enablers) saw systems they didn't understand, and more irritatingly other parties who wouldn't just lap up shit as they were bossed around, and inferred this meant the US must have been getting a poor deal instead of an awesome one. (BuT tHE dEbT!!1!)

I think what your comment proves is that many Americans are stuck in the Democrat vs Republican mindset and thinking that kind of explanation actually works in a global context.

Pax Americana is over, US is no longer capable of dictating globalization to the rest of the world, why? Because many countries has caught up.

There's a world of difference between accepting a shift in relationships from 'dictating' to being more equal partners, versus deliberately trashing relationships and doing your best to alienate.

If the US weren't still some kind of world leader, USD would be in the toilet as other countries would have dropped most of their USD holdings. The current regime seems to be doing their best to make that happen, whether for cryptocurrencies, foreign agents, or just simple-minded looting.

I'm an American libertarian. It's not Democrat versus Republican. It's conservative versus neofascist/patrimonialist.

IDK, contrary to popular belief we don't all work for lockheed martin so i really couldn't care less about the military-industrial complex losing business. I really don't see that as a bad thing; it's pretty obvious at this point that a significant amount of US sabre-rattling is a result of the incestuous relationship between politicians, high-ranking military officers and defense contractors. I suppose this could have down-stream effects for commodities like steel and that's unfortunate but there's no way the military-industrial-complex could possibly be reduced without that happening.

But more to the point, you seem to be under the impression that Americans benefit on a personal level from our country's global empire. We really don't. Like I said above, there are a lot of fat-cats making big money grifitng off government contracts, often with overt conflicts-of-interest involving their connections in the government. Some of that money goes to their employees and ultimately into local economies but largely it's just a circuitous way to enrich assholes.

If you ever visit America, try driving about 150 miles or so out of whatever major metropolis you're staying at and take a look at how depressing this country really is. These people don't look like they're living in the epicenter of the world's most powerful and influential empire. It does not matter to them if Europe buys up the new f-47 or whatever. They could care less if the EU becomes a major military superpower in its own right. That's why when you look at these election maps, it comes down to urban areas backing the democrats and rural areas backing the trumpublicans with surprising uniformity.

> But more to the point, you seem to be under the impression that Americans benefit on a personal level from our country's global empire. We really don't.

I am routinely puzzled at the simple ignorance of U.S. citizens decrying the benefits of being the global hegemon:

- global reserve currency: lower borrowing rates, allows us to set economic norms

- massive military and power projections: maintains stability and provides influence wherever it's deployed

- US culture: opens up the world market to US art and culture, all of which redounds to the benefit of industries and consumers inside the US.

These benefits extend to all our allies and generally created an epoch of peace unlike any that existed before (this is including all the wars the US elected to engage in).

You may not like all of the particulars (who would?), but there is no question US citizens are richer for our global power and reach.

>These people don't look like they're living in the epicenter of the world's most powerful and influential empire. It does not matter to them if Europe buys up the new f-47 or whatever.

They may not appreciate how much the military-industrial complex benefits them not, but I think they will experience directly how it had helped when the market is gone.

It's fair to decry US citizens' ignorance of the true extent of US dominance and how it affects the home front ... BUT combined with 40 years of increasing neoliberal austerity, it's not correct to equate the effects with a better way of life.

Instead I would say that US corporate interests and the wealthy undoubtedly benefit from US hegemony, and there is a more or less relentless effort to deny those benefits to the poor and middle class. The cost of living, especially rent or mortgage servicing, has drastically outpaced wage increases. Health care is in terrible shape with medical bankruptcy increasingly common, and outcomes way worse.

The MI complex is again something that Americans don't credit enough for economic stimulation, but if anything it just shows that a command economy works way better than neoliberal capitalists would have us believe.

Even "peace" is poorly distributed internally. A "volunteer army" in effect is one where those with means don't have to risk their lives supporting the latest US adventure.

> hus forcing EU to invest in their own tech & military, thus becoming a competitor to the US products.

Not sure how you made the jump here. EU is signalling increased military spending but there isn't really much talk about tech (beyond reddit-like enthusiasm which leads nowhere); which is funny because the top referrals for this site are .. american companies themselves.

That being said, increased spending doesn't necessarily guarantee results.

Signalling? Talks about investing 800 billion in the military industry across the EU would have been unthinkable 4 months ago. Now they're proceeding at a speed that is staggering when you see how long these talks/processes normally take.

EU cloud is certainly much discussed, and more than that. Holland for instance voted and accepted a resolution last week for more digital sovereignty. This doesn't mean we'll have an AWS competitor overnight, but we're also only 3 months in.

The problem is precisely that most things have been (and continue to be) "unthinkable" "impossible" "unreal" in Europe for a long time. The unthinkable has the tendency to hit the many walls that exist in the corrupt and disfunctional European institutions. Lots of virtue signaling, lots of talk, lots of discussion, lots of failure, little action, little results. Put me in the skeptical bucket that European leader (and population) have the will power to sustain the unthinkable beyond an American election cycle.

It's unclear how this EU momentum will stand the test of time, even if the war in Ukraine were to stop quickly.

Where do these 800 bn really come from, how fast they will transform into R&D and products, how much the industrial status quo is going to change? These are hard questions that remain unanswered.

> It's unclear how this EU momentum will stand the test of time, even if the war in Ukraine were to stop quickly.

I don’t think it really is unclear. The war in Ukraine served as an initial trigger that did spark some notesble changes. But the trump administration even more so. Ask the former UdSSR and Warsaw pact states. They were sounding the alarm bells for a long time and don’t appear to be willing to take any chances going forward.

> Where do these 800 bn really come from,

Government deficit.

> how fast they will transform into R&D and products

R&D is not really the issue. While there are some notable exceptions, the European defense industry has lots of very capable system that match or exceed the capabilities of US counterparts. The problem is primarily production capacity.

And production capacity is a problem that is relatively easily solved by throwing money at it and committing to long term purchases.

The main risk is that states want to ensure that if they want to spend more, they also get proportionally more. With production capacity being a bottleneck, increased spending could lead to inflationary pricing.

> Ask the former UdSSR and Warsaw pact states.

With the inexplicable exception of Hungary.

>Government deficit.

And where does that come from? Obviously, it should come from the people of the country or its natural resources.

But we don't like to say that, do we?

It comes from the future production of the countries, the exact thing the spending is meant to boost.

If the 800bn creates more than 800bn in (time-adjusted) future productivity, it pays for itself. If not, it was a bad investment.

>the exact thing the spending is meant to boost.

Sure, but that is 800bn that could have been spent on more meaningful things. People would be more happy to redeem that by their work..

> But we don't like to say that, do we?

Because it not true. The only body emitting currency is a government

a currency is backed by value generated by the people and the natural resources of a country.

I think the momentum doesn't come from the Ukraine war. It comes from the US going back on NATO article 5, declaring any promise of mutual defense dubious at best. And it comes from the US threatening NATO allies such as Canada and Denmark (to which Greenland belongs) with invasion.

When you treat your closest allies like that, you instantly become untrustworthy. And you will remain untrustworthy far longer than Trump can stay in office, be it with the current terms or some Putin-like term extensions.

Also, the 800bn are a huge bunch of money that politicians would have never gotten otherwise. Now they have it an can spend it on their military-industrial-cronies. They won't let that opportunity go to waste, even if the reason were gone.

What do europeans have to show for the money spent in the "Next Generation" plans?

Allocating the money and printing feel good stories on regulations is the EASY part.

Now, delivering on the cut-throat tech competition on a reasonable time frame seems not part of the european ethos.

>Talks about investing 800 billion in the military industry across the EU would have been unthinkable 4 months ago.

Okay, but if that's true then what does that say about the relationship between Europe and the United States when they could have done this the whole time and chose not to? Especially when the last 4 or so presidents have all complained about European nations neglecting to meet their NATO defense spending targets only to be politely ignored or in some cases laughed at in public by European counterparts?

Obviously, this comes at a cost.

I assume Europeans are willing to forgo some, maybe even most of their social benefits in exchange for increased military spending? I understand many currently enjoy fairly generous government support.

If not, then will there be an even bigger increase in taxes? How does EU plan to roll this out?

Germany has altered its constitution to go into debt for this purpose.

A bunch of markets trying to recreate products is going to eventually work out for some of them on the same basis that disruptive startups that just brought things into freemium succeeded.. Many things would benefit from a rewrite and succeed to capture a larger market at a lower cost than where they ended up over the years.

The EU started Deep Tech funding programs 2-3 years ago.

They're supposedly spending €1.4B this year, up by 17% from last.

https://eic.ec.europa.eu/news/european-innovation-council-in...

> there isn't really much talk about tech

There's a significant amount of EU-based companies being created in the defence space. Helsing was visionary in that sense, but also paved the way for many startups to follow suite.

Europe has cutting edge domestic military tech in almost all relevant categories but don't build enough of it to matter because until recently their people and governments haven't taken defense seriously.

Europe doing so now is good for America because it reduces the risk of Americans once again dying in yet another European war.

Last time Nato's article 5 was invoked it lead to Europeans dying in US wars.

We need to go back to WW2 for you comment to have any value.

I think Americans can thank themselves and nobody else for their people dying in wars.

The only time Article 5 has been invoked.

The fewer wars America and Europe are involved with together, the better. Europe has the economic and industrial capacity to defend itself, and America certainly doesn't need Europe's help with whatever new retarded military adventurism our politicians are plotting. The reason America invoked Article 5 was to give an air of international legitimacy to the invasion of Afghanistan, and if doing something like that again isn't on the table then maybe American politicians will be slightly less likely to think that a new war will pay off politically.

We're both better off if Europe can comfortably cut America loose. Europe building up their domestic defense capabilities is essential for this and will bring about a greater chance for long term peace.

>I think Americans can thank themselves and nobody else for their people dying in wars.

Okay that's a fair point, but if we've learned our lesson from Iraq, Vietnam, etc then why would we want a war in Ukraine? Ukraine's not a NATO member and we have no obligations towards them. If Ukraine is so important to the Europeans that they want to risk escalating a regional border squabble into an apocalyptic nuclear confrontation with Russia, then they need to raise an army for it.

I don't particularly like the way that trump has been overtly signaling his desire to end NATO, but the NATO treaty never obligated America to defend non-members and the people who seem to think it does are as perplexing as trump himself.

>Last time Nato's article 5 was invoked it lead to Europeans dying in US wars.

US service members represented about 68% of the coalition deaths in Afghanistan and about 93% in Iraq:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_casualties_in_Afghan...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#Coa...

The expectation for a European war should be similar. Europe should supply about 80% of the effort, since they're the ones directly affected. Even now, the US has supplied almost half the aid to Ukraine:

https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-s...

So the US pulling out of Europe could be considered a necessary correction to reach parity with the Iraq/Afghanistan situation.

>We need to go back to WW2 for you comment to have any value.

The point of having a strong military is to deter your enemies, not fight them. The US has deterred the USSR/Russia in Europe for 80 years. What did that get us? HN comments about how we've supposedly "extorted" Europe.

It's really striking the amount of anti-Americanism that comes out of Europe relative to other US allies. This has been going on for years and years before Trump. There seems to be something uniquely dysfunctional about the Atlantic relationship, relative to other ally relationships the US has.

>I think Americans can thank themselves and nobody else for their people dying in wars.

Of course Europe's contribution to Iraq and Afghanistan should be acknowledged. Here it is on the State Dept website: https://www.state.gov/dipnote-u-s-department-of-state-offici...

> The point of having a strong military is to deter your enemies, not fight them.

That breaks the premise for this thread which was people lost in war.

> It's really striking the amount of anti-Americanism that comes out of Europe relative to other US allies.

You broaden up the premise from lost casualties in war to the entire relationsship - I think that is multiple PhDs to figure out whether this is anti american or reasonable push back.

I can further open this up an include obvious anti trust malpractice, cultural imperialism, etc., etc. that the US in constantly pushing on the EU (and the rest of the world).

But please enlighten me on how the entire world in against the US, and how badly you are being treated - the country with the absolute biggest economic power and military power.

Cry me a river.

>That breaks the premise for this thread which was people lost in war.

lupusreal talked about the "risk of Americans once again dying in yet another European war" (emphasis mine). By making Europe part of its security umbrella, and deterring the USSR/Russia, the US shouldered that risk.

It's simple. I don't want to shoulder risk for people who despise me. Every time Europeans downvote my comments in this thread, it makes me want to shoulder risk for them less and less. And I'm a registered Democrat.

>You broaden up the premise from lost casualties in war to the entire relationsship - I think that is multiple PhDs to figure out whether this is anti american or reasonable push back.

I'm trying to tell you, as a European, why Americans like me aren't enthusiastic about the alliance. What you do with that information is your business.

I think some pushback on the issue of Greenland is perfectly justified. That represents actual aggressive behavior on the part of the US. And I think it's fair to complain about the US voting with Russia at the United Nations. We could at least abstain from voting, like China.

What I don't like is the notion that the US has a special obligation to protect Ukraine.

* Everywhere on the internet, you'll see the "fact" that the US promised to protect Ukraine in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. That "fact" is false. All we promised was to seek UN Security Council action. Read the memorandum for yourself if you don't believe me: https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%203007/P...

* There are ongoing armed conflicts all over the world. The US can't police everywhere. And it's psychologically unsustainable to do volunteer police work when people despise you for it. Given our limited resources, we need to prioritize. We might as well de-prioritize the interests of relatively wealthy countries, such as Europe, since those countries should be better able to provide for themselves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflict...

>obvious anti trust malpractice

You're saying that you don't like how antitrust is practiced in the US? Why is that any of your business? The US is a sovereign country. If you're going to complain about Elon Musk commenting on German elections, why is it your place to complain about how antitrust law works in the US?

For many years, Europeans have had absolutely no inhibitions in expressing their contempt for US policies in guns, healthcare, etc. Yet somehow when Americans do the same, and comment on European policies regarding e.g. immigration, Europeans flip out.

>cultural imperialism

So Europeans, of their own free will, like American music and movies. This is supposed to represent the US oppressing Europe somehow?

I think these two complaints of yours actually underscore my point about European anti-Americanism. I can't imagine a Japanese person complaining that they are oppressed due to the way antitrust is practiced in the US, or that they are oppressed because so many Japanese like to watch American movies. Out of all our "allies", it's only Europeans who are in the habit of complaining about stuff like this.

>the country with the absolute biggest economic power and military power.

I think life is generally pretty good for Americans, and we don't have a lot to complain about. But we do have limited resources, and we can't help everyone. And it's very annoying to read all of the anti-Americanism online, even for situations where we tried to do our best, and even when we're arguably one of the most benevolent superpowers in world history. At a certain point I just don't want to be involved anymore.

I don't think we will ever reach a conclusion, and it will take the next 4 years to learn whether the approach you represent is more productive than the approach I represent.

But remember: Power is rarely taken but mostly given.

>But remember: Power is rarely taken but mostly given.

I don't care about the US being a powerful country. I'm tired of being the world's police. I'm against so-called "American imperialism". I want to be Switzerland. Ally with no one, trade with everyone. Switzerland has a much healthier relationship with the rest of Europe, without toxic dependency.

That's my metric regarding whether an approach is "productive" or not. Give it 10 years until the US/Europe relationship resets to the Switzerland/Europe relationship. That's the goal.

I'd say Trump has already succeeded by this metric in terms of Europe taking responsibility for itself. That's the first step. You need to stop depending on us so you'll stop resenting us.

The comparison with Switzerland is stretching things a bit thin.

Switzerland never threatened Germany to become the 27th canton. They didn't threaten military allies with military intervention. They also do not keep permanent military bases in other countries, in practice autonomous zones where there are intermittent scandals where Swiss law protects rapists. No other counties dutifully joined any Swiss invasions in the Middle East.

Europe did not have to shoulder orders of magnitude (look it up) more refugees from these wars than the instigator of the wars. The Swiss do not regularly use their economic power to force other countries to share passenger data for all transit, they do not force far reaching intellectual property legislation of all sorts on other countries.

The Swiss, however, do a lot of other strange things. They are basically a bank with national sovereignity which economically has kept up a very strong industrial appendix with a very strong, primarily industrially focused, engineering sector. The post-WW2 history contains a lot of stones largely left unturned, and there is zero chance another coutry could occupy this particular nation state evolution niche.

>Switzerland never threatened Germany to become the 27th canton. They didn't threaten military allies with military intervention. They also do not keep permanent military bases in other countries, in practice autonomous zones where there are intermittent scandals where Swiss law protects rapists. No other counties dutifully joined any Swiss invasions in the Middle East.

>Europe did not have to shoulder orders of magnitude (look it up) more refugees from these wars than the instigator of the wars. The Swiss do not regularly use their economic power to force other countries to share passenger data for all transit, they do not force far reaching intellectual property legislation of all sorts on other countries.

Exactly. We are in violent agreement. You're doing an excellent job of explaining why the US should be more Swiss, as I've been saying.

>there is zero chance another coutry could occupy this particular nation state evolution niche.

Of course we won't do exactly what the Swiss have done, e.g. we will continue to have a major software industry. My point is we should have a more Swiss approach to foreign policy.

> I want to be Switzerland. Ally with no one, trade with everyone.

Imposing tariffs and threatening annexation of former allies is not a great start.

But you will get a lot more of the "anti-americanism" you were crying about some comments ago. Better get used to it, it has merely started.

>Imposing tariffs and threatening annexation of former allies is not a great start.

I'm against annexation of Greenland as I stated elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43460070

The US, as a sovereign country, has just as much right to levy taxes on imports as any other country.

> I'm against annexation of Greenland

You, personally, being against it means little, when your president openly threatens it.

> The US, as a sovereign country, has just as much right to levy taxes on imports

And other countries, in their own sovereignty, have just as much right to retaliate with tarriffs of their own, and do trade deals amongst themselves.

>You, personally, being against it means little, when your president openly threatens it.

You can discount all of my opinions due to me not being president then :-)

>And other countries, in their own sovereignty, have just as much right to retaliate with tarriffs of their own, and do trade deals amongst themselves.

Agreed.

> Agreed

And that, friend, is called a trade war.

Good that we made some progress here.

I think you have a great point about the merit of America defending the defense of Europe against Russia in light of European attitudes towards America becoming clear on the internet. This wasn't really a problem during the Cold War when casual communication across the Atlantic wasn't a thing most Americans had access to, but times have changed and the general American public now perceives a lot of contempt for America coming from Europeans. Clearly they're capable of paying for their own defense, since they love to gloat about their expensive social policies so much, so let them shoulder the responsibility they have for their own defense.

Do you think us defence will become cheaper if the EU steps up more?

And do you think the US will start setting up more social policies if such happens?

You should look up social policies in the US under the cold War. I think you'd find that the US was much more aligned.

Also,it is easy to diminish the attitudes the US has against all other countries - which is not quite heartwarming either.

I would love to return to these conversations when the is influence has shrunk to the influence of Switzerland. I am not so sure the points will stand as strong anymore.

"US Defense" is a euphemism for waging foreign wars. America would be better off if Europe kicked America out of all the military bases in Europe, thereby making it more difficult for America to wage such wars.

> I don't want to shoulder risk for people who despise me

They don't despise you. They dislike your government.

> What I don't like is the notion that the US has a special obligation to protect Ukraine.

Sure, it doesn't. But you don't think that appeasing an expansionist Russia might run contrary to America's interests?

> You're saying that you don't like how antitrust is practiced in the US? Why is that any of your business?

Because how antitrust is practiced in the US has global effects. Why wouldn't it be our business?

> If you're going to complain about Elon Musk commenting on German elections, why is it your place to complain about how antitrust law works in the US?

Yeah, the influence of a random commenter on HN is comparable to the owner of one of the worlds largest social networks. Come on.

> Yet somehow when Americans do the same, and comment on European policies regarding e.g. immigration, Europeans flip out.

Generally, we tend to be better informed about American issues than vice versa, due to the global reach of US media. I'm not saying Europeans are perfectly informed, I've seen some dumb as fuck takes, but on average it certainly skews one way.

>They don't despise you. They dislike your government.

Then why are my comments in this thread being downvoted? I'm trying to share my perspective, and I get sarcastic replies like "Cry me a river."

All of my most acrimonious arguments on HN have been with Europeans talking about transatlantic relations. There just seems to be something uniquely dysfunctional about the US/Europe relationship. From my perspective, I'm sorry to say that internet Europeans come across as incredibly obnoxious and entitled.

Put it another way, I see way more "Americans are fat and stupid" comments from Europeans than other US allies. That's not about our government. That's about us as Americans.

I find that anti-American stereotypes are frequently false when you fact check. For example, the US actually seems to have pretty good education outcomes. We're not stupid: https://xcancel.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/17322446879293604...

This fact-checking tells me that anti-Americanism (again: regarding citizens, not the government) may be driven by resentment rather than data.

There seems to be some sort of tall poppy syndrome coming out of Europe which I don't want to be a part of. I interpret it as a sort of toxic collectivism. America is an individualist country which believes in celebration of success and free association. Europe wants to resent American success, while also obliging the US to help it when it needs help. I just don't want to be allied with you guys anymore, sorry. I'm happy that you're now starting to figure out things on your own, and I wish you the best.

>you don't think that appeasing an expansionist Russia might run contrary to America's interests?

For one, I don't buy this appeasement talking point. I haven't seen much hard evidence that Russia has ambitions beyond Ukraine. This seems to be another European collectivism thing again, where if you question this you get excluded from the collective.

For another thing, from a realist perspective, I actually don't see why Russian expansionism is so vital to US interests. From a realist perspective, we could just be neutral and trade with whoever wins. Peace with major powers like Russia and China is very much in the US interest.

Even before Trump, Europeans would always say that the US is a selfish imperialist country. Maybe the point of Trump is to show just a bit about how the US would actually behave, if the US was the sort of country that Europe has always said it was.

>Yeah, the influence of a random commenter on HN is comparable to the owner of one of the worlds largest social networks. Come on.

Is there a principle that you're not supposed to interfere in another country's elections, or not?

Sure, you're just one commenter, but a lot of random European commenters add up.

I'm happy for you to constructively critique why you think a different antitrust policy would be better, or even say Europe should make antitrust an item in trade negotations. But it comes across as obnoxious when you act like US antitrust policies are oppressing you and we're obligated to change them for you, and this negates 80 years of NATO protection.

The US is a sovereign nation that's allowed to have its own antitrust policies, its own foreign policy, its own approach to alliances. That understanding needs to be foundational for an improved US/Europe relationship. So far I just don't think Europeans get it.

From your link

> Do European countries appear to perform worse than White Americans in standardized tests because of low-performing immigrants?

You are literally citing material that compares as race segregated US to other countries as wholes.

I have a lot of very smart American friends, from all across the political spectre.

I have mostly worked for us companies.

And luckily you are not representative of the average American.

>You are literally citing material that compares as race segregated US to other countries as wholes.

Yes, the claim is that apparently low US scores have more to do with US racial composition than a problem with the US educational system. That's the point?

I hedged with "seems to have pretty good education outcomes" because I'm not sure about the racial composition of Europe for 3rd+ generation immigrations. My expectation is that mass migration to Europe is mostly just in the past couple of generations (accounted for in that thread), but I haven't looked into it.

>And luckily you are not representative of the average American.

I didn't vote for Trump. I actually think he's a terrible president. But many Americans did. If Europe wants to get along with the US, it would be useful to understand how Trump supporters think. Since I do sympathize with them in some respects, I've been trying to explain that perspective, as I understand it, to users in this thread. If you want to understand the "average American", you can't just write off a huge fraction of the American population and refer to Trump as "Agent Orange", as was done elsewhere in this thread.

You claim to have American friends from all across the political spectrum. What have you learned from your Trump-supporting friends which helped you understand their perspective? It looks to me like you had me pegged as a Trump supporter previously (ascribing views to me I did not hold), and immediately became sarcastic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43459849

I don't have you pecked as a Trump supporter.

Also, the US only has two parties - so a lot of people are voting because of a lack of better alternatives. This is wildly different than the EU where most countries have a much more nuanced political landscape. Eg. Germany that has 7 parties.

As such I also know that politics in US is more akin to a sports match than what I consider politics in - and this is congruent to what I hear from my US friends with the sentiment: Either you are with us or against us.

What I do have you pecked on is a complete ignorance of the US's political position globally. You seem completely oblivious to the fact that more than half listed stock globally is US - and that this is a marketplace. Ie. not only US capital.

I appreciate you don't want to be in that position. That you want to be a part of an underdog country. But you are not.

When I write "Cry me a river" that is a way to say: Deal with it. Go and understand where the US stands on the global scene.

Hopefully you can get to appreciate the benefits (English is not my first language) and manage the down sides of such an arrangement.

And hopefully you can develop some humility to the fact.

>English is not my first language

Try using Google Translate or a European equivalent? You can write in your native language and translate into English. Using a translator could help you understand my points better, as well.

>You seem completely oblivious to the fact that more than half listed stock globally is US - and that this is a marketplace. Ie. not only US capital.

Yes, I'm aware that US stocks are overvalued. I don't see the relevance to our discussion. A correction was inevitable in my opinion.

>I appreciate you don't want to be in that position. That you want to be a part of an underdog country. But you are not.

First, it's not about being an underdog. It's about having free and equal relations, free association between nations that respect each others' sovereignty.

In any case -- If you respected US sovereignty, you would respect my opinion, as a US citizen, that we need a more Swiss foreign policy.

We have no obligation to stand in our current place in the global scene. Our current place was the decision of a previous generation of politicians. We're a democracy. We're allowed to vote, and change our policy. You can't coerce us into being an empire with your words. That's absurd.

If you wish to persuade me that the pre-2016 arrangement was good for the US, you're welcome to respectfully make your case for that. You're not doing that. Your condescending attitude is exactly the thing I'm arguing against, and exactly why I think the idea of "US-Europe shared values" is overrated.

>And hopefully you can develop some humility to the fact.

You are a foreigner commenting on US politics telling me that I, as a US citizen, need to be humble in my views of US policy. It's wild to me that Europeans will talk this way, then turn around and complain that Elon Musk is "influencing European elections".

Imagine if Elon said Europeans "need to be humble, appreciate their position, and keep buying Teslas". How would you feel?

The difference between you and I is: I recognize that Europeans have free association, and they are free to buy whatever products they want. I think it is silly to boycott the US over Ukraine, when the US has been one of Ukraine's biggest supporters. I'd say you should start by boycotting countries such as Brazil which have provided almost no support at all. The vast majority of countries have provided no support: https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-s...

But, I recognize that you're a free individual making free choices for yourself -- same as us Americans are. So, buy what you like. Boycott what you like. I may think it is silly. But it's your decision, and I respect that.

This needs to be foundational for our discussion. If we say the partnership isn't working for us, you need to respect that instead of give us a lecture on our ignorance and our need for humility. Simple.

Is think there is plenty of evidence in both mine and other commenter's on why you comments are being downnvoted (which I can not do, as you answer to my comments).

You way of debating is defensive and dismissive. So that is a hard stop from me here

You said to me: "cry me a river" and "you can develop some humility" and you're accusing me of being dismissive? I was more polite to you than you were to me. You were rude to me before I said anything even slightly mean to you. You repeatedly insulted me while I spoke respectfully to you.

I'm getting downvoted because Europeans have taken America for granted. They struggle with a relationship based on mutual respect and fairness.

I, for one, would very much like to see US be more neutral.

But as an outsider (in Europe, but in one of those countries that has been "policed" by largely US-led initiative), I think you are seen as discounting the net economic benefits US has enjoyed from taking on that role in the past.

If you acknowledged that more openly, I think people would take more gladly to your arguments: yes, it will hurt both US and EU as the countries move away from this mutually beneficial arrangement (which helped keep US a global economic leader, and helped EU focus on society development — greatly simplified summary so obviously flawed), but I do agree with you that hopefully we end up with a nicer state of affairs in 20-30 years. I am not necessarily confident this happens though, which is also what you might be seeing play out (fear of this unknown future).

You are also simplifying things, which does not help: if EU had a defensive force so it needed not depend on NATO/US, what else would have been different?

Note that people do complain about other countries doing the things you see them complain about in the US too (eg. China's state sponsorship of local companies with reduced taxes and oversight), though I understand how you, as an American, feel those towards the US more strongly. And yes, they are even more common against the US because we have more US people engaging in discourse on the same platforms (mostly US ones), so they are unsuspecting "willing" listeners. Not much sense in arguing about China when everybody agrees, and Chinese do not feel the liberty or have any desire to participate.

And that's perhaps the core point: the two cultures value these same human rights, which does mean that you need to hear the shit people dislike a lot more (and there's even the term for it in "vocal minority").

> I haven't seen much hard evidence that Russia has ambitions beyond Ukraine.

Hard evidence is too late. Putin (and associates) speeches and writings indicate more than enough. Why do you think that former Soviet countries boardering Russia are the most scared?

> risk of Americans once again dying in yet another European war.

How's the proposed Canada / Greenland wars fit into this? As well as ongoing support for the forever proxy war in the middle east between the US and Iran.

That's a very narrow view on the topic.

There have been many cases over the last decades where European interest and opinions have been quite different from US foreign policy pushes, but European countries almost always yielded to US pressure, partly due to the close relationship, but more so due to the de-facto dependence.

If Europe becomes more self-reliant and builds up more notable and integrated military capabilities, it will also mean that the we will persue different goals and prioritise our own strategic and economic interests, which sometimes might align with the US, but plenty of times will not.

It will bring about a marked decline of how much sway the US has.

World War II was not a European war, the clue is in the name.

I don't think third world even wanted anything to do with it.

Is selling less product good for US defense companies?

The latter is true only if America take a measured, stepped approach to pulling out of Europe. Something I, as a European, have been wanting to happen since 2003. It's insane that we let the US dictate our foreign and trade policy and they only reason we do is because of German fears of rearming.

Doing so rashly? That vastly increases the chances because it encourages Russia to do something in the 3-5 year timeframe.

>> Doing so rashly? That vastly increases the chances because it encourages Russia to do something in the 3-5 year timeframe.

Can you sit down with a map and draw out exactly *WHAT* you think Russia will be capable of doing 5 years from now? Keep in mind that:

1. We watched the best-equipped and trained brigades in Ukraine bounce off well-prepared minefields and trenchworks in summer 2023. Just like in WW1, technology is in a state where defense is easier than offense.

2. Europe has years of prep time, and unmolested industrial capacity available, to build defenses that would make the "Surovikin Line" look like a speedbump.

This is why people joke about "Schrodinger's Russia": where Russia is so weak that people make fun of it for its slow progress in conquering Ukraine, yet is also so powerful that it has 500+ million Europeans shaking in their boots at the idea that Russia is gonna blitzkrieg the whole continent or something.

They can build up a force capable of annexing the strip of land between Belarus and Kaliningrad. They have a large number of experience troops and a massive number of conscripts, their drone capacity currently dwarfs Europe and is expanding. They also have hundreds of thousands of experienced operators.

They also have one of the most capable psyop machines in the world and a massive network of spies / 5th Column in place. They are especially strong in Eastern Europe and Germany.

So there's very much a risk that they try to hybrid style "grab" there then at a time when they have sown political chaos into Europe.

We can reduce the risk of we have overwhelming force available at hand - like we currently do as allies of the US - which makes any such move literal suicide as we would obliterate them.

Also - now this is my viewpoint - by committing to re-arming now and providing everything we have to help Ukraine kick Russia out of their country - a full rout of the Russians - we vastly reduce the risk of anything like that ever happening again and we set the conditions for the eventual liberation of Belarus and demilitarisation and neutralisation of Kaliningrad.

Basically: we get sharp fangs now so we can push the best time-line.

Also: there is an unlikely but not unthinkable scenario where American, under Emperor Trump (or Musk) switch to using gunboat diplomacy and bully Europe the way the British (and other European nations) bullied others in the past. And like America itself did to its neighbours in the Victorian times. So re-arming such that we have complete independence from the US reduces their leverage.

In a good timeline having both a strong Europe and strong US on the same side puts us in a very good place wrt China / India etc in the future.

>They can build up a force capable of annexing the strip of land between Belarus and Kaliningrad.

Ok, I'll take this as a starting point. Let's assume Russia has committed to seizing everything south of Kaunas and Vilnius, and north of Suwalki. The eastern part of this patch of land is ~200km frontage with Belarus (south of the E28 Highway). Because Kaunas and Vilnius combined have populations of ~900k, I'm going to assume the Russians will aim to bypass rather than seize them, so that will involve establishing blocking positions south of both cities in order to isolate them from the desired terrain. It also involves capturing Alytus, about the same size and population as Bakhmut. I would need to dig through some doctrinal publications to figure out how the Russians would template a force package for this op, but I'll spitball it at at least an entire corps/Combined Arms Army of 2-3 divisions and a few separate brigades, maybe 60-80,000 men?

While the focus is on repulsing an attack in this southern sector, let's assume Lithuania fortifies the entire border with Belarus, which is ~350km. Minefields 1km deep with 1 AT or 1 AP mine per 6 square meters would require ~60 million mines and $5 billion USD (about 1 year of Lithuania's military budget). That's an extreme lift but not impossible if amortized over several years, even without help from other EU nations. A defensive belt built behind a minefield like that will take the Russians weeks to penetrate if properly supported by other assets. Those weeks give the rest of the EU decision space for political action as well as time for mobilization/flowing combat power into the Area of Operations.

So the real question is "why"? Why would Russia want to expend the resources to accomplish this? Figure out what Russia wants and then structure a defense that imposes an unpalatable cost on the attacker. My position is that it can be accomplished without American involvement. Finland spent the Cold War a) outside of NATO b) with no independent "security guarantees" c) without getting invaded by the Soviets (again).....because it also made itself expensive enough to invade/annex that the Soviets didn't think the cost of re-absorbing that particular bit of formerly-Russian-Imperial-territory to be worth it. Facing down a massive conventional military assault from a well-equipped and supported adversary is not impossible: the Lebanese have done it twice in the past twenty years against the Israelis. Be like Lebanon.

>by committing to re-arming now and providing everything we have to help Ukraine kick Russia out of their country - a full rout of the Russians

That's not realistic. At all. There is no reality where Ukraine forcibly ejects Russia from the land bridge that it has established with Crimea. Breaching Russia's fortifications requires more combat engineering equipment than exists in all of NATO at this point. The Ukrainian 2023 offensive was supposed to reach Tokmak in 3 days. It took them closer to 90 days to even breach the 2nd of 3 defensive lines north of the city. Let alone actually reach Melitopol and Berdiansk. No army on the planet is trained and equipped to deal with kilometer-deep defensive belts covered by artillery, UAVs, attack helicopters....AND enemy air superiority. You would need to completely collapse the Russian army and economy 1917-style, which is also not looking likely, or at least not likely to occur before Ukraine itself collapses.

At some point Europeans need to come back to reality. Until then.....Americans are no longer interested in getting tangled up in Europe's mess (even though the mess is largely our fault).

> So re-arming such that we have complete independence from the US reduces their leverage.

Which ironically is what Trump wanted Europe to do anyway: pay for your own security with your own money!

> In a good timeline having both a strong Europe and strong US on the same side puts us in a very good place wrt China / India etc in the future.

The US is returning to a Pacific focus, like the one we had 1890-1913 (ish). I think this is the correct posture for us. We don't need to be on the "same side" of Europe, just like we weren't really on any European side until Woodrow Wilson, America's worst President, ruined everything by getting us into WW1. Due to geography we are fundamentally a maritime power, and we should be focused on trans-Pacific trade with the growing economic heart of the planet: the Valerierpieris Circle ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle ).

Hopefully my post isn't too disjointed and rambly...

No we weren't really to start with. What happened was a lot of European business executives worked out the best retirement plan for them was to either sell off our industry or subcontract everything out. I worked for two companies in succession that were sold out to US defence ownership.

Now their successors, who have been hoping that there isn't a tough discussion coming up, are now edging around that it was a terrible idea and backtracking as quickly as possible. Fortunately the US didn't move all the staff out so there are US subsidiaries in Europe which have staff in an uncertain situation who are probably quite easy to hire.

It's a step in the right direction for Europe but only because it was historically a terrible step in the wrong direction.

I think France are probably in a better place than most countries at the moment. That is it.

> US subsidiaries in Europe which have staff in an uncertain situation

Keeping an eye on this myself, as a Brit working in the UK for a US chip company; I'm wondering when the right moment to pull my RSUs from the US brokerage account and back across the Atlantic is.

Yeah good idea. UK here working for a US company (different sector). Already pulled out my US investments and rode Rheinmetall, BAE and TSLQ hard.

Predicating the argument on a unified EU is a mistake. US was a good ally in NATO, certainly better than most EU countries. If this split can occur between US and "EU", it's almost certain a similar split will occur within the "EU" itself, and quite soon. Romania is already leaning this way. But France and Holland also trending this way.

EU politicians right now are trying to use this moment to unify the EU more and to justify more spending, but they way they steer the narrative is very awkward. They want to spend but only some regions will benefit from this spending as it stands and the others will only pay the bill further causing division.

Private companies in EU face a different problem - switching away from industry leading vendors makes them less competitive. We will have to see how this plays out.

Both are a good thing? Even from folks in America who strongly dislike the fascist leadership, you'd be hard pressed to find folks who think "Europe should underfund their military and rely on the American tax payer for defense" or "Europe should be uncompetitive in technology and just buy American and Chinese solutions"

I don't understand why Europeans have to blame Trump for "spending a fair minimum on their own defense in the face of existential threats" or "investing domestically in technology".

These are things you always should have been doing.

For us Europeans it's a good thing. There have been sane people here in Europe who never wanted to be reliant on US subscription software etc., but who had no chance of getting their view through.

For the US though, this European reliance on what is in effect rubbish is great. Rubbish in return for cars and all sorts of sophisticated technology.

I don't like calling ad firms etc. 'tech'. Technology for me is things like new chemical processes, whatever TSMC is doing, etc. and the US does have that, but firms like Meta are not a big player outside of machine learning research.

> rely on the American tax payer for defense

Not sure how much that's true. EU spends billions buying US military hardware such as the Reaper. It's unclear how the story will end up for US taxpayers here.

> Not sure how much that's true. EU spends billions buying US military hardware such as the Reaper.

The thing is, West Germany alone had about 3000 tanks at the end of the Cold War, and reunified Germany nowadays has 300. Navies and air forces have been run to the ground across Europe, even the nuclear forces of UK/FR are nowhere near what they had once been.

The expectation over the last decades, especially after the pacification of the Balkans, was that open war would not return to Europe any time soon - on the one side because almost all European countries were either members of the EU, EEA or Schengen and thus were likely to more integrate instead of going back to 19th century fiefdom wars, and on the other side because the only realistic opponent was Russia... which we thought we could handle by "peace by trade".

By "relying on the American tax payer" they mean trusting the US military to deter Russia.

This is an odd take when one considers we (the US) have a large trade deficit with the EU. I personally prefer that we have open and free trade with the EU with no protectionism at all. It's only our adversaries like China and Russia that I worry about trading with, and hence tariffs and restrictions be much more appropriate, the clown in charge in Washington seems to want the opposite.

The situation laid out in the article doesn’t really indicate in any way that people are just mad at Trump and fleeing to EU alternatives. Yeah that’s obviously part of the acute response in 2025, but everything indicated by the data and the points made in the article seems to say that, whether Trump made people newly aware or motivated aside, people are looking for privacy-focused software products. Mind you, a spirited interpretation of recent EU regulations and law almost requires data to live in the EU.

The US has done a terrible job regulating digital privacy irrespective of which party has held the office of president. The whole world absolutely should be challenging America to do a better job being the custodian of so much sensitive data. Competition in that market is very welcome and does not represent the death of American tech infrastructure. As an American citizen and alternative search user I love to see pressure on the Google and FB scale giants to compete at providing better privacy in their products. And I think that the only way to solve the data privacy issues rampant in our industry is through legal requirement and market pressure.

Finally, please try not to cheaply patronize Americans and Trump’s foreign policy. We can talk about this issue without the political zingers insinuating that Trump and his supporters are a bunch of reckless ye-haw cowboys-idiots.

Great comment. Would this have happened without the tariff whiplash? As in, Trump always brings unaccountability. But he placed a venal children’s book author and a podcaster at the head of FBI. Since the USA has no codified privacy rights, we can expect abuses.

Also, these people don’t come from cowboys; they’re unrestrained salesman-on-TV personalities humiliated by poor competitiveness. I think that slightly matters; never seen it in a cowboy.

> thus earning U.S. money and making EU technologically and politically dependent from the U.S.

This came with a responsibility to provide military protection to the US via NATO. Trumps voters don't want America to be an empire, responsible for protecting a bunch of far-away places that don't share their values, that's why they called the movement "America first". Historically speaking being an empire generally turns out to be a terrible deal in the long term, with maintaining the empire eventually becoming too expensive and leading to collapse and reduced living standards back home, like happened to the Roman empire, and the British empire after WW2.

>responsible for protecting a bunch of far-away places that don't share their values

You mean Europe? There's literally not a place in the world (except for Canada and Australia) that shares as many common values with the US as Europe. Unless the very definition of these values suddenly changed for the US with Agent Orange.

As far as "far-away places go", it might take a similar amount of time to get from east to west coast of USA as to fly from one of the US coasts to somewhere in Europe...

Europe has been aligned with US culturally and politically for decades and it helped to promote US interests worldwide and to fight US wars. And when we need you the most for the first time since the 1990 you decided to fuck us. I feel personally betrayed, and I imagine there are many, many more like me. Your decisions will ultimately be bad for us all.

>There's literally not a place in the world (except for Canada and Australia) that shares as many common values with the US as Europe.

I just don't think that's true. Europeans seem much more collectivist, whereas the US is more individualist. That's why Europeans express disdain for US policies around healthcare, guns, etc. Europeans express a tremendous amount of disdain for the US online, calling Americans fat, dumb, neo-imperialist, etc.

That's been going on for ages before Trump. It's done a lot to undermine the transatlantic relationship, in my view. People-to-people connections matter for diplomacy.

How would you feel if an American insulted your leader with a derogatory nickname such as "Agent Orange"? Europeans are so used to expressing disdain for the US that they hardly even notice themselves doing it.

>when we need you the most for the first time since the 1990 you decided to fuck us.

From my perspective, we deterred Russia for 80 years following WW2, and provided almost 50% of the support for Ukraine to date. That's more than enough to account for European support in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The US provided 80% of the muscle for Iraq and Afghanistan. For a fair relationship, Europe should expect to provide 80% of the muscle to deter Russia. A reset to fairness should not feel like betrayal. Europe gets most of the benefit from NATO, therefore Europe should do most of the spending in NATO. Fix this pie chart: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/...

> How would you feel if an American insulted your leader with a derogatory nickname such as "Agent Orange"? Europeans are so used to expressing disdain for the US that they hardly even notice themselves doing it.

This happens literally every day. There's a bunch of xenophobic stereotypes about my country I've only ever heard from Americans, and on average I've received far more vitriol from them than from my fellow Europeans.

Maybe your views are colored by your subjective experiences, without being truly representative of the objective facts? Because I have no idea how else you could have the idea that what you described doesn't happen the other way around.

>This happens literally every day. There's a bunch of xenophobic stereotypes about my country I've only ever heard from Americans, and on average I've received far more vitriol from them than from my fellow Europeans.

So how does it make you feel? Does it make you want to send troops to America's next Iraq?

It honestly doesn't have a bearing on my political leanings regarding America, especially since there are also many nice and wonderful Americans I interact with. My political opinions are instead based on the political positions, trend, instability & recently insanity of America.

If I took personal opinions I'm reading online into consideration, I'd be very open to manipulation by the platforms themselves. Just look at something like Reddit - I'm guessing at least half the comments are AI generated these days, if not more.

>It honestly doesn't have a bearing on my political leanings regarding America, especially since there are also many nice and wonderful Americans I interact with.

OK, well, can you understand if some of your countrymen didn't wish to send troops to America's next Iraq, due to the xenophobia they experienced?

That's just human nature regardless of what country you're from. That's what I've been trying to explain.

You know that in the US, conservatives are over-represented in the military. If the US does fight Russia, they will be the ones dying for you. Driven by a sense of American patriotism that Europe loves to belittle. It just doesn't make any sense.

>If I took personal opinions I'm reading online into consideration, I'd be very open to manipulation by the platforms themselves.

I don't believe it's manipulation. Europeans have been anti-American for as long as I can remember. I don't think it is just an internet thing. But yes, it is ironic that lots of Europeans (in this thread even) post, and vote on comments, in more or less the way they would post if they were being paid by Russia.

In any case, if we're going to disregard the internet, why not disregard my comments too? Maybe I'm an AI bot. Or maybe you'd find me to be nice and wonderful if we were interacting in person :-)

> OK, well, can you understand if some of your countrymen didn't wish to send troops to America's next Iraq, due to the xenophobia they experienced?

Sure! But has this ever not been the case? I think it's reasonable to assume that some level of xenophobia has always existed. So why are you suddenly so hurt about it? Could it be that platforms are deliberately showing you more and more of that, while not showing you positive interactions?

> You know that in the US, conservatives are over-represented in the military. If the US does fight Russia, they will be the ones dying for you. Driven by a sense of American patriotism that Europe loves to belittle. It just doesn't make any sense.

Right now it seems more likely that these same Americans will be fighting with Russia against us, so I hope you can accept that I have very little love left for American "patriotism" right now. Maybe try not threatening allies and dividing the spoils with our shared enemies, that would certainly help.

> I don't believe it's manipulation. Europeans have been anti-American for as long as I can remember. I don't think it is just an internet thing. But yes, it is ironic that lots of Europeans (in this thread even) post, and vote on comments, in more or less the way they would post if they were being paid by Russia.

Okay, but why is this suddenly such a big deal? You're apparently not perturbed by American xenophobia against us, why did you suddenly become so sensitive?

>Could it be that platforms are deliberately showing you more and more of that, while not showing you positive interactions?

Doubtful. The platforms I'm talking about are mostly HN and /r/worldnews. There's no recommendation engine for either of those. And I don't see other Europeans arguing against this stuff, either.

I elaborated further here regarding why online discussion matters: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43477385

>Right now it seems more likely that these same Americans will be fighting with Russia against us, so I hope you can accept that I have very little love left for American "patriotism" right now. Maybe try not threatening allies and dividing the spoils with our shared enemies, that would certainly help.

I certainly wouldn't want the US fight with Russia against Europe. I highly doubt that will happen. But if you like, you can view my "American patriotism that Europe loves to belittle" comment as an explanation of how we got to this situation.

>Okay, but why is this suddenly such a big deal? You're apparently not perturbed by American xenophobia against us, why did you suddenly become so sensitive?

I am perturbed. But to be honest, I'm skeptical that you received much American xenophobia, especially compared to the oceans of anti-Americanism that have been washing across the internet for ages. If you want to show me an example, maybe that will help me understand.

In any case, it's not the anti-Americanism that gets to me so much as the ingratitude. The US has been one of Ukraine's biggest supporters. Yet even when Biden was president, there was a lot of anti-US sentiment in Ukraine discussions, because they wanted even more. They never mentioned countries such as Brazil which gave hardly anything. The US was probably their #2 most hated country after Russia.

I'm arguing for the principle that people who do good things should be appreciated rather than disdained. I see that as a prerequisite for any sort of prosocial society, or a prosocial world order. That's much more important to me than anti-Americanism. In cases where I believe anti-Americanism is justified, it doesn't bother me nearly as much.

So many of these US policies like supporting NATO were justified on the basis of gaining "soft power". The reality is that soft power isn't worth very much, and in the modern world, trying to do good things actually reduces American soft power, not increases it.

> The platforms I'm talking about are mostly HN and /r/worldnews. There's no recommendation engine for either of those.

Sorry, if you really think there's no "recommendation engine" behind Reddit, I can't help you.

I go directly to /r/worldnews and look at the top posts. Oftentimes I'm not even logged in.

BTW, if you disagree with other Europeans in this thread, why are you arguing with me instead of them?

You mostly don't seem to be stating points of disagreement with them, or points of agreement with me. I can infer a lot from that :-)

Anyways, if you truly think there is a serious risk that the US sides with Russia, then hopefully we at least agree that the US should pull all its troops out of Europe. That should reduce the risk to you guys.

> Europeans seem much more collectivist, whereas the US is more individualist. That's why Europeans express disdain for US policies around healthcare, guns, etc.

The US is plenty collectivist. Patriots who put country first and would die for it? That's collectivism. Someone who puts their family ahead of themselves? Also collectivism.

One should disdain the US healthcare system not because it isn't "collectivist" (there's nothing particularly individualistic about insurance), but because it's horrifically inefficient. The US government spends more money on healthcare per capita than anywhere in Europe (or Canada or any developed country), yet only manages to cover half the population leaving the other half to spend even more money for private insurance.

>The US is plenty collectivist. Patriots who put country first and would die for it? That's collectivism. Someone who puts their family ahead of themselves? Also collectivism.

Our discussion is on the topic of whether the US and Europe have common values. You can call this stuff "collectivism" if you want. But ironically I think it still indicates some deep US/Europe value differences.

No one in the US believes people should be obligated to serve in the military. It's considered an honor which receives societal support and recognition. This feels more like voluntary altruism. The US has a similar approach with charitable giving -- last I checked its charitable donations are among the highest in the world. In Europe, by contrast, things are organized along obligations. Europeans don't give to charity as much; rather, they're forced to pay taxes so the government can hand out money. And they take that same mentality to the transatlantic alliance, implying that the US should be obligated to defend them. It's quite jarring to me when here in the US we celebrate the voluntary sacrifices of our service members, whereas Europeans take our service members as a given, and complain when we discuss withdrawal. You should celebrate more when another country chooses to defend you, not less.

> No one in the US believes people should be obligated to serve in the military

USA still has legal support for conscription, so that is wrong. Plenty of people feel exactly that.

The opinion polls I see show a large majority are against conscription.

> Thumps voters don't want America to be an empire

Why the leadup (complete with de-humanization of citizens!) to annexation of Canada, then? Why normalization of invading parts of Europe (Greenland)? Why talk about taking over Panama?

Trump is 100% pro-empire, he's just too thick to understand that America already had empire without having Google Maps have everything the same colour.

> Trumps voters don't want America to be an empire, responsible for protecting a bunch of far-away

Then why did they elect an imperialist? The current president has already announced the possibility of military interventions against Canada and Denmark in order to expand US territory.

That's a kind of imperalism not seen since the middle of last century, when most empires started to proritize soft power over territory as the military and economic powers started to unite. It was easier to secure cheap natural resources than to secure the resources themselves.

> that's why they called the movement "America first"

We should always listen to action, not words. Rhetoric is cheap.

The actions tells us that the US deficit will continue to grow. It is not clear yet how much, but everything points to an increase in military spending. Other parts of the state will have to be cut back.

>[the US] wanted to extort even more money and dependence from EU...

I think it's more they are threatening to attack the EU (Denmark) and aid it's adversaries (Putin). I put that down to a Russian asset president rather than wanting money.

I liked a comment by Sarah C. Paine, about how Communism is a really great system for taking power from within a state (think Mao), and then staying in power, but it's horrible for generating prosperity. When evaluating the choices of certain people, it's clarifying to not think in terms of prosperity, but, rather, power. I think there's a case to be made about Trump seeing advantage in making enemies of his political rivals' allies, and then there's that whole weird situation about making Russia-favoring decisions, who knows why.

The same Sarah Paine that speaks about how China lifted 1B+ people out of poverty and created tens of millions of millionaires?

Isnt it objectively true that China is the only country to lift 500m people from poverty? The debate is whether the power to do that needs to come from a single party so powerful it can starve 50m without repercussion.

Sarah C. Paine, the professor of strategy and policy at the U.S. Naval War College. I'm not aware of what you're talking about.

That was who I was referring to as well.

I'm not sure what your point was. Are you contesting the numbers she cites?

Largely after abandoning damaging communist ideas and allowing private business to exist.

China is no longer communist, it's this weird hybrid of capitalism with heavy government controls and heavy censorship.

Yeah, The Economist regularly writes these articles that spend half the time praising the intense competition in certain sectors of the economy and half the time bemoaning the influence of state-owned enterprises (or other CCP instruments) in others. It seems to vary a lot by specific industry.

> China is no longer communist, it's this weird hybrid of capitalism with heavy government controls and heavy censorship.

I think the established term is 'state capitalism'.

Which is owned by the Government

In my mind, Communism as exhibited by modern China is more defined by the dictatorship style, than the economy style, not that economy is independent of it. So, I'd consider the chinese communism vs western democracy a more enlightnening contrast.

In some areas China is even becoming more liberal than the EU.

Look at DeepSeek.

Which happened immediately after they abandoned the planned economy

Are you living in a parallel universe? There is no conceivable path forward where Europe will somehow be able to compete on the world stage against US and China.

Europe is more than two decades behind and in a death grip of the woke left, basically hell-bent on self destruction.

All talent has left to US and Asia. Endless stupid regulations and crippling taxation make startups impossible. There is no way Europe will ever be able to compete.

Do you have a source for that last sentence? All I can find is the opposite:

<<Universities around the world have reported seeing an uptick in applications from U.S.-based researchers, who face an increasingly uncertain climate under President Donald Trump’s administration. And some countries and their institutions are already looking to use the opportunity to attract new talent and reverse the steady migration of scientists to the U.S. in recent decades.>>

https://www.science.org/content/article/overseas-universitie...

> and they wanted to extort even more money and dependence from EU

Trump wants countries to lower tariffs and not steal US jobs. So he hits them with reciprocal tariffs and dis-incentives for making stuff out of US. Trump does not want other countries to think US will defend them. So he makes it clear to them.

What is this deal about extortion and increase dependence?

well, eu still has to deliver. given the social and economic status quo, i am not sure they will be able to.

You're giving a lot of credit to the EU. I'm european, I live in the EU. I talk with many other europeans and they all have the same point of view: the EU is fading into irrelevancy and most EU capital cities are quickly becoming complete, total and utter shitholes.

> So now EU is investing in their own tech and military ...

It's amazing that we're supposed to believe there's going to be a EU renaissance now that, for the third time, the EU wants to begin a world war. There's talks of gigantic investments in the EU war machine, talks of making the military service mandatory again in the EU, talks about how "wonderful" it is that so many young europeans are willing to go to war to save "democracy", etc.

It's really nothing short of amazing that the warmongers are happy that the EU is planning gigantic investment in its military apparatus and that that is supposed to be where the EU's renaissance shall be coming from.

What a future for the EU! Military investments!

If I had 5 million USD to spare, I'd buy the US golden visa that Trump created and I'd GTFO of the EU in a hurry.

I do believe things are going to turn from worse to shit in the EU and it's not the tens of millions of uneducated, unemployable, unwilling to adapt to western civilization armies of religious fanatics that the EU imported and keeps importing that are going to solve anything. The only outcome is that it'll accelerate the descend into shitholeness.

The EU has its own problems and there's a reason so many countries started seeing the far-right gain lots and lots of votes and this started way before and has nothing to do with Trump.

> ... is the US now GREAT enough for you yet?

It's great enough for me. Way greater than the EU.

> It's great enough for me. Way greater than the EU.

Why are you still here?

I believe most users here are not in favor of Trump, and these snarky and confrontative remarks are generally a bad tone.

>Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

There are plenty of pro-Trump users on HN.

There's a whole pipeline designed to capture young men (Tate for the dummies, Moscow-Lex for those who aren't) who are also a key demographic here.

I understand it too having seen the fallout and overstep of the "social justice left" with the reading comprehension of sewer rats - almost all American - who themselves attack white men for the crime of being white men (I've been on the receiving end a few times and I was supporting them; if my profile was a black woman or a trans-woman then I would not have been attacked).

Actually the average reading comprehension problem is really a thing, and Americans seem - anecdotally at least - to have the worst level in the English-speaking world. That or they outnumber the Brits by 100-1. This isn't just hyperbole - the numbers on reading comprehension have been dropping for years. We had to pay extra special attention to our kids to get them up to scratch.

My son has seen it happen on his high school. The victims proudly proclaim to be weaponized autists. They have an outlook on life that funnels them into an incel lifestyle. If you’ve seen the Netflix series “Adolescence“ you’ll recognize that it’s downright frightening.

Talk to your kids, people.

I've had that recommended to me before and it's not surprising. I was in that group myself at that age but the internet was a much nicer space. I'd break into computer systems (including USG) for the lulz. I'd get weirdos attempt grooming and hit them either with deletion scripts (deleting autoexec.bat and some key Windows files) or go full Back Orafice on them). I would take down the porn sites which kept spamming my gaming / book newsgroups.

Now those groups have been weaponised. It started on 4chan / SomethingAwful - at that time Americans were so obnoxious that we simple banned them from our gaming servers - where the ARGs were tested out and perfected. Then it was pivoted to Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and the other socials and perfected.

We should have saw this coming. I even thought to myself back then: "it's just as well that the internet was just a nerds thing because this could change society if it was used to control the great unwashed".

It looks like the evil people were also paying attention.

My comment being downvoted is interesting. Is it pro-Trump users disagreeing that they are pro-Trump? Or democrats disagreeing that there are pro-Trump users?

I've had numerous encounters with people in the comments who were pro-Trump, who basically seemed to support corporate slavery.

The pro-Trump people here all seem to mindlessly repeat stuff they heard on the cringy “All-in” podcast after they read a summary of Atlas Shrugged.

On the topic of Ayn Rand, I read the Fountainhead, and as I remember it, it was rebelling against tyranny and groupthink, and the recurring themes were how powerful elites and mass media villified free thinkers, by promoting obviously bad architecture, while ridiculing the work of the protagonist. They pretended to defend the common man, while actively working against him. Ultimately, the owner of a news paper tried to be sincere and support the protagnist, but was destroyed by the masses, thus suggesting that a frenzied crowd can be hard to turn around.

In other words, the book is relevant even today. I.e. it might be very hard for Democrats to start a revolution, because their voter base is as complicit as they are, in the corrupt scheme to enrich themselves.

I tried reading Atlas Shrugged but failed to finish it and can't remember a word of it. Perhaps the two works are in different categories.

If you read both works, I'd be happy to hear your comments.

A series of "just-so" sentences revealing more about the convoluted manner in which iammjm thinks than anything about the world. Sad.

> Your boy trump did do deliver, is the US now GREAT enough for you yet?

Not our boy. Trump was elected by uneducated farmers, not by HN crowd.

Almost 78% of farmers endorsed his most recent presidential run. https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-farmers-voted-trump-feeling-210...

I grew up on a farm. Farmers as a class are not stupid, at least no more so than any other group of people I've dealt with. They do have different interests and priorities than city dwelling people which tend to be better represented by traditionally conservative parties, but that is not an absolute. In Canada, historically, farmers were also responsible for the social credit movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit). It's not a question of being educated/uneducated. It is a question of who is doing a better job of talking to them. "Urban elites" are just as ignorant when dealing with rural issues as farmers are when dealing with urban issues. It would be nice if more people were able to bridge the gap.

Thank you for saying that.

I see this divide all the time, and I can't bear seeing this used time and time again to make the rural vs. the urban populations angry at each other, which in the end only detracts from trying to see how to make everything work together.

I wish we'd be smarter and stopped just being condescending towards the other group. The only ones actively benefitting from this divide are not well-intentioned people in my mind.

One elaboration on your point: the rural and urban populations aren't mirrors of each other. The urban population generally ignores the rural population. The rural population pays attention to (a select subset of) what is happening in the city.

I think this is an inevitable consequence of population size and density. People are interested in people. The people who generate new culture -- who attract the interest of other people -- thrive in the cities. They have a bigger audience and a bigger community of fellow creatives. They find more variety. They have more to work with. So in both the city and the country people pay attention to what's happening in the city and ignore what's happening in the country. More is happening in the city and it is more interesting.

This isn't everything that makes cities tend to differ in their values and politics from the country, but it's the hotbed malign demagogues exploit to empower themselves. They tell the country, "Hey, the city people don't respect you. They have contempt for your values. Their politics are the reason for your suffering. You are the real people. They are parasites. Be mad!"

The country is primed to rise up. The city isn't. So the demagogues make the country hurt the city. Then the city is mad as well, at people who have genuinely hurt them, whereas the country was fooled into being mad at the city and striking the first blow.

It isn't necessarily the case that the people in the country are dumber. They're just the ones primed for a fight. But the con artists are working over the country people, so from the city's perspective the country people are fools.

I appreciate your insight but this explanation seems overly simplified (or needlessly complicated). It’s very possible that the demagogues are seen for what they are irrespective of city vs country and people across the board don’t like having demagogues in power. You also can’t wash the city people clean for all the frankly hate and vitriol they spew at country folks. It’s not just demagogues.

> I see this divide all the time, and I can't bear seeing this used time and time again to make the rural vs. the urban populations angry at each other, which in the end only detracts from trying to see how to make everything work together.

Personally, I'd love to see more investment into rural and semi-rural areas to stop rural flight (because letting run that one unchecked is the cause for the housing prices in urban areas skyrocketing).

The problem is, it's getting increasingly hard to justify spending money on these areas morally. In Germany, even over ten years ago when I worked in construction primarily in rural areas, outright nazism (like entering a bar and witnessing the bar shout the heil-salute including raising the arm) was already a thing, listening to the "Stammtisch" idiocy outright painful, and today it's even worse because this kind of opinion isn't just utter fringe any more, it's gotten political mainstream.

When we're deciding to send money to rural areas, we're effectively rewarding "going fascist". Just behave deranged enough and you'll get everyone bending over.

> Farmers as a class are not stupid

Yet in my lifetime I have seen them consistently go or vote against their own interests (see Brexit which absolutely gutted British farmers which overwhelmingly voted against "evil EU rules").

The difference between UK farmers voting numbers for Brexit and the general UK population voting numbers for Brexit was ~ 1% .. within the margin of error and shows that farmers overall voted much as the general UK population did.

Given the smaller absolute number of farmers, their vote carried less significant weight than many other blocs.

~ https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fv...

~ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074301671...

Face it, the UK population as a whole voted against their own interests, there's no justification to single out UK farmers as being somehow different to the UK population and more deserving of blame.

That only matters if Brexit was about as bad for the direct personal interests of farmers as it was for the average Brit. If farmers had it far worse after Brexit than the average Brit, then it means farmers were especially dumb for voting against their own interests.

My comment above was written in response to an earlier version of the comment above it.

That original version was phrased as to blame farmers for the plight of Brexit, as if a small group who voted more or less in line with with the nation made any kind of difference.

Did farmers have it far worse after Brexit than the average Brit?

My understanding is the nation as a whole suffered, with the exception of well off Brits with significant off shore assests.

Your understanding is incorrect, but understandable if you read the wrong sources. There was so far no measurable negative impact of Brexit. Go look at graphs of trade balances, economic performance, etc. You can't see Brexit in them.

The only metric I can think of that was impacted was currency value on the day of the vote, but that dump was driven by predictions of economic problems that never happened so arguably those traders just took a bath due to believing the wrong people. It is anyway not necessarily bad for a country like the UK to have a lower valued currency; economists had for years been arguing it was overvalued and would be better if the currency was cheaper, so this is a bit of a wash.

All the comments being made here about people voting against their own interests start by assuming that voter's interests are exclusively trade-related, and that constitutional issues don't matter to people at all. This is clearly wrong but a required assumption for the whole against-their-own-interests claim to work. And then it goes on to conflate predictions with reality, by assuming that because the NGO-academic class predicted economic doom it must have actually happened when it didn't.

Both of these are fatal flaws to the argument.

The only way I can see to argue there was negative impact is via very indirect paths, e.g. the voters wanted less immigration and Johnson set the thresholds in the new immigration system so low that immigration increased. But that's more accurately blamed on the Conservatives and the general ideological hangover of EU membership on the party itself, not leaving. Voters can at least do something about it now, and the rise of Reform (Britain's new top-polling party) is evidence of that effect in action.

> There was so far no measurable negative impact of Brexit

Uh... Disagree.

> On January 11, 2024, the London Mayor's Office released the "Mayor highlights Brexit damage to London economy". The release cites the independent report by Cambridge Econometrics that London has almost 300,000 fewer jobs, and nationwide two million fewer jobs as a direct consequence of Brexit. Brexit is recognized as a key contributor to the 2023 cost-of-living crisis with the average citizen being nearly £2,000 worse off, and the average Londoner nearly £3,400 worse off, in 2023 as a result of Brexit. In addition, UK real Gross Value Added was approximately £140bn less in 2023 than it would have been had the UK remained in the Single Market.[0]

The whole page paints a picture which is far from "no measurable negative impact". While it's contrasted with some areas suffering and others benefiting, it's hard to have an overall picture that looks either good or bad, but it's far from being overly positive. And this is just on the economic topic, there's another whole hoist of topics which have negative outlooks such as security, politics (i.e. with the Ireland controversy and how difficult this situation is), etc.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effects_of_Brexit#Imm...

This reply is a perfect demonstration of my complaint:

"[Remainers] conflate predictions with reality, by assuming that because the NGO-academic class predicted economic doom it must have actually happened"

The report you cite it isn't showing a measurable negative impact of Brexit, although you brought it up as a rebuttal to that point. It's a modeling exercise in which the authors imagine a hypothetical world up to 2035, and then pick a long series of unvalidated assumptions which causes the UK's performance to diverge massively from that of the wider EU and prior trends. None of these assumptions are plausible:

• They admit that they did a similar exercise in 2018 which was wrong.

• On page 14 they even admit that they are being deliberately pessimistic.

• They assume an annual GDP growth rate of 4.3% suddenly starting in 2026. That's US levels of growth. Both the UK and the EU only grew at 1.4% last year.

Arguments of the form "I told Excel it will be bad and therefore it's bad" are invalid, but were exactly the strategy the Remain campaign used during the referendum. In the years that followed their predictions were all falsified. Anyone can pay some consultants to write a Word document about the future that imagines whatever the customer wants. Go ahead and imagine 4.3% GDP growth appearing out of nowhere, why not? Such reports aren't independent by any stretch of the imagination, and certainly don't show that anything bad has already happened.

Unfortunately, Sadiq Khan is a manipulator who understands the psychological weaknesses of his supporters very well. So this set of imaginings about the future gets presented in the present tense, with sentences like "London’s economy alone has shrunk by more than £30 billion". It hasn't. Go look at the actual data. It has "shrunk" vs the imaginary numbers in his report, which means nothing.

Predictions are not reality. Reality is reality. And in reality, there has been no measurable negative impact of Brexit, which is why people like Sadiq Khan are forced to make numbers up.

> and shows that farmers overall voted much as the general UK population did.

Against their own interest.

Sure, but your parent's point is that they did so no more or less than the general population. This is in response to the assertion that farmers are especially stupid.

yes, just like almost every other group that voted for it. It's wrong to single out farmers for this.

Maybe their actual interests are different from what others think they should be.

Sure, if their actual interests are to suffer devastating economic consequences.

Yeah, I see farmers here in Europe as one of the most educated groups.

They need to be educated in politics and economy in order to navigate all regulations and subsidies.

I know I'm being pedantic, but the parent comment said 'uneducated', not stupid, and while it's certainly true that some use those interchangeably, I do not see them as such.

In any event, the GP’s comment still holds. The narrative that Trump is just a populist for the uneducated masses is really really… toxic.

Toxic? Let’s review:

US withdrawal from Climate Agreement, vaccine sceptic being made secretary of health, US alienating Europe, proposed ethnic cleansing of Gaza, lying about who started the Ukraine war. Cutting funds to USAID. Threatening to take Greenland by force. Threatening to annex Canada. Proclaiming himself to be King. Constantly "joking" about third term.

Does any of this seem toxic to you? Would educated people support these actions?

Europeans had to fight for our rights and freedom. In this sense, it is your civic duty to ensure order in your own country.

The critique is that too many Americans have become complacent and allowed the political system and media landscape to evolve as it has. The Democrats are also corrupt and need to be replaced, but it requires a sacrifice of wealth that people aren't willing to give, for selfish reasons.

But you will experience the consequences.

They have also been the main target of Soviet/Russian/CCP information operations designed to cause the current mess and live in a democratic system where the (ultra)wealthy have had far too much power.

You could argue that it goes back to when Bush became president despite losing the election to Al Gore, by suppressing recounts that later proved that he lost.

The Democrats have been allowing this for too long and are equally complacent. Nancy Pelosi doing insider trading is just the tip of the iceberg, quite literally speaking as the house speaker.

Americans should join Serbia and Turkey in their revolutions.

> You could argue that it goes back to when Bush > became president despite losing the election > to Al Gore, by suppressing recounts that later > proved that he lost.

That was the day that I lost all respect for America and I fully agree that it was the day when the Republicans saw that you didn't need to win an election you needed to game the system.

From that point onwards is when the Red states went ham on targeted voter suppression and made a number of extremely anti-democratic moves. The current situation is at least 25 years in the making.

> not by HN crowd

Maybe not the HN crowd (though that is debatable, there is no homogenous group here) but a seizable amount of the SV rulers have endorsed him.

SV billionaires did vote for him yes, but not HN crowd.

There are more Trump supporters here than you probably realize. They just aren’t ones to wear their political affiliation as a badge for approval, and aren’t as loud, generally.

HN has a large Trumpist contingent, plenty of people here voted for him, if only to vote against "wokism."

And this is what they got:

NIH cuts, US withdrawal from Climate Agreement, vaccine sceptic being made secretary of health, US alienating Europe, proposed ethnic cleansing of Gaza, lying about who started the Ukraine war. Cutting funds to USAID. Threatening to take Greenland by force. Threatening to annex Canada. Proclaiming himself to be King. Constantly "joking" about third term.

In retrospect is this what you voted for?

> Almost 78% of farmers endorsed his most recent presidential run

Which is surprising because they were bitten by his tariffs last time round. What made them think he'd do better for them this time?

> What made them think he'd do better for them this time?

Same answer as for everyone else: Fox News.

"Think" is a big word here.

That's 78% of farming-dependent counties, not farmers. >78% of any demographic voting at all would be a phenomenal step for democracy.

You misunderstand.

While America is internally divided between rural and urban, or red and blue, or Woke and MAGA, the rest of the world is becoming united in seeing it all as just those damn Americans, and a growing threat.

The world at large has stopped caring about the petty squabbling that goes on in America, the boorishness and the melodrama.

America is the house down the street that always has shouting and screaming coming from it, someone throwing someone elses crap on the front lawn and the cops getting called to it every other week.

It is embarrassing and no one cares who started it anymore. We just want peace and quiet.

THIS. Nobody gives a fuck if half the Americans don't support their dear leader, it's all the same to the rest of us.

I certainly care - they are human being - and I support asylum claims just like support them from other oppressive areas of the world.

I do not agree. The same division is spreading throughout the west, if not the world.

From the very woke education system in the US to the electoral success of the AfD in Germany we seem to be following the US.

Woke has not spread into Asia, but nationalism and racism were there already.

Trying to parse a comment where someone implies that nationalism and racism are bad but also that ""woke"" (diluted into meaninglessness by over use) is .. also bad?

It's two extremes. As with most things it's a spectrum, too far to either side isn't great. On the one hand you have racists and bigots, on the other you have people insisting that we should be asking everyone their preferred pronouns before addressing them and men who decide that they are now women should be allowed to compete in women's sports leagues, oh and actually gender is just a social construct because some women don't have uteruses or something like that, and so on and so forth.

To me, that's what woke means. Lots of making demands about how people should think/see things, and calling people names like TERF if they dare question the woke "truth".

Why is TERF as a term bad when it actually matches the ideology? You have to be against trans and otherwise feminist. Which is exactly what that is.

A lot of people who get called TERFs absolutely don't identify as feminists, let alone _radical_ feminists. It's just a meaningless term now

The word feminist is also a hard one to pin down. SOme people define it as just meaning believing in equality - but in a society where that is the consensus view (its not true of every society, but it is where I most frequently come across the word) that has little meaning.

In addition to the other replies, plenty of words are descriptive until they get used offensively. Another example is "retard".

I dont know, I've just seen it used in a seemingly derogatory way. I don't know what it means and I don't care. Nobody in my real life uses that term anyway, it's just weirdos on Twitter and such.

Close to my view.

Gender IS a social construct though - but sex is not and people conflate the two. The other problem is that if something is a social construct you cannot claim it is also an absolute truth.

Race is also a social construct, which a lot of people who are woke seem to have trouble dealing with - a lot of people who accept gender self-identify seem to be unwilling to accept race self-identify.

Yes, exactly my view. I am not signed up to a side and feel no need to follow a particular set of views because they belong to a group I identity with.

I'll bite: What is "woke" to you? The term's history has basically no bearing on what it means now. Preferably a definition, not examples, because often the examples, when you list enough of them, contradict.

I always say ... there are obviously many, many great people in the USA. You're likely one of them.

But your democracy has spoken now. The first time can be waived off as an aberration. The second time you have to own it.

Now, either you're commenting reactively on HN about it, or you're doing something about it and not taking it personally.

Not only that but the "system" has failed to stop his actions, even those it has branded illegal. If the system is deciding that presidents are kings, then America is only as reliable to the rest of us as those it elects as president.

Always a surprise to see the contempt people in blue collar jobs are held in by Democrats.

Genuine question: is farming a blue collar job? My (possibly incorrect) image of farming is management of heavily industrialized processes, not of rolling up your sleeves.

Careful study of farming often reveals that it's a mix of landowners (rich on paper, possible cashflow problems) and workers (usually immigrant, often undocumented, in which case they're not voting at all).

Fair point. I guess it is more like managing, say, a building or plumbing firm.

I guess what I should have said is "contempt for people outside of the laptop class" (and yes farmers may use laptops but you get what I mean).

Have you see any farmers with white collars? I haven't, they tend to wear working clothes even if they have lots of money.

Prisoner's dilemma, innit. If people are going to use "I'm working class" as an excuse for holding other people in contempt, they shouldn't be surprised to see it reflected back at them.

And contempt is one of the defining features of Trumpism/Muskism, far more than "blue collar".

There are like… 2% farmers in the US?

Bear in mind that the President of the United States is not directly elected by a popular vote. The mathematics of who gets the largest voice are distorted, intentionally so by the Framers. They did not want low-population agrarian states to be permanently in effect disenfranchised.

It is ironic after all of these decades of originalism being seen as a reactionary thing against minorities that the Framers put positive discrimination for (economic and geographic) minorities into the Constitution explicitly to prevent "tyranny of the majority".

The U.S.A. is full of such ironies at the moment.

> explicitly to prevent "tyranny of the majority"

Yep, as if tyranny of the minority is better. Of course Republicans think it's good because it gets them elected but this country is regressing because of the status quo.

When the framers were setting out their ideas the rural states had large populations. However the framers declared great swathes of them to be worth 60% of others.

A lot of these 2% live in states whose influence on the outcome of the presidential election is disproportionately high due to the electoral system. So you have a high influence of farmers on states that have a high influence on the election outcome and those 2% end up looking more like 4% in terms of practical influence.

It is disingenuous to lay the results at their feet only like the comment you're responding to suggests ; Trump did win the popular vote. The dems fumbled this one, plain and simple.

You're correct that this election was more lost by the Democrats than won by the Republicans, but Trump didn't actually get the popular vote. That meme took off well before the final vote count was completed.

It was close, and American politics being what it is, it doesn't actually matter. Hillary Clinton did get a majority in 2016 after all, but the narrative was still that she was the worst and losing-est candidate in American political history. Every Democrat is a liar, a cheat and a communist, every Republican has a mandate from God to sweep the leftists into the sea. That's just how it works, regardless of what the numbers say.

> You're correct that this election was more lost by the Democrats than won by the Republicans, but Trump didn't actually get the popular vote.

What do you mean? In 2024, Trump indisputably won the popular vote - as in, he had more total popular votes than any other candidate (77.3 million votes compared to 75 million votes to Kamala, and nowhere remotely close for anyone else), which is what "winning a vote" means. In 2016 you're right that Hillary won the popular vote but still lost the presidency, but that's a different matter. And you're also right that he could have lost the popular vote again and still won the presidency, but that's irrelevant to the question of whether he did win or not.

Huh?

Trump won 49% of the vote in 2024, compared to Hillary's 48% in 2016.

The numbers go with the story perfectly. He didn't win a majority of the popular vote, but neither did Hilary. Trump did win a bigger share than she did though.

You're confusing the popular vote with electoral votes.

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by a margin of almost 3 million[0].

But because states vote for President in the US through the electoral college, rather than people, Trump won the election with a slight majority of electoral votes. Hillary Clinton lost not because she was unpopular (she was, even in the most conservative estimate, about as popular as Trump,) but because she didn't campaign in the correct states.

[0]https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/hillary-clinton-officially-w...

They're not confusing popular and electoral votes. Trump won a majority of electoral votes, and a plurality of the popular vote, as they claimed; that is from the official count, not preliminary counts. He did not win a majority of the popular vote, but that is also the case both for Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton (twice, though one of those was a rare three candidate race where a majority would have been unlikely).

You cannot say that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 and say that Trump did not in 2024 unless you are disputing the official count. He had a margin of around 2.3m.

https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/2024pres...

No one claimed he won the majority of the vote though. The claim was just that he "won the popular vote" (this time, in 2024, not in previous elections). And winning a plurality is winning the vote, in almost all electoral systems (of course, the popular vote is ultimately meaningless in the USA, but that doesn't mean we should apply some other arbitrary threshold for what it means to win it).

> And winning a plurality is winning the vote, in almost all electoral systems

Presidential systems with runoffs are very popular. A plurality is useless there, you win with a majority.

Even then, both the candidate who wins the plurality and the runner-up make it to the next step of the election, so in some sense they (both) still won the (first step) of the election. Regardless, the USA has no such runoffs at any level in the electoral process, so it doesn't seem like this standard should be applied here.

We're in agreement on that point. I'm just trying to understand the rationale of the commenter who seems to be claiming that Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 and Trump lost the popular vote in 2024. Setting a threshold of a majority would at least be consistent, but I don't see any way to hold both of those positions while accepting the results as correct.

>And winning a plurality is winning the vote, in almost all electoral systems

I'd argue that there are many electoral systems that realize the potential problems this causes, and either use runoffs, or IRV/STV, to avoid it. The US (and UK...) just have very antiquated electoral processes that, especially in the US, have not benefited from the last two centuries of research on voting systems.

Clinton did win the popular vote in 2016. That much has been well documented and well established.

I was incorrect about Trump not winning the popular vote. I thought that the final vote tally had him losing by a slight margin but apparently not, so mea culpa on that.

Its always the farmers fault... Like it was in Germany back in the day.

Keep people uneducated, dont support the poor and then act like you will solve these issues, its conservative 101

Seems to me America is a pretty shitty country to live in if you're not rich so I am not too mad that they protest vote for Trump.

Ofcourse in Europe we learned that socialism improves the lives of the proletariat not national socialism.

So protest vote people that'll make your own situation 100x worse? This is logic that never checked out for me.

These people feel that they are in the losing side of a win/lose situation.

So they are going for a lose/lose situation out of spiteness.

The solution is to always go for the win/win situation, even if it leads to smaller wins. It avoid building up resentment, that will always lead to a lose/lose situation.

There isn't a single socialist country in Europe since around 1990 (and good riddance). I think the term you're looking for is social-democracies (for the political system) or social-market-economy (for the economic system).

"Socialist" is such a loaded term it's kind of best to avoid it in any discussion where you aim for clarity.

The original definition, which is where it got its lasting popularity, comes from the popular workers' movements of the 1910s and 20s: workers owning the means of production. That is basically describing an economic system in which enterprises, particularly factories, are democratically controlled by the people working in them, who would have a say in how the enterprise is run.

This notion of socialism was corrupted by Lenin and his ilk when they essentially seized the worker's revolution that tore down the Tsars of Russia and founded the USSR. However, instead of decentralized workers' councils actually owning, profiting from, and controlling the factories (and farms and other enterprises) that they worked for, the state was put in charge of all of these. Ostensibly the state represented the will of the people, so that is how this leap was justified, but of course in reality it was one of the most heinous dictatorships that the world had seen in a long time. But because worker's rights were a popular idea at thrle time, the new absolutist monarchs of the "Soviet" empire kept claiming they are "socialists", just as they claimed they are "democratic", and no one bothered to contradict them.

In the meantime, in the West of Europe, particularly Germany, the same basic workers' movements were co-opted by Hitler, here claiming that he represents the people of Germany in their interests against the bogey-men they hated, the Jewish people (and Armenians and a few others), identified as evil Capitalists that had to be combatted. So they also named their movement "socialist", while in reality having an iron grip and military-like complete top-down control of the means of production.

Finally, more actually democratic forces that were nevertheless interested in keeping the capitalist status quo came up with a series of more minor reforms that would give some more resources, better lives, and rights to workers without actually putting them in full control of the enterprise they worked for. This movement ended up calling itself social-democrat or democratic socialism. Being very much similar to the previous status quo, and keeping the wealthy in power and in control of enterprises, while also not egregiusly oppressing workers to the point of revolt, this proved to be the most enduring form of "socialism" that persisted.

Here’s a counterpoint:

https://fee.org/articles/the-poorest-20-of-americans-are-ric...

This doesn't quite match the rhetoric of the current US government though, does it?

Listening to them one could think the US is on the brink of collapse unless some 'strong leader' steps in and 'makes America great again'.

Cherry picking a 2 small demographics to validate your point is intellectually dishonest.

Farmers are not stupid. Read up on petty bourgeoisie and why they tend to support reactionary movements. Hitler too famously found a lot of support in farmers and small businesses. There are very good material reasons to this.

Material reason that they were more blood thirsty and hateful. More wanting to expand German, annex other countries and happy to turn other nations into slaves. They have seen empathy as a weakness, the same some current politicians do.

Also, they gained about nothing and seem themselves as the victims by the end of WWII. (Yes, literally they have seen themsevelves as primary victims of what happened.)

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