European Nations Decide Against Acquiring Boeing E-7 Awacs Aircraft
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I see the same happening with choices about other suppliers. The EU is a very large trading partner to the US and what is happening right now is unprecedented in the last 75 years or more. The damage to our future world order is incalculable and the fact that it all seems to be by design bothers me greatly.
The lyrics of Alan Parson's 'Children of the moon' have been spooking through my head lately.
Now that no more protection is offered, there's no point in spending the money.
But I think it was a pretty bad appeasement deal.
Eurofighter is really only good for peacetime patrols, the F35 will detect and shoot down enemies in real conflict far before the Eurofighter can do anything.
In a bizarre hypothetical conflict you would certainly not want to engage a F35 in an Eurofighter, the Eurofighter would be knocked out of the sky long before it could even see the F35. It certainly couldn’t turn on it’s radar.
There are extensive public studies available from e.g. the Danish government that ended up with the conclusion that the F35 is far superior in air-to-air combat. https://www.fmn.dk/globalassets/fmn/dokumenter/strategi/kamp...
Against China? If you’re willing to accept a level of losses we haven’t seen since WW2, but that’s just the nature of peer to peer warfare.
However the story might be different in a decade as sixth gen aircraft like Tempest are entering service and probably other modern technologies like unmanned/autonomous drones and hypersonic and directed energy weapons are more widely deployed. Connectivity between units in the field is also clearly a huge deal that is going to matter more and more and that is going to require a level of interoperability and trust that won't be kind to "partners" who aren't good team players.
On that kind of timescale I expect "buying American" will be much less attractive to most "allies" of the US than it has been for most of the past century and it will show exactly in decisions like who is making and buying whose planes.
Oh France sure how long until you can supply a fraction of what we are buying from the USA? What a decade!?!?! Ukraine won't exist in a decade if we wait and what's that you won't even ramp production unless you can get guarantees from multiple member nations? What a joke.
https://breakingdefense.com/2025/06/air-force-cancels-e-7-we...
I don't think "damage" is the right word, especially outside of the US. Changes aren't necessarily bad, and, as someone living in the EU, I actually like the current trend.
If one takes a longer view of things, the period from WW2 to now is very much an anomaly reflecting relative European weakness in the aftermath of that war's physical and moral destruction. There is no intrinsic reason that the US should take the lead on, say, policy toward Russia. Quite the opposite.
The precedent being France and UK that were so disgusted by war after WWI (and recall that France was the historical biggest warmonger among Western nations at least since the second half of the Hundred Years War) that they didn't react to Nazi Germany annexing Austria, then invading Sudetenland, and in fact not even when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Had they reacted earlier, WWII might have been avoided.
In the mean time, most major EU countries have increased their defense budgets. Some of the larger ones, most notably Germany, are considering to reintroduce conscription. Within about five years, the EU will be able to withstand Russia without any aid from the USA.
In fact, right now, Poland would be able to withstand the Russians on their own. Mind you, they would not be able to defeat the Russians, but they would give them a beating and repel any invasion of Poland.
It made us look weak internationally compared what could have been, and it made us weak. All that military money went into social programs and heavy lean to the left. It sort of works if you have other's umbrella shielding you, which now is questionable (but is it really, I think its more a projection how further can things go in future).
For Russia Europe never ceased to be a battlefield - eastern part of battlefield itself, western part as prize to win or conquer. Past 2+ decades of quite overt subversion, sowing chaos and discord via both radical left and right (which is hilarious, seeing 'patriots' parroting russian propaganda against their own country or ethnicity), sometimes outright attacks and assassinations.
Secret services kept reporting all this even publicly but were mostly ignored by politicians. Weak long term politicians like Merkel allowed this with open arms, hoping in vain that pure business is enough to keep psychopathic wolves happy. Well what a failure that was (yes I hate her as does most of eastern EU, leftist populist and nothing more which grinded strongest European economy to a halt).
Correction is being done, it will take decades but course is set regardless of what next elections in US brings.
As for geography - its only relevant doe to the fact we are connected by land to russia. Of course any country which has huge ocean between them and russians is much safer from them. The rest can either defend themselves or are an easy prey.
Also, when the Brits have a revolution (e.g., English Civil War, American Revolution) deaths never get as arbitrary and difficult-to-predict as in the French Revoution.
Still, let's not forget Napoleon :)
As I mentioned in another comment, I don't want to see us, Romanians, fight the West's wars anymore (like we fought Germany's war in the 1940s), I don't want for my grand-kids to tell their kids how their grandad barely managed to stay alive thanks to some Russian peasants close to Krasnodar who brought him (me) in their home in the middle of the Russian winter, i.e. the same story that has been actually directly experienced by a person close to me (now dead, of course, as are most of the WW2 veterans) on his way back from just outside Stalingrad.
Again, I don't want for my country, Romania, to be the West's sacrificial lamb for West's interests anymore, once was enough. And you should keep your pontificating for yourself, because you Dutch colonialists didn't fight sh*t on the steppes of Southern Russia / Southern Ukraine so you don't know s*it when it comes to fighting Russia in a great land-war, you were too busy, first, getting your asses kicked by the Japanese, and second, cutting the hands off of the Indonesian freedom fighters.
Major cities in 'my little country' have been bombed to little pieces during WWII, my family lived right next door to a particular bridge, maybe you've seen the movie.
All you will achieve is exactly the thing you are trying to avoid.
You're in Putin's pocket and you don't even know it. Guess who will end up fighting his wars for them? You, your grand children and so on. It's the proximity to Russia that is your problem, not the distance to the western part of Europe.
And I have never and will never make any excuses for what the Dutch have done in the past in their colonies and elsewhere, it is atrocious.
> If anything, I’d rather actively choose Russia’s side on this against the West
Based on your comment history, you have already done so. You've been carrying water for Russia on HN for the longest time.
> at least Russia is the devil we know
Apparently, you don't know. You think you know. Romania could be the Switzerland of Eastern Europe, but it is this mentality that stops that from happening. Russia is a terrible country towards its citizens and you wouldn't even be a citizen of Russia, you'd be a citizen of a resource for Russia, someone to be exploited or to be sent to fight Russia's wars for it. Note that this is exactly what is happening and if Ukraine should become occupied you can expect that the next wave would be Ukrainians against Eastern Europe. That is what you are hoping for here.
> I’m not alone here in Eastern Europe when it comes to this ideological choice, just look at what people vote (when they’re allowed to do that freely, that is, just look at the Călin Georgescu case).
Yes, look at that case, and think about it a bit longer: you've been actively recruited as a fifth column member in the army of a hostile nation. If war does break out (which by trying to avoid the destruction you are actually increasing the chances of it!) you might be found to be aiding the enemy, think long and hard about the consequences of such choices.
I'm talking physically, for better or for worse that is still not the case. I don't want to see Romanian men (which would include me) leaving their (our, in fact) bones on the Ukrainian steppe up to the Volga, once was enough.
> Apparently, you don't know. You think you know. Romania could be the Switzerland of Eastern Europe,
Yes, I do know, and yes, and I am completely and utterly annoyed by Westerners lecturing us on our geo-strategic future.
I don't want to see Romanian men (which would include me) leaving their (our, in fact) bones on the Ukrainian steppe up to the Volga, once was enough.
The current US government is throwing away a world power status of unimaginable costs, which literally took almost a century to build. For better or worse, but let's not spin fairy tales about the why and when.
WW2 was the anomaly- a conflict impacting all nations on earth, with Europe falling under a horrible regime
The popular narrative suggests a 'United States of Europe' is forming, but this seems like propaganda when you look at the reality, nations are already returning to the historical status quo, prioritizing their own agendas and pulling in separate directions, much as they always have.
A recent, clear example is the debate over using frozen Russian assets to fund Ukraine’s war effort. That single issue exposes the deeper divides. Belgium objects because it wants to shield its own financial sector. Germany backs the idea because it would spare it from taking on more of the financial burden. France, meanwhile, has long argued for a different approach, issuing joint EU debt, an option that many financially weaker member states would favor, but one Germany refuses to accept.
EDIT. Unfortunately HN has decided that "I am posting too fast", because I wrote 4 posts, amazing work, I love getting throttled by mods with not reason! So cannot really respond in the thread. EDIT2. As always, thank you for downvoting without addressing the argument.
I'll just update this one:
> Do you really believe Europe would devolve into actual > internal warfare, without the US? What about the EU? I > believe it has successfully kept the peace ever since its > predecessor, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) > was created - specifically to avoid another war. > Your example is very on point: the member states are talking > - not fighting - to protect their own interests.
It’s really not hard to imagine this turning into something very different. All it takes is a major political shift in Germany or France, and both are already close to that point. A lot of people are still thinking in peacetime terms, but we’re past that. The parties that are likely to come to power soon are not going to keep talking about “European solidarity,” because a core part of their message is that this solidarity has come at the expense of their own country’s strength.
I don't think your narrative is as informed as you make it out to be.
Germany is not objecting out of confusion about past instruments. It is objecting because a broader program of joint debt would place more longterm financial exposure on Germany, and it does not want to carry that load. Other countries support the idea precisely because it would distribute that cost more widely. That conflict keeps resurfacing every time the topic comes up.
You could just as easily point to other examples that show the same thing. Spain isn’t eager to pour money into the defense of Eastern Europe because it doesn’t feel the Russian threat the same way. And plenty of countries in Central and Eastern Europe push back hard when it comes to sharing the burden on migration, because they see that as a Southern European problem.
If you look at the short term, countries may be pulling one way or the other, but the "ever closer union" _is_ happening if you look at a longer trend.
Your example is very on point: the member states are talking - not fighting - to protect their own interests.
in reality for most of it was the fact the Russians were 50ft away, with American troops as the security guarantee
Russia in 2022 is yet another example of how rapidly despots will discard "entangled trade" for military conquest
It's the same shit with the Baltic states and other former Soviet satellite states. They're terrified of Russia, but people in Germany or further West think it's all overblown propaganda and there's nothing to fear from Russia.
You being ignorant doesn't mean there aren't real issues and real, justified fears.
Tell me why we should care about some island on the other end of the world.
It would make sense to begrudgingly accept it, just like we did US military adventures in South America.
I mean, if we're talking about Taiwan, it has strategic and commercial importance above and beyond being "some island". Certainly more than Central America ever did when the rest of the world was ignoring the US's idiotic anti-Communist adventures. Pretending that it's irrelevant because it's far away seems like a pretty big economic misunderstanding, at the least.
It is your problem and you're not exactly being great allies to us in ours.
And that is why Germany is moving a whole Brigade to Lithuania? I think only Spain and Portugal are not appropriately concerned with the Russian threat.
An extreme and inaccurate statement. The US is still party to NATO Article 5, meaning the blood of our young people is pledged to be shed to defend, say, Estonia. That has not changed.
What has changed is the US has become more realistic and up front about the limitations of its reduced military. It’s not healthy, for the US /or/ Europe, to indulge the imperial fantasy that US forces in Europe (token deployments in Germany and Poland) are sufficient to defend against Russian attack.
Trump is not the first US president to push Europe to do more of precisely what it is doing here (spend its own money on defense). Being clear about limits is what a reliable ally does.
Europe ordering an Airbus AWACS instead of Boeing now that the US stopped subsidizing them is not surprising nor does it mean the sky is falling.
What changed is the US President saying things like, he will encourage Putin to invade countries not spending so much on military.
What also changed is the US President threatening members of the EU militarily over greenland for example.
Reliable allies don't really do that.
(you probably do not realize the shock Denmark felt over this, that went deep and the change will not happen over night, but it will happen)
The president has repeatedly been vocal about the US leaving NATO as a possibility.
If I were the EU, I certainly wouldn't be counting on the US honoring any of its agreements and I'd be planning with the assumption that they will not join a NATO response.
However, I think that many in the US are underestimating the current paradigm shift. Right now, in Europe, leaders and voters need to take decisions while keeping in mind the possibility that the US will invade Canada and Greenland while not reacting if Russia movies to Estonia.
Will it happen? Who the f*k knows? Donald Trump has made declarations very much in this direction. Also, Donald Trump has broken a sufficiently large number of treaties since becoming president that _anything_ should be considered possible.
That being said, as you mention, it's not clear that any of this is in any way related to Europe not buying the E-7.
Which?
There's obviously more, like NAFTA.
Trump didn’t break NAFTA, he renegotiated it. NAFTA remained in effect until the new treaty, USMCA, came into effect.
In international law, they were treaties. Your internal squabbles do not concern us and just make you look unreliable.
What a joke everyone knew we didn't ratify them everyone just wanted to pretend. We even send a letter to Iran making sure they knew. The EU especially was funny acting like the agreement had any value when the USA wasn't part of it.
It only makes you look like you don't have your shit together.
Please provide a verifiable reference to the specific international law or laws that says that a US president's signature is sufficient to create a binding treaty.
The US Constitution, specifically Article II, section 2, says "[The president] shall have the power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided that two-thirds of the Senators present concur". That's pretty clear that the President's signature alone is not enough.
> 1. A person is considered as representing a State for the purpose of adopting or authenticating the text of a treaty or for the purpose of expressing the consent of the State to be bound by a treaty if:
[...]
> (b) it appears from the practice of the States concerned or from other circumstances that their intention was to consider that person as representing the State for such purposes and to dispense with full powers.
> 2. In virtue of their functions and without having to produce full powers, the following are considered as representing their State:
>(a) Heads of State, [...], for the purpose of performing all acts relating to the conclusion of a treaty;
[...]
Again, your constitution is your business. We do not care about it and it is not pertinent to our dealings with you. Get your house in order.
At that point, the US was estopped from changing course. Doing so broke the bona fide principle.
Also, who's speaking of NATO in this thread?
The USA did not ratify
> Paris Climate Agreement
The USA did not ratify
Obama famously avoided sending either to Congress as he is legally required for the USA to ratify a treaty. The USA's "commitment" was non binding and frankly illegal for Obama to make. Hell the USA Congress even send a letter to Iran to be super explicit that the accords didn't mean shit since it's not ratified by the USA.
Since these treaties covered more than tariffs (e.g. some of them were the same treaties that ensured recognition of copyrights across borders), I'm not sure of the whole scope of these events.
Before making chest-thumping proclamations of this sort perhaps you'd best read the text of article 5:
-- If a member is attacked, other members will take "such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area".
See the part where it says "such action it deems necessary"? Trump may decide that the necessary action is to go play golf. He's gone back and forth on his commitment to European defense a number of times over the years, so there's really no reason to believe that his he won't change his mind on it before breakfast tomorrow.
A treaty is only as good as its enforcement, and if the USA declines to uphold their obligations, who is going to force them?
A mutual defense treaty is no good at all if it needs enforcement; it only works as a coordinating tool between basically-willing parties. When it becomes anything else, well, look at CSTO.
This has not been reciprocated.
All that aside, and regardless of your views on this administration’s posture toward NATO, Europe needs to revitalize its defense industry as there’s been a much remarked on free rider problem for a while. Robert Gates made a now infamous speech about this problem on his way out of office as secretary of defense.
A significant reduction in the quality of life for many in the 'so-called West' appears to be the unfortunate price of the world returning to a more 'normal' historical pattern of international relations.
I don't think that's true. The policy of alliance building and containment of their largest peer and competitor still makes sense. It was how the US ultimately overcame the Soviet Union, and is even more vital given the size and talent in China. A US without an alliance system will not win that competition.
What's much more concerning is that the rational interests of the US as a nation aren't reflected in its policy making any more. The 20th century had its share of domestic issues but the inmates weren't running the asylum as far as foreign politics was concerned which was coherent.
What's much riskier to the world is the US having to take the brunt of defending Europe, the Arctic front, and dealing with a conflict in China (which is far far more serious military threat than Russia in 2025).
It's difficult medicine to swallow but that's the realpolitiks of it.
The fact that Americans are abandoning us in our struggle with Russia in order to pick a fight with China makes it hard to see them as reliable allies.
Germany's GDP is twice that of Russia. EU GDP is 8.5 times larger than Russia.
Yet even in the current state Russia would have very hard time fighting Europe. The Russian military hasn't been this diminished in decades. But the real issue is Europe can't easily spare stuff to help Ukraine because they don't have their own security figured out.
Why do you think a rising China is concerning to the US, but not to Europeans?
Re China: We don't share any border or ocean with them and none of our interests are opposed. To the contrary, they're the only other major power taking climate change seriously. Why would they be a threat to us?
For example, can the person of today afford a higher standard of living than one of 20 years ago - unclear, food has become disproportionately more expensive, housing cost has by far outpaced the wage growth, tech has become cheaper, but big-ticket items like cars are proportionally not cheaper.
From this, the person of today is poorer in tangible terms.
Did the infrastructure improve? - some, but I'd say it was a (sub)linear improvement in absolute terms - we certainly didn't build as much stuff as we did in the mid to late 20th century, and what we built before was the more important stuff, so the new stuff has marginal utility.
Did European industry and technology improve? I'd say in terms of relative importance, we regressed - there are huge gaps in European technological capability for which only foreign options exist - this didn't used to be the case.
Were there some big ticket innovations like Concorde or the Moon Landing or whatever - clearly no, the world seems to have lost its appetite for these kind of hugely ambitious projects.
This 'number go up' style capitalism is clearly not to the benefit of the individual, but I can't for the life of me think who does it actually benefit.
Forget 20 years ago, you can just back 6 years is enough. Ask any person when life was more affordable and job security better, in 2019 or today and everyone will say 2019.
Graphs like GDP or the stock market going up, mean jack shit to the average person when they can't afford a house anymore.
A lot of our economic growth was just on paper through financial instrumentation.
This isn’t a US-only problem, and if anything the US has been more reliable on this account than some major European countries. For instance, in the first several months of the war Germany actually prohibited other countries from exporting their own surplus Leopard tanks to Ukraine.
The US has spent years begging, pleading, cajoling, and now threatening the Europeans to take responsibility for the defense of their own continent. It took the outbreak of war in Ukraine for anyone in Europe west of Warsaw to even start considering rearmament.
Also, the shitty anti-American attitude from Western Europe isn’t anything new, it existed for decades before Trump seriously entered politics. I’m just speculating here, since none of us actually know what’s said between world leaders behind closed doors, but the US wants Western Europe to rearm and Western Europe’s leaders probably recognized the necessity of doing so in 2022, so it’s pretty convenient for all parties involved that they can pretend they’re doing it to spite America rather than at America’s request.
Pretty much all of our problems are a direct result of your military adventurism in the Middle East. Stop fucking up our part of the world.
Another curious thing is despite how the US has been acting in this manner, their stock market still continues to outperform everybody else's
Turns out even if you have as much power as the US president with their executive orders, if you start making stupid or insufficiently well-prepared policy decisions, you have to roll them back or your country will crash into the ground.
Kind of makes me think that supposedly autocratic leaders of powerful countries have much less power than we thought - once they make a couple stupid decisions, their countries start going down the drain.
Only a tiny fraction of the S&P is performing, and it's because it's either part of the AI bubble or because people have memed extreme value into poorly run companies that now have absolutely insane EPS numbers. There's nothing about the US stock market that's even slightly connected to it's financial or economic performance, right now.
Now that NATO is in question, you'll start to hear about US manipulation of the SWIFT banking system, so Europe will start pushing for an international one, which China will eventually control.
We are in a multipolar world with the dominance of China incoming and the western nations need to spread capability.
Not that these problems are impossible to solve, but they are nontrivial in practice, I'm afraid. It would take quite some effort to turn the fantasy into a reliable theory, and then quite some more, into a practical swarm.
Will be cool though.
What would be even more fun (i.e. stretching the limits) would be to include a 30-300 mhz radar in the mix, which would resolve just fine with dispersed nodes, and penetrate most stealth coatings and bounce off the airframes of the enemy.
Then, there should be a super-node in a larger aircraft that would receive the data from the swarm and turn it into a coherent picture, run object detection and tracking, etc.
There was a request for information that went out in April, asking, hey, uh, if we do want to make this an actually good awacs, what should we do with the platform? https://breakingdefense.com/2025/04/air-force-eyes-advanced-...
Seems incredibly silly to me that such an incredibly crucial capability is being so sorely neglected. Having superior signals has loon been a key US advantage, that's core to enabling so many other capabilities to be used well. Theres what feels like absurd fantasy going around saying we can skip airborne platforms & just use space for all awacs needs. And who knows maybe, but it feels like a lot of ridiculous wish casting, that's leaving us with horrendous woefully inadequate eyes, ears, & links today. We need a real e-7 plan, one with a really good sensors not the decades old tech that the US's E-7A defined.
Is this implying that USA was paying for it previously? It sounds like they're blaming "noise polution", but also that they're not getting the planes for free anymore?
First of all, none of this should be "unexpected"--Obama famously announced a pivot to Asia well over a decade ago. What exactly did Europeans think that meant?
Second, European military intransigence has dramatically escalated the risk of a devastating war affecting both US and Europe, and the US is simply overextended. The US cannot bring sufficient military power to bear to defend the Pacific, European, and Arctic theaters simultaneously. European NATO members simply must pull their own weight now; reaffirming European luxury beliefs like "we don't need to prepare for war because Uncle Sam has got us covered" would be doing both US and Europe a dis-service. Many presidents have tried more polite pleading and cajoling in less critical times, with evidently poor results.
Finally, the asymmetry of expectations is remarkable. Europeans clearly expect the US not just to fight Russia with them, but to fight Russia for them. Yet no Americans expect European forces to come to the US's rescue in the Pacific--and European commenters online make very clear that that expectation is correct. Consequently, many Americans are skeptical of the value NATO membership brings, while seeing clearly its risks and costs.
If you want America to remain engaged in European security, y'all need to get much more serious about fielding an effective military force and clearly commit to helping the US against China in every way possible. And if you don't want America to remain engaged in European security, y'all need to get even more serious about fielding an effective military force.
So put your heads down, get to work, and quit it with the hyperbolic butthurt comments about "unexpectedly" being "blown off".
The US has pivoted from traditional AWACS to the proliferated warfighter space architecture, the idea being hundreds of LEO satellites can provide a cheaper and much more survivable (not to mention persistent) air moving-target indicator capability. There is substantial project risk, but the US is resource constrained and cannot afford to fund everything under the sun.
European NATO nations don't currently need something so fancy and without the US, E-7's per-unit costs would be too high. But the US now prioritizes its needs in the Pacific theater (where those E-7s would not be survivable) over Europe's security interests (cheap, capable traditional AWACS). That's the pivot to Asia in action.
I don't even think that this outcome is bad for Europe. It's a reminder that Europe's needs are not America's priority, which helps to light a sorely-needed fire under European asses. Europe will buy GlobalEye or some Airbus platform, and the US will have a decent alternative available if the PWSA doesn't work out. It's also a potential opportunity for European NATO countries to contribute to PWSA, Starshield, and/or Golden Dome and more visibly and tangibly contribute to NATO's mutual defense.
Maaaybe you should introspect a bit about how a single thoughtless sentence on some web forum could possibly inspire you to write an essay about European entitlement. Is this American vulnerability?
When you have the US Air Force in a program and they purchase a bazillion aircraft, things get relatively affordable.
Well, the US left and nobody want to spend billions of dollars into the development of this aircraft (most of the problems are the airframe not radar I heard, citation needed) and end up with just two aircraft and then deal with internal news about how they spend billions of dollars per aircraft when commercial airlines are so much cheaper.
Boing stock didn’t even fall down as much as the S&P500 so one can assume that this was already taken into account.
Seemingly the USAF was about to buy E-7 Wedgetail aircraft, but according to Wikipedia, they think it would be a better idea to use satellites.
This isn’t an angle I had thought of before, and there must be many satellites required to support that.
I’ll try and research more into this.
Which begs the question, why should the EU see China as an adversary? That's mostly an American thing, the Pacific doesn't really concern us.
Maybe alliances will reshuffle in the future?
No rising Chinese middle class without the world's largest wealthy consumer market.
A match made in heaven ;)
Or the EU relying on the US army for defense ;)
We're not in the post ww2 world illusion or world peace through commerce, mutual dependencies clearly don't stop nationalist interests. Trump shattered the illusion with his illegal meme tier tariffs, now we're slowly going back to empires dealing with their friends while fucking over anyone else.
From the fall of the Berlin wall until the Ukraine invasion, the US saw Russia as more of an adversary than Europe saw Russia.
Yes, even after Russia annexed Crimea. In fact, it's only this year that Europe has started to significantly increase defense spending, three years after Russia invaded Ukraine. And, even then the most aggressive increase plans end up short of where spending was during the Cold War.
Every US president after Clinton (and maybe Clinton as well) urged European countries, especially NATO ones, to keep funding defense and they cut instead.
It turns out that the cowboys were right, that there was a bear in the woods, and that "soft power" wasn't power.
But I don't think that this makes EU policy necessarily incorrect: Would German military spending of 5% GDP have prevented the Crimea annexation?
We won't know, but I don't think so, and European militarism in the 2000s might have led to significantly worse outcomes than we actually got.
I also think that painting this as a clear "US stance proven right in hindsight" is an outsized claim; EU military spending only really came up under Trump, and was a very minor topic before. You could make a similar argument that "the cowboys" were all wrong with the whole middle-east interventionism thing (in Afghanistan and Iraq), but the military side of that was at least competently executed (unlike Russia in Ukraine), collateral damage lower and war crimes somewhat minimized/prosecuted.
I sadly agree that Costa-Rica-style pacifism appears a non-viable approach for the EU now despite looking somewhat workable 15 years ago.
Probably not Crimea, but you'd think that the annexation would have caused some rethinking of "soft power".
The lack of European defense spending since 95 means that Europe doesn't have much to help Ukraine. (EU countries brag about "100% to Ukraine" but never talk about how little that 100% is.) It also means that Europe doesn't have much in the way of a defense industry. (And then they whine when money gets spent on US weapons.)
Getting serious in 2014 (after Crimea) would have given Europe options.
> EU military spending only really came up under Trump
Trump's comments, the actual words, on EU defense spending were basically the same as Obama and W's.
The difference was in how Europeans, especially the Germans, reacted.
BTW - do Europeans know how "But we have better work/life balance" comes across? The reaction by many Americans is "Why am I paying to defend their work/life balance?"
Realistically, what options? The only thing that could have really helped in my view in hindsight was either massive visible arms-deliveries to the Ukraine before 2022 (to discourage Russia), or to demonstrate willingness to join the fight (with soldiers). That willingness is and was not there (in neither US/EU), and spending more would not really have helped that.
> you'd think that the annexation would have caused some rethinking of "soft power".
You mean giving up on Russian gas early? It's a much harder call without hindsight in my view if Crimea is the main focus. The whole second Chechen war was much more problematic than that annexation in my view, and if you're not drawing the line for that, than why'd you change your opinion for Crimea?`
I do fully agree with you though that there should have been harsher consequences after 2014, and that those might have actually helped more than anything else (by making the "happy path" for the 2022 invasion worse): I think Putin considered the 2022 invasion as "quick regime change, some yapping from the west and then business as usual in a few years"; the west/EU demonstrating willingness for self-sacrifical sanctions to punish expansionism in 2014 might have discouraged this strongly.
> BTW - do Europeans know how "But we have better work/life balance" comes across? The reaction by many Americans is "Why am I paying to defend their work/life balance?"
I'll give you my European perspective:
1) Yes the US is overspending on its military, but that is entirely their own decision
2) American military spending profits itself first and foremost, because spending mainly goes to domestic industry, and forces are mainly used to further domestic interests
3) Europe is already paying for the humanitarian fallout of ill-advised US interventionism in the middle east, and indirect costs from this alone are in the "percent GDP" range as well
Don't get me wrong, I think it is a really good thing that the US did provide substantial aid during the Ukraine invasion. I personally wish that "the west" did even more, but the sad reality is that a good part of the population considers the Ukraine conflict a "not my problem", and is simply unwilling to pay more to defend human rights abroad (and the attitude is very similar between especially western Europeans and US-americans in my view).
From where I’m sitting in the EU, both seem successful in their quests.
(So I’m assuming they mean China.)
The US has nothing to offer Europe except LNG that Europe cannot produce itself, or obtain from China at better price or quality. Canada has ~200 years of LNG reserves and can ship to Europe from LNG Canada.
https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/imports/united-s...
https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...
The True Cost of China's Falling Prices - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45876691 - November 2025
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/americas-self-d...
> In 1995, China accounted for less than five percent of global manufacturing output. By 2010, that number had jumped to around a quarter, and today it stands at nearly a third.
The US is still a very large and attractive market for European exporters, and it would at the very least substantially least hurt Europeans if they had to fully substitute the US with China as a trade partner.
To your point about the US market, I would put forth the size of China, India, and Africa as import markets for Europe. The population of the US is ~343M, ~745M is Europe, while that of China, India, and Africa combined is ~4.6B (as of this comment, rough proxy for total addressable markets). Admittedly the latter are at various stages of development, but I am of a strong opinion they can replace the US considering demographics, proximity, rate of development and purchasing power increasing, etc. International equities have already outperformed the S&P500 this year, so this may happen faster than we might expect. China is not as quite as wealthy as the US, but India and Africa are the last of global emerging markets and where the economic growth future of the world is. Do you configure and target your export economy for growing markets? Or declining markets?
Citations:
https://bsky.app/profile/carlquintanilla.bsky.social/post/3m... | https://archive.today/P2HxS ("International stocks are outperforming the S&P 500 by the widest margin in 16 years.") - November 12th, 2025
Goldman Strategists See US Stocks Lagging All Peers Next Decade - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-12/goldman-s... | https://archive.today/aINUx - November 12th, 2025
How the Rest of the World Is Moving on From Trump’s ‘America First’ - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-11-15/the-wo... | https://archive.today/m67tK - November 15th, 2025
This line here makes it clear to me you've never really researched any of this. Canada doesn't have the ability to export that to anywhere but the USA and refuses to even consider building another pipeline.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LNG_Canada
https://www.gem.wiki/LNG_Canada_Terminal
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43322266
https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/facilities-we-reg...
https://www.politico.eu/article/canada-lng-europe-tim-hodgso...
(commodity market participant)
Coincidentally it's also why the US and EU are growing further apart.
That is not a given, as there are many authoritarian political parties in European countries growing in size and influence. Possibly Europe is only the usual decade or two behind the US developments? Well, I at least hope it does not come to this.
Authoritarian regimes will inevitably attempt to expand because authoritarian leaders view the existence of people they don't rule as a threat towards their rule and they inevitably desire to grow their control and power over more and more people.
Which is ironic that most of the annexation talk came from the US in the recent times, not from China. Canada, Greenland, Panama Canal, Mexico what else has he threatened to annex?
They’ve also engaged in widespread campaigns of asymmetric warfare against other countries. Lots of cyberattacks. Theft of intellectual property - corporate espionage but also copies of designs and hacks of government agencies. Unfair protectionism in their own markets. Lots more to list.
But mostly because the CCP just can’t be trusted with their power, because they’re neither democratic nor support liberal values like free speech. I think there’s a lot to admire about China and Chinese citizens. But their government is ultimately a threat to the world order and the progress of liberalism.
> But mostly because the CCP just can’t be trusted with their power, because they’re neither democratic nor support liberal values like free speech.
How do we square this with the US being democratically elected (let’s ignore gerrymandering and absence of one person one vote) but the actions like the upcoming war with Venezuela, bombing Iran. The people didn’t vote for that either.
For Venezuela and Iran specifically - I won’t claim to be an expert on either. But I think neither the Maduro dictatorship nor Iranian theocracy are legitimate. You can read about how Maduro suppressed opposition movements and manipulated elections in many sources (example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicol%C3%A1s_Maduro). As for Iran, the current theocratic authoritarian government came into power via a revolution in 1979 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Iran). Sure it replaced a monarchy, but that monarchy was actually quite liberal and photos of Iran from that era show a culture that was very different from today. That was taken away from their people, and replaced with their current rulers’ cultural agenda.
As for specifically the issue of whether people voted for something or not - well the US system and I think all democratic systems that exist today aren’t direct democracies. We give powers to the presidency and congress that let them do a lot of things. That’s by design, but it is still at the service of the people, who have the ability to alter the constitution at any time. If someone (like the president) breaks the law, we have the ability to hold them accountable. But I also know sometimes they get away with crimes. I look at that as minor flaws of an otherwise very functional system.
Well duh, pictures of pretty girls from the (very small) upper classes sell better than pictures of the victims of Savak.
> Russia, sure they’re actively fighting against our allies. China?
I assume this is a joke because China is actively helping Russia with weapons, intelligence, and Zelenskiy has even stated China is actively manufacturing weapons inside Russia for Russian use in Ukraine.
A nation that makes that kind of choice is not a reliable ally. We're just beginning to see the repercussions of that loss of trust.
The art of the deal.
Has that happened? Give us something concrete a real example of that. Europe seems to be increasing it's dependency on the USA with large military spendings. They bent the knee really quickly during the last round of trade talks....
If this is a damaged USA's soft power what we've really learned is that we've been wildly overestimating other countries.
The pressure to leave US controlled cloud providers actually started way back with the US Cloud Act. I’ve been surprised that that process has been as slow as it has been, especially for the public sector and adjacent services.
Europe can't seem to get a tech sector bootstrapped no matter what it does and European governments seem to be much more comfortable with the USA having full access to everything they do then risk running on a EU cloud.
So... can't really blame Trump.