They’re just hedging that American politics will stop licking the car battery.
*: https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-be...
As I said, still licking the car battery.
> And their leadership is so docile and complacent
That is the real issue.
Only if invaded by Russia and possibly China. And even then only the little peripheral ones. UK, Germany, and France could handle Russia - up to and including nukes.
For any conceivable military or paramilitary invasion from the rest of world, Europe will do just fine.
And sadly (an a bit off topic) , Europe — well Denmark at least — is most likely to face an military invasion from the USA.
And they didn't exactly struggle with the invasion parts of Afghanistan and Iraq, nor in the getting of high status targets in those theaters.
Arguably, the ICJ in the Hague is actually a result of one of those successful deployments of US forces on the continent.
Still not sure what can be done about the car battery ingestion challenges, though.
That was post 9/11. The mentality and motivation was different back then. Im not saying the US Military is anything less than a top tier orderly organization, its just that morale is generally low now among not only ranks but the entire country that supports them. You can't just throw out events occurring 23 years ago under a completely different context and assume things are the same.
I'd argue an initial moves against Europe, Canada, etc. would be a bigger mess initially than Afghanistan/Iraq were.
No one is sending in the troops to rescue Bibi from the Hague for a variety of reasons. Chief among them is that he is not currently under arrest, and the chances of him being arrested are effectively nil. Also, Mossad.
Let's suppose Netanyahu is somehow arrested and held in a highly secure government prison in The Netherlands awaiting his chance to clear his name at the ICC.
What exactly do you suppose Mossad is going to do?
- break him out? how?
- openly assassinate politicians/judges until someone gives in?
- blow up civilians?
What?
Bibi has not been arrested, he won't be arrested anytime soon, and the US is not at the point where they are willing to invade Europe to save him.
What do I think Mossad would do in the made up, improbable, alternate universe where we are debating the US invading their European allies?
I think that Mossad/Israeli security would never be caught flatfooted enough to allow Israeli leaders to visit a country that was planning to arrest them. I thoroughly believe that it would be nigh impossible to maneuver an Israeli head of state into a position where they were arrested. If things change and he is no longer protected by Israeli security, that is different.
So in answer to your question, no Mossad is not going to be breaking him out of a maximum security prison. They are going to use their intelligence network to say "Hey Benji, stay out Canada. They are going to arrest you, and have you tried if you set foot on their soil". Or "Hey Bibs, this state visit is mildly risky, we have an extraction plan in place if shit goes sideways."
Only by using the UK as a staging post - and then invading a country that wanted to be liberated with an active partisan network.
So, if China can't take Taiwan over a 150km stretch of littoral waters, a naval in invasion from over the Atlantic is impossible.
There is also no way such a fleet would get past Gibraltar or the Suez canal, so the US would they'd have to stage in Morocco or possibly take Scandinavia then cross into Denmark.
Back to licking batteries.
Normandy wasn't even the first invasion of mainland Europe by Americans of that war, let alone the first cross Atlantic invasion that the US has undertaken. The US had full armies on the ground in Europe almost a full year before Normandy, without staging in the Kingdom, and in a fascist, hostile country.
Aside from the above point, the US actually has a long, long tradition of successful invasions across oceans, including across the Atlantic. Hell, the first time the US raised their flag on foreign soil was a cross-Atlantic war in 1801. They're astoundingly good at it. They sent floating ice cream factories for troop morale in WWII in the Pacific, three of them actually. Can you imagine fighting total war and your enemy from 10k KM away shows up towing an ice cream factory for the boys?
> So, if China can't take Taiwan over a 150km stretch of littoral waters, a naval in invasion from over the Atlantic is impossible.
China hasn't tried. You have NO clue if this is accurate, and neither does anyone else. Aside from that, China is just getting into the force projection at sea game. Comparing them to the US expeditionary capabilities is daft.
> There is also no way such a fleet would get past Gibraltar or the Suez canal, so the US would they'd have to stage in Morocco or possibly take Scandinavia then cross into Denmark.
Yes, there is no way that is happening because the route from Virginia, where they keep all the Atlantic invasion stuff, to Denmark does not go anywhere near the Suez or Gib. You can just steam from Virginia to Denmark.
> Back to licking batteries.
Dibs on the lithium!
Reddit level argument ignoring the fact that the US's goal there wasn't to win anything since there's nothing of value there, it was to funnel taxpayer money to the military industrial complex for 15 years.
Pretty sure the US could have glassed Afghanistan off the map if they really wanted but probably wouldn't have been very popular decision.
War is only a tool, dominating a country or region militarily is not the same as winning a war if you have not achieved its political goals. In Afghanistan, those goals were not achieved, which means the war was lost.
if the situation is such that a US -> Netherlands land invasion (with somehow independent armed forces?) is imaginable, you're past the point of the US-ICC legal relations mattering (i'd go so far as to say there's no sovereignty to speak of here :p)
Yes, it does. Sentiment in politics and the population seems to have shifted significantly. And Trump being Trump seems to be helping Europe realize the necessity of this. I'll count that as one useful thing he has accomplished.
There’s no actual threat of Western Europe invasion from Russia.
Russia is a gas station operated by racketeers, they’ll bite off as much as they can and threaten with guns and nukes, they don’t have capability to meaningfully invade Western Europe.
Of course Russia can't attack western Europe right away, but he can weaken it by taking a bit at a time from eastern Europe. And Ukraine is part of that. Europe should really be stepping up there, but they keep telling themselves that Russia can't invade western Europe, so it's not that urgent.
In the coming decade, that will change.
Hopefully for the better.
They get government funding for both (British resident) students and research so the government has leverage but would have to use that to incentivise them. I imagine at least some other European countries are much the same.
An even trickier question if you are interested in digital sovereignty is how to get the private sector to do the same. Running everything on AWS and requiring a mobile app to do anything seems to be almost instinctive for many organisations.
Now I do m365 consulting and some Azure and I feel terrible. First of all those are terrible products, they lock you in heavily, they are overly complex. I would love if we started selling sovereign cloud solutions, open desk etc and I think our customers would be interested too. But we don't.
I'm actually thinking about starting my own business.
European countries (except maybe Russia!), in the EU and outside, are very complacent.
Whereas China not only has a much bigger budget than individual EU countries, but also central planning on a large scale, so they can just "force" things be done, no matter whether people like it or not. China giving 0.01% for such projects is way more money than a small EU country giving the same %. And it's not like they'll vote the party out for a failed project (which happens in EU countries quite often).
Also, curious: did you not like it there and left, or was that a fixed-duration contract or something?
I would claim that today is a much better moment to switch than it was 20 years ago - much more open source options, so less overall costs.
Many factories were building crap or wrong stuff just because somebody high up in the Party found it convenient for some reason.
Maybe the EU as a whole could pull off being 'fully independent' but it would require way more collaboration between countries than what we currently have.
EU could become fully independent by simply taxing imports. Designated collaboration between countries would just lead to inefficient central planning style stuff. Which is how many trans-Europe projects died
Today people are much more reliant on real-time collaboration, polished cloud and mobile experiences. Fractionalized open source software has a harder time competing with this than file based boxed software workflows of the past.
I constantly need a VPN as some services from my old country are geo-blocked. And when I forget to disable the VPN to my old country I can't visit certain sites from my current country. I need two phone numbers as some services require a phone number from the country they operate out of. I'm talking banking, classifieds, insurance, municipal. I can't use certain apps from my current country because I have to switch my account country but that disables apps from my old country.
And the best part, I can't vote for the national elections in my current country. Only for those in my old country. And it will be like that for the rest of my life. An example: I had to enable VPN to see the election results of my old country, the one I am eligible to vote in.
Please unify the EU so I don't have to deal with all of this.
If you live in the country you can vote. If you don’t live in the country you can’t vote. Simple.
No taxation without representation.
But the real joke has to be to vote for laws for others (not you) to be subjected to.
Representation without obligation (e.g. to be drafted) is even wilder.
Goes to show that voting based on a passport is silly.
Participating in local elections is often allowed.
If someone has been living and working in a country for a long time that should be enough to let them vote in national elections, regardless of what citizenship they have.
Not willing to change your citizenship is a sign of not integrating fully, in not being completely loyal to the country and to its citizens.
Imagine that both countries start a war between each other - who are you going to support? Whoever you choose does not matter, the fact remains that you would have to choose, legally speaking. Why should your current living country give the strongest possible leverage to an untegrated potential agent/supporter of the foreign country?
Highest privileges should be given to people who decided to be fully in, in both good and bad. You can't be allowed to only cherrypick the good stuff: "I want to vote, but I don't want to be drafted to be killed in a war".
And I personally hope it won't. Seeing how things are going, I have no interest for my country to become a small province of the EU to be managed by some bureaucrats in Brussels who have never set foot in it.
Sharing intel and and resources why not? Becoming a vassal state of an EU federation no thanks.
That has always been the case. I don't see how that would justify giving up our independence to become a province of a super state.
Secondly, using Russia a bogeyman to justify giving up our national rights is not a really convincing argument.
Russia hasn't been able to conquer a third of Ukraine in the last 3 years and it's economy is in shambles, yet we are supposed to believe that only a European super state can save us from it? That makes no sense.
But each to their own, those who want to give up their national rights, identities and shared cultural heritage should go ahead and integrate this super state and those who do not should be able to stay out of it.
I guess fundamentally we have a different view of what Europe should be.