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Comment by witheredspirit | Hacker News Reader

This is a bogus statement. EU countries have met or surpassed defense budget goals, usually the ones that don't have the contracts in progress but the full payouts not done yet since they are still in progress. Percentage of GDP to military spending has been criticized as a bad way to measure how much military spending is done and needed. Additionally, the European countries are paying for the war while the US is taking that money and the optics of providing certain military supplies. This whole situation is just exploitation of the EU with the benefit of the US' companies.

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Only about a third of European defense spending goes to the US. Europes struggles to ramp up production have been an ongoing story for many years now.

There is still about a trillion dollars of NATO defense spending to replace if Europe does not want to be reliant on America. Doable, but spending a third of that on American equipment wouldn’t help matters.

Perhaps if Europeans got an earlier start, instead of ignoring nearly two decades of warnings and a clearly deteriorating security situation, they wouldn’t need to care so much about US policy. Better late than never.

https://economist.com/europe/2025/12/01/europe-is-going-on-a... from The Economist

Of course the economist would say that. Of course that a trillion dollars have to be replaced. Who is that enemy Europe is going to fight? The Russians? Makes not sense at all.

No they did not. Just a handful of countries are spending close to 5% of their GDP on defense, the rest are doing everything in their power to pay as little as possible.

> Just a handful of countries are spending 5% of their GDP on defense

Have you even read the comment in full before responding? I'm talking about this part of it:

> Percentage of GDP to military spending has been criticized as a bad way to measure how much military spending is done and needed

But since you wouldn't get it anyways:

The "5% of GDP" is a number that US politicians came up with, seemingly out of nowhere, because they figured they want to boost their military industry.

EU countries are already spending that or even more - just look at Ukraine spending by EU countries - but since it's spent on their own domestic defense industry, US politicians don't like it. That's the point.

They don't want us spending 5% of the GDP on defense unless we buy their stuff. So here we are.

The 5% number is fudged, much of the increase over 2% comes from civic infrastructure investment. They’re fluffing the numbers.

Most EU defense spending isn’t on US equipment (only ~35%); I don’t get where the European victim mentality is coming from here - Europe can and is building up its own defense industry.

There’s some Trump nonsense more recently about buy American, but the demands to take security seriously have been going on for nearly 20 years, and have been largely ignored until Ukraine round two.

> I don’t get where the European victim mentality is coming from here

It’s coming from the fact that we’re already in a difficult time with a slowdown in economy and then get bullied into spending the money we could be using to help our own people on new US weapons.

All for Trump to then sign half of Ukraine off to Russia.

Like it or not, the US will the war. They want to do business with Russia, not squabble over a country no one knew existed until 4 years ago.

> not squabble over a country no one knew existed until 4 years ago.

I think you're really not qualified to say anything about Europe if you didn't know Ukraine existed until 4 years ago.

So, your argument is that the US wants money no matter if it kills people with cars due to lower safety standards, nor if it gives up on allies and security guarantees the US promised? That just sounds like their greed is what's causing harm.

I appreciate that you created a new account just to disagree with me.

Anyway, "greed is good".

>just to disagree

Ad hominem. I did not create it to disagree with you specifically, your stance is not that unique, as you can see I've replied to similar positions. However, when you admit the quiet part out loud I feel like you have no rebuttal and are fine with the exploitation in favor of money standpoint, which should bring your other standpoints in question if this is your guiding principle.

I disagree in your assertion that sarcasm is an “ad hominem” attack.

Here, so you get it, as I was a bit wrong: https://www.nato.int/content/dam/nato/webready/documents/fin... - page 3.

Poland spends 4.5% and that is the highest number, the rest are spending much much less.

Tell me again how they're spending more???

By sending stuff and people to Ukraine. But that doesn’t end up in the Nato GDP spendings, because it goes through their governments not NATO.

The 5% GDP deadline is 2035. The 2% by 2024 was met. Not even the US spends 5% of their GDP on defense. Again as I've stated, it's been criticized as a bad goal to use this metric. In actuality, people who push the narrative that Europe is being bankrolled by the US will never be satisfied by any percentage.

> Just a handful of countries are spending 5% of their GDP on defense

And the US is not one of them

The US spends more than the EU combined. If the US would spend 5% of GDP on defense we would all speak english and drive Suburbans.

So proportionally it's spending less than certain EU countries

Wow, the mental gymnastics needed to conclude that while the US spends more than the whole EU combined is less than certain EU countries. Just wow.

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