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Comment by throw310822 | Hacker News Reader

Europe isn't a superpower but it's a giant entity with 450 million people and 15% of the world's gdp. It has the means to oppose the US and retaliate against its sanctions, if it doesn't it's because of the cowardice of its politicians and the weakness of its institutions.

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More importantly, the bilateral relationship between the US and Europe represents 30% of global trade, and 40% of the global GDP. Both economies complement each other naturally (at least right now), and neither partners don't want it to end, so even with the relationship becoming more fragile as the US tries to close itself off from the world, I think both will still try to remain collaborative with each other, regardless of this posturing that is going on.

It will take a lot to shift that trade dynamic, but the current US administration seems quite energetic about rapidly tearing down Chesterton's Fences that it doesn't understand nor want to spend the time to understand, so I'd not bet on this remaining so even for the next 3 years.

And yes, I do understand how utterly bonkers it is to suggest something this big changing over just 3 years.

That trade dynamic isn’t going to shift unless the EU becomes a lot more insular.

The War in Ukraine is dampening trade with Russia. The EU is struggling in their trade relations with the PRC even more than with America right now, and fears them more than they fear us. A trade deal (“Mercosur”) with South America is in the process of potentially blowing up, and if it’s not passed in its current state, Brazil is looking to walk for the remainder of their President’s term in office.

So the EU’s options are limited.

> So the EU’s options are limited.

Part of the issue if that as you move up the value chain your list of potential trading partners shrinks, as lower-income partners aren't viable.

Look at GDP per capita (I picked nominal, for export consumption purposes): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

Europe's options for high-value exports at scale are... who?

Europe's options for high-value exports at scale are...

each other. Intracontinental trade has always been a large part of Europe's wealth.

That's what all the serious European economists are pushing for especially Draghi and his report but the EPP and the countries which massively benefit from the status quo, starting with Germany and the Netherlands, are blocking any move in the direction of propping up the internal market.

Merz is actually doing a masterclass in beggar thy neighbors policies right now by breaking the debt brake mostly to pay for subsidies in Germany rather than investments. It's pretty surreal to see them somehow stuck to sell side policies when they have no one to actually sell to and refuse the mean to create an actual market in Europe.

You don't really need rivals outside when your core members act this way.

... and if you look at history you will find this situation, no viable export partners, is the norm and not the exception.

Although I would add that what makes good export partners is not GDP directly, but changes in GDP and that mostly comes from changes in the debt levels of these countries. So, ironically the Russian threat, and the EU debt increase in response to it, can probably be expected to raise the GDP of EU countries by 2-3% or so. So EU-US trade should actually increase, tariffs or no tariffs. Besides, tariffs are a tax on the poor, and it's not the poor importing stuff (just ask the poor in the EU how it's been going). US basic needs manufacturers, like farms, are the ones that are going to lose big, and keep losing big, due to tariffs. Oh, and the poor, of course. I'm sure Trump will make some of his typical eloquent remarks about the poor needing to lose weight and spend less on children.

By contrast, the US will need to do it's very best to not reduce public debt or really increase interest rates they're paying in the next year and a half. Not because of Trump's intentions but because of how he scheduled the massive debt increase last time he was in office. The way he was probably actually fucked by Biden, you know what he was screaming about for years, is that he put a $10 trillion dollar refinancing requirement for the US in for 2025-2026-2027 that he expected to fuck up his successor. Then Biden "stole" most of the good part of Trumps debt increase: the decrease in debt repayments for the US government 2016-2020 ... and delivered the refinancing disaster right back ... to Trump.

That was Trump's financial plan: massive debt increase in 2017, scheduled to come due (require refinancing) ... 8 years later. "Apres-nous le deluge" I believe this principle is called. So Trump's plan was 2017-2021: lots of debt repayment paid by massively increasing US debt, including refinancing debt due in 2021-2025. then 2021-2025, spend the extra income, knowing the bill isn't due until 2025-2029. Then, Biden got to spend the 2021-2025 money ... and send the bill to Trump. Like is often said when it comes to Trump's supposed brilliance: "ooops...".

Probably Trump expected to be out of the office at the start of 2025 and just leave his successor with a massive and difficult refinancing ... and Biden and democrats dropped that hot iron right back into Trump's lap.

So Trump introduced a massive new tax, which of course won't cover the sums he needs. He will raise taxes further.

The EU certainly has limited options, I agree about that.

The problem I see is the risks are not under the EU's control. We may face becoming much more insular regardless of what any of us ourselves actually want.

Trump is behaving in a manner not consistent with EU nations retaining indepdendence and sovreignty. And also betting the future of USA on economic development plans (and military plans) that do not seem realistic.

The insular part was a very small, maybe too subtle of, joke.

That’s also not a viable option for the EU, or more specifically: the constituent nations of the EU. They’re as dependent on trade as we are, maybe even more so, and so we are stuck in this relationship where we constantly piss each other off in various ways, and believe me when I say it goes both ways.

Technically the biggest blow to the US-Europe trade relationship came from the Biden administration. The IRA was naked attempt at pulling European companies from Europe and push them to invest in the US instead.

Trump policies look extreme because tariffs are often seen as crude and outdated but it's very much a continuation of economic hostility rather than a novelty.

I don't believe this is possible, even at Trump speed. It's much easier to wreck NATO than to reshape the world economy to that extent.

Indeed, but it's not impossible for him to simply wreck the economy faster than it can be correctly reshaped.

Boris Johnson: Hold my pint.

Fortunately for the UK, the photos of Boris Johnson holding a pint during covid lockdowns he'd ordered, mean that Boris Johnson is no longer a threat to the UK.

I didn't believe Brexit would happen either, until it did.

"neither partners don't"

I think your main point is valid, but it would be more compelling if you'd taken a few seconds to read it before submitting, to catch this double-negative.

If the EU goes against the US and happens to recruit allies, we’re cooked.

Not really. We have the most money, the most guns, and world economies depend on us. Europe won't even fight Russia when they literally invaded a country in their backyard, and Russia is much weaker than the US.

Fighting Russia or the US is basically the same; you're just going to get nuked. Ukraine doesn't get nuked because Russia isn't in a real risk of losing it's own territory and doesn't want to annex irradiated lands.

But also Europe (besides Ukraine) doesn't have much to gain from fighting Russia. They're happy to assist in air raids in North Africa / Middle East for energy reasons (see Libya) but it's fighting for practical purposes.

The table can also be turned against the US. Despite the endless complaints about Mexico sending drugs & drug dealers into the US it's not like we are doing effective (or drastic).

Europe has a lot to gain from fighting Russia, because if they conquer Ukraine they're going to invade Poland next.

I doubt Russia would invade the EU anytime soon under current conditions, even if they manage to annex all of Ukraine with no further losses.

Much more likely they invade another non-EU, non-NATO country like Moldova.

Much more likely they'll invade Belarus, then Letonia, Estonia, etc. well before they invade Moldova.

Your most money won't buy you much resources in a decade. most of the natural resources exporting countries feel a bit cheated with 20 year contracts and two "quantitative easing" in the same period

> most money won't buy you much resources in a decade

You’re vastly underestimating how resource rich America, North America and the Western Hemisphere are.

You’re vastly underestimating how quickly we can exhaust those resources.

> You’re vastly underestimating how quickly we can exhaust those resources

…to where we need to mine or drill Europe?

What is your source for any of this?

The only resource suppliers to EU other than the United States is Norway (natural gas pipeline, crude oil 14%) and Australia (coal 36%). The US supplies a a huge minority in those as well as a majority in LNG. (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/interactive-publications/e...)

If the EU ally’s with Australia, pics up an enemy of an enemy - China, they can withstand a US embargo.

About our increasing consumption, you can read the report here (https://www.unep.org/resources/Global-Resource-Outlook-2024).

We can’t extract our way out of this. We’ll have nothing left. We need space minerals and more rocks that aren’t home. We’re fighting over less and less sand in the sandbox.

> they can withstand a US embargo

We were never debating if Europe could survive an American embargo.

You said “most money won't buy you much resources in a decade.” This was about America surviving a European freeze-out. The simple truth is, there are more resources in America and within its military’s undisputed reach than there are in Europe.

Your UNEP report doesn’t show why America alone couldn’t extract its way out of an embargo. (While it puts its military to use.)

You must have me mistaken with someone else. I didn't say that. I said that it wouldn't matter as resource exhaustion is faster than it was previously and we will run out of resources, money or not. So if one side decides to horde or exploit the other hemisphere, it's like kids fighting over the last bit of sand in the sandbox.

> it wouldn't matter as resource exhaustion is faster than it was previously and we will run out of resources, money or not

Oh. Sure. Fair. But not relevant in our lifetimes, at least not from the position of the United States. If push came to shove, we'd take those last bits of sand. That's one of the problems with might makes right: it lets those in power put off hard choices.

China has more sand

I hope that the USA will maintain strong relations with the EU. But the EU is structurally incapable of taking any coordinated action more significant than mandating USB-C chargers for cell phones.

Europe (as in all european countries combined) does not have a military powerful enough to oppose the US. And that is all that matters.

Would you say that the United States had a much larger and more expensive military than Vietnam? How did that work out for the United States?

The US was winning the Vietnam war militarily. The US pulled out because it wasn’t winning it domestically.

Another potential goal of the war may have been to demonstrate that the USSR couldn't hope to win a conventional war against the US (the 1973 Easter offensive fielded 700-1200 tanks of various kinds, and the US destroyed 400-700 of them with trivial losses to US forces). The Soviets were using 15-20% of their economy to produce, among other military items, 4000 tanks a year, so a demonstration that the US could destroy so much without significant losses or any particular economic strain could have been shocking. If that was a real goal, though, it probably couldn't be openly discussed at the time, which would have contributed to the "why are we even there?" mood of the American people.

The US was barely treading water militarily, at enormous cost in both lives and cash. It was not progressing towards its military and political goals. That's why the US public pulled the plug.

The US could have continued to tread water for another 5 years, or another 10 years, or another 15 years, and would have lost even more men and spent even more money, and it would still have faced the same problem: there was no way to win the war. Every day that the war continued just meant more deaths and more money wasted.

Well, "not winning domestically" can happen as likely today as it did in the sixties.

If anything, the US society is more divided today.

In the event that someone is directly attacking Americans in America, I think you'll find that Americans are more united than it appears.

Americans culturally have seen ourselves as the "Good Guys" for the last century or so, and Good Guys imply Bad Guys. If there aren't any credible Bad Guys external to the US, Americans start thinking the Bad Guys are the rich, or the coastal elites, or flyover country, or liberals, or whatever. That's just 'cause there's no one else to be against, though; it'll pass.

> In the event that someone is directly attacking Americans in America

Didn't Trump have the army attack democratic cities earlier this year?

No, he did not. Where did you come up with this idea?

It's a complicated bit of American constitutional / federal law. Tl;dr...

The US military cannot be used to perform domestic policing functions (Posse Comitatus Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act ), except in times of insurrection or when state unable or unwilling to suppress violence that threatens citizens' constitutional rights (Enforcement Acts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enforcement_Acts ).

Hence Trump's continual (and false) claims that the cities he's targeting are lawless and dangerous places.

The above applies to federal US military forces. The laws specifically exclude the US Coast Guard. Non-military federal forces (FBI, ICE, etc) are also excluded.

It also, in the more complicated quirk, excludes state military forces (i.e. "National Guard" units). These forces can be activated under a variety of different legal frameworks (see https://www.nationalguard.mil/Portals/31/Resources/Fact%20Sh... ), some of which allow their use for domestic police functions (Title 32 and SAD), because they're still under the command of the state governor (who can use military forces to perform domestic policing functions inside their state or a neighboring state).

There's also a special exclusion for Washington, DC, as technically the president is sort of its governor for many purposes.

Given that background, what actually happened...

- Trump activated National Guard units under Title 10 (aka federal active duty service), because this doesn't require the consent of a state's governor

- Trump then deployed these units to several cities, some with the support of Republican governors and some without the support of Democratic governors

- The administration's legal team realized performing policing functions with the above forces was on extremely shaky ground

- Therefore, they mostly claimed (loudly) that they were deploying "the military", but in actuality used them for extremely limited, non-policing purposes (picking up trash, talking to tourists, guarding federal buildings, guarding other federal agents performing law enforcement functions)

- After state governments sued, the courts generally agreed the deployment was unlawful ( https://www.reuters.com/world/us-supreme-court-rejects-trump... )

This is a fiction.

"Actually we did find weapons of mass destruction"

That would only matter if US invaded Europe or vice versa. That's not going to happen. So the size of military expenditures doesn't really matter.

You can’t be that naive to believe that military might has nothing to do with political might.

That's not what I said. I said that it doesn't matter.

Military might has plenty to do with bluffing. That's what politics is all about.

But when the music stops and the ball drops, US and EU aren't going to war with each other any time soon. So measuring military might doesn't really matter.

And you can't be that naive to believe is gonna make any difference. The US that had to get out of Korea, Vietnam, all the way to Afghanistan, will take on Europe? Lol...

It’s not what the US might do, it’s what they might not do.

If Putin decides Poland is propping up Ukraine he might expand the war into Poland because right now it isn’t clear that the US would honor their NATO commitments.

Ukraine was not a NATO country, never mind a EU country. I’m all for speaking truth to the weakness of the eu and its indecisive pussyfooting on the military front but let’s not start getting high on our own supply: Russia absolutely does not have the military nor industrial power to invade Poland and take on the actual EU in a hot war. NATO or no NATO it wouldn’t even be close.

Or it could just end with mutual total nuclear annihilation of course.

Edit: now if they were to attack the eu over a decades long interference campaign with its member state democracies, funding anti eu parties, stoking separatist sentiments, and covertly subverting the fundamental pillars of its liberal democracies, on the other hand…

I think Putin would use nuclear weapons. I don’t think the EU would retaliate in kind.

If we're accepting as a given that somehow Putin launches nukes into Europe to invade Poland, and the EU doesn't retaliate in kind, then the USA definitely wouldn't--NATO or no NATO--so I'm not sure how it's relevant to the original comment.

Russia is has tried and failed for a couple of years now to push particularly far into Ukraine, and you think Europe would have a problem stopping a Russian attack on Poland?

Poland alone has a population comparable to Ukraine, and a significantly larger economy.

Europe doesn't need the US to defend Poland against Russia.

If EU countries commit to a conflict, Russia has no chance. It makes nuclear escalation a real risk though.

That doesn't matter. One or two atomic boms from France and say goodbye to a good GDP from the US coasts. Everyone losses, but the US it's set back to 1940.

This will only happen if France decides to commit suicide at a national level, which is very unlikely.

There's no difference between suicide and an invasion from the US with total control of the neocons against a social-democratic state. That being a puppet state a la Vichy, I mean; not something being bribed upon with corruption and money.

What the US needs is to invest right now in fusion technology and learn the damn Math right. Hint: hypercubes and physics.

They have it easy:

https://phys.org/news/2025-02-fourth-dimension-scientists-gl...

https://wt3000.substack.com/p/scientists-just-built-a-fourth...

They don't need a war to feed the industry, they need the balls to evolve themselves as the Chinese did. First from pure Maoism to Deng Xiaoping, and next from coal to clean energy. It's a decades bound plan, but if Beijing becames clean it would be one of the greatest things for China (and the world) ever.

This would mean acknowledging that some sectors are best stated supported, such as healthcare; while others are best company supported/evolved, such as telecos and R+D, but with proper regulations, so net neutrality stays as is and patents get open over few decades so everyone can play the game.

And, no, you don't need to put social credit, social surveillance or any other bullshit such as Chat Control.

... "hypercubes and physics"?

You'll understand the reasons for it later.

Programmers with concepts such as the Hamming distance and nodes in a network are pretty much ready to understand the further reasons of my comments.

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

Hint: rotating/translating objects will be cheaper than moving over time.

Labor shortages abound in the US military. It is slowly approaching paper tiger status, unless we're talking about delivering long range ordinance. The US can engage in a small handful of conflicts at the same time; it cannot take on the world. The Coast Guard didn't have enough staff to commandeer an oil tanker near Venezuela recently [1] [2]. The US Navy has mothballed seventeen supply ships due to labor shortages [3]. Total global US military headcount is ~2.6M as of this comment, ~1.14M on US soil [4] [5] [6] [7]. There are also military sourcing single points of failure, like L3 [8] and the US Air Force.

China can already detect and track stealth aircraft using a combination of ground based passive radar and StarLink signal, as well as satellite reconnaissance. Europe could have this capability whenever they're ready to spend and, in the case of a satellite, lift to orbit. Use hypersonic vehicles for anti air defense and carrier busting [9].

[1] https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2025/12/24/u-s-hunts-sanctioned-t...

[2] https://www.stripes.com/branches/coast_guard/2024-03-06/coas...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46130106

[4] https://www.gao.gov/military-readiness

[5] https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-are-in-the-us-...

[6] https://usafacts.org/articles/is-military-enlistment-down/

[7] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/06/6-facts-a...

[8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355005

[9] https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2025/12/18/eu-flag...

No, but China and Australia do if they were to, you know, alliance themselves against the tyranny of the US. Much like we did against the tyranny of the Nazi regime.

Add in other nato countries and we’re cooked.

Europe would need to increase military spending to 20+% of GDP to plausibly defend themselves.

The EU is a vassal state through and through, they just haven't accepted this yet.

Defend against what?

France has nukes, so those aren't a plausible threat. Any kind of land invasion is doomed to fail - the US didn't even manage to beat a bunch of goat herders in one of the poorest countries of the world. A naval blockade is the most likely to succeed - except for the whole "land bridge to Asia/Africa" part. And if the blockade does succeed and the continent starts to starve, there's the whole "France has nukes" part again...

Besides, do you really think China/India won't get involved? And do you really think the US public is going to accept their friends and family dying because some power-hungry politician got the braindead idea to send them against Europe? The reception will be worse than Vietnam!

EU is not a state, it's a union of states.

> they just haven't accepted this yet.

What on earth are you talking about???

We have accepted that for a long time, and there are no plans to change it.

Why do you think there is zero movement to disentangle from any important US dependencies? Such as software. There is nothing whatsoever happening to be any less dependent on the US, part from defense, and that only after repeated urging and finally some real force-pressure to get the EU moving (even after Trump's first term little to nothing actually happened).

European countries are perfectly fine with where they are, if any less dependency on the US is to happen, it will only be after huge pressure from the US.

That is deliberate, they just don't see value in e.g. trying to recreate the Microsoft and other software ecosystems. After all, it already exists, so why compete at that point? It does not make economic sense. Also, it is not Europe's strength: Every country would, in practice, (have to) develop their own version, while in the US a company can easily scale across the entire nation. For Software, it makes no (economic) sense for Europe to compete in an area where this kind of scale is important.

And that strength argument, only some minor politicians, and some journalists, keep bringing up headlines such as "Can Germany save Europe?", or celebrating "Germany back on the world stage" when there is some minor meeting hosted by Germany (seen recently). The vast majority of people could not care less about being "number one" and "leading (anything, politically)".

Not trying to reinvent the wheel, or many wheels actually, out of some "pride" moment seems pretty foolish to me. If the US is good producing this or that, we get it from there, so what? Everybody, including the US, made even more far-reaching similar decisions with industry moved to China. Compared to that, European reliance on the US is not much, and pretty much unavoidable, unless one gives up lots of wealth.

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