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Comment by _djo_ | Hacker News Reader

Can you name any examples? European countries and the EU as a whole don't have an equivalent of the US's ITAR 'See-Through' rule, which lets the US control the usage of a system that has any US components.

I'm not aware of any sale of a US weapons system containing European parts being blocked by any European government. It has been done within Europe, but only for major components, such as Germany's blocking at one point of sales to Saudi Arabia.

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The trivial example is the rules about selling weapons directly, so as a very simple example of this you could take:

https://www.brusselstimes.com/153970/wallonia-faces-new-chal...

But this is the one-component-is-the-weapon, with everything going in one direction version of such a rule. An F35 has 300,000 components from 19 countries, so you can imagine what a maze the agreements for that one are.

It's also not just about the weapons and the danger they pose. It's also about jobs. Know-how (both spreading and restricting know-how). And even the traditional "synergy" (you've designed helicopter blah, hence you make radio component so-and-so, so how about you manufacture NATO standard blah radios and antennas) and the occasional monopoly (it's kind of secret but there aren't many companies that can make the obvious alloy needed for the trust vectoring to name one obvious thing)

Our side is NATO, and we make weapons that are designed to push the global integrated worldview and human rights ("America and it's allies") that we espouse as an alliance. And this view permeates all weapons. For NATO guns, one, you'll never get ridiculous ammo stores (that would enable you to eliminate a population for example), we all work on these weapons together, design them together, and if you try to use your own ammo, everything will fail. Most NATO weapons are defensive. You aim a NATO weapon at a (small) target, it finds that target and either kills it or it disables itself and falls to the ground, essentially intact. Russian weapons are the total opposite: they're meant to kill and if they can't kill their target, they'll just kill whatever and whoever's nearby. Sometimes up to the point they kill the weapon's operators. They will fire "cheap ammo" and literally come with instructions on how to make it. They are meant to kill on a very large scale, without precision and they are most definitely not safe to use. This philosophical difference applies to everything from machine guns to nuclear weapons.

Your link is about limiting the sales of Belgian weapons on the basis of Belgian legislation.

A quick Google search will find you plenty of European legislation. And you should look at those laws like the Belgian laws here, like they were a company "Values" document. That is how the EU/Belgium (and other countries) react "by default", but specific treaties explicitly create exceptions to those rules between specific parties.

So like this: exporting guns and ammo is certainly not something any country allows their companies to do, but most/all countries make specific exceptions in treaties.

This just happens to have the advantage that it makes it extremely easy for politicians to deceive voters about weapons. "Belgian law says it's illegal to export weapons". 100% technically true, and totally misdirects people into believing Belgium doesn't export weapons, which is absolutely false.

Meanwhile, Belgium exports ~50 million euros worth of weapons. But Belgium is just an example, it's not like the Netherlands or France or (definitely) UK, or the EU as a whole are different.

You missed the point. The example asked for was this:

"I'm not aware of any sale of a US weapons system containing European parts being blocked by any European government."

That would be something like "Belgium says the USA can't sell F-35s to Israel because the wings are Belgian-made" similar to how the USA prevents ASML from selling their machines to China.

Oh that's what you want. In the clusterfuck with the Turkey involuntary withdrawal from the F35 program half the treaties were renegotiated (you see, can't have any Turk produce weapons unless he's a "genius", that would not be fair. In other news: the Turkish definition of genius is mostly being the son in law of Erdogan [1])

I believe this agreement is part of the restructuring after that cluster... Note that the agreement is both about production and buying. [2]

"Finland has required extensive domestic participation, with industrial cooperation valued at a minimum of 30 percent of the contract price of procuring 64 F-35A fighters. Under the agreement, Finnish firms will produce the F-35’s forward fuselage structures, including components intended for export aircraft. The agreement also includes ..."

As to how the EU is involved: https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/eu-defence-indus... (ie. that's where you go to ask for loans to start a factory for making F35 components, they have a page listing the deals ... somewhere). Note that this is one of the EU institutions that isn't in the budget (well, the loans aren't). They're not spending tax money to make those loans, they're printing money to make those loans.

So the Finnish government is making this deal, including details on export (and this is obviously weapons exports).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sel%C3%A7uk_Bayraktar

[2] https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/finland-leading-ma...

How is it an example of European governments preventing American weapons from being sold? Are you saying the Finns unilaterally decided that Turkey can't have F-35s, even if the USA wants to sell F-35s to them?

You misunderstand. Everything is prevented by law, with the purpose to make any change in production involve negotiations with the government, who then negotiates weapons/jobs/local production/... Without those negotiations, and the resulting exceptions to the law nothing can be sold, even dual use items are restricted.

And, of course, the other side of that coin: weapons export regulation is Europe is not something that is meant to actually prevent weapons export. Rather it is used like a company policy: it makes sure everyone regularly has to give the government something they want.

Which is, to put it mildly, not how politicians present those laws.

No, you misunderstand. You keep talking about things irrelevant to the key point.

Look at the political pressure the USA puts on ASML in the Netherlands to prevent them from selling certain products to China because those machines contain some American parts.

The question is explicitly when the reverse has happened, not some general info about European weapon exports or legislation.

Things like Wassenaar Arrangement and MTCR(that applies to a lot of hobby stuffs I'm interested in) are multinational and global. The US implementation is the most painful, but they're like non-Linux unices, sameish in concept and not like first-worlders get free passes.

(And these regs aren't complete nonsense; the technologies regulated by these are useful for guided munitions. It just so happens missile technologies are fully commoditized by now and also happens to be immensely useful for totally peaceful purposes too)

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassenaar_Arrangement

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_Technology_Control_Reg...

These, again, are export control restrictions at the point of sale and transfer, and the US follows them too. It's not the same thing as what we're discussing regarding the US's changing requirements regarding systems that embed its components.

Note that dual-use items (which Wassenaar regulates) and MTCR are not the same as the US's ITAR 'see through' rule which it uses to block third party sales of systems that contain even small numbers of US components.

For dual-use items, the EU's Directive 2021/821 governs things and broadly authorises exports to the United States through EU General Export Authorisations (EUGEAs) that don't require individual approval.[0]

[0] https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/help-exporters-and-importe...

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