zlacker

>>saubei+(OP)
There will be a lot more decisions like this one. For the war in Ukraine and anything immediate they will buy American stuff if there is no EU alternative (and for many things there just isn't right now, there are too many dependencies). But the tide has changed, for 'in' it is now to 'out'. It is abundantly clear the USA is no longer a dependable ally, and that it will use all kinds of strings attached to hobble what they sell to be able to exert political pressure. Besides the obvious problems with the political system internally to the USA I think it is the external effects that drive decisions like these.

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.

>>jacque+U4
> The damage to our future world order

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.

>>usrnm+g7
As an American, I am also gratified to see the EU take steps toward independence from US foreign policy. Independence doesn't mean enmity; it just means that the EU and US should both be adults in the room, reaching decisions on equal terms.

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.

>>kogus+g8
I wouldn't say it was weakness rather than a sense of disgust about anything war related. Europe is tired of it, and precisely because of that may well end up in another major war.

>>jacque+K8
That has more to do with their geography than their disgust no?

>>bix6+0b
I think GP means that Europe didn't intervene when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and, more generally, has done its best to limit rearmament until now. And we're going to pay for it by having a war against Russia that we might have avoided had we projected more strength.

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.

>>Yoric+Ch
Actually, it is not quite the case: the most warmongering country in Europe was the UK since the 1600s (between 16 and 18 times depending on the criterias you use, a war declaration is way less a clear cut decision than you might think). They most often declared war to France, whereas during the same time, France declared war about 13 times (mostly to Spain, Prussia and Austria). There is no single source for those numbers, because some count invasions as war declarations, and some others don't, and some count wars against coalitions as 1 and some detail the exact number of countries involved. If you want to compare that with Germany/Prussia, they declared war about 10 times during the same time. And if you want to know which country was the most declared war upon, it was France (about 20 times), whereas England/UK was declared war to only 10 times. So it would not be far fetched to argue that it was mostly England/UK that was the biggest warmonger of the past.