The article's headline says Germany is "supercharging its military", but for somebody who's been following the development of the German armed forces, it's more like "patching the most glaring, gaping holes".
A journalist would never misrepresent such a thing.
Germany must be having a spontaneously explosion of defense competence, just in the nick of time. We're going to see tangible results regardless of obsticles in the near future, I'll hold my breath for it.
The key point is that Germany has finally loosened the debt brake, which has particularly strained the social system and infrastructure. In addition to the 1,000 billion euros allocated for social welfare and infrastructure, another 600 billion euros are designated for the military. The former is linked to the tense situation in social systems and the associated right-wing shift in Europe, while the latter is connected to the ongoing fascist counter-revolution in the USA.
Since the USA and companies based there are no longer reliable partners, Europe will stand alone in the future. This means that France and Germany are working together on a joint nuclear defense shield to ensure Europe's security and strengthen NATO's eastern borders.
That remains to be seen. Inflation will grow and the average worker will have to shoulder even more. Most of that money will be used to fill holes in collapsing social security systems anyway.
Problem for the military is that money doesn't buy soldiers anymore for the most part and very few like to pursue a military career.
> 1,000 billion euros allocated for social welfare
No, the money is definitely not meant for social programs, neither for affordable housing.
On the contrary, the debt brake was introduced to justify cutting social spending after the 2008 banking crash.
Social spending is still limited, debt financed military spending however is unlimited.
The money will go into fortifying bridges, roads for Truppentransporte, programs to protect civilians from disasters, emergencies, and armed conflicts. Military Keynesianism.
The political class is now debating ways to increase pressure on the population.. higher VAT, deregulate working hours, dropping public holidays, re-activate mandatory military service etc.
It depends on how SPD vs. CDU. For now they say its infrastructure and social.
Never the less, we should tax the rich and not talk about having a public holiday less.
The money system is owned by the Central Banking cartel (BIS club). The major holder of German debt is the ECB. This is not owned by states. It’s very enlightening to learn how it came to be.
Next big buyers of German debt are individual European banks (members of the cartel) and pension funds
(also known in Wall Street as “Dumb money”).
anti-war social movements are alive and well, despite this headline. Who is investing whose money, and who gets advantages in doing so? There is no "we" in the war machinery. Extra bonus points for putting ambitious women in front of the camera to ride the herds.
It's pretty crazy if you look at how much the US is/was spending on NATO in pure dollar amounts.
Since that's going to be cut back Germany and to a lesser degree France are the only countries left to take up the slack.
I don't have a really strong opinion either way in terms of what's happening in the US or in Europe, but the argument claiming that there's no real reason to spend money on the military seem pretty disingenuous re. Russia.
What's the real chances that Russia would do something like a land invasion of Europe? Really, really small.... But military spending is the thing helping keep those chances very small.
Most strategic thinkers in both Western and Eastern circles saw the chances of a full invasion of Ukraine as "Really, really small..." on Feb. 23, 2022.
Imperialist Russia is in its final throws prior to becoming "a normal country," like the rest of Europe. From the European point of view, keeping those insane throws to a minimum is worth every penny, both in human and economic costs.
> Imperialist Russia is in its final throws prior to becoming "a normal country," like the rest of Europe. From the European point of view, keeping those insane throws to a minimum is worth every penny, both in human and economic costs.
That is about as likely as "they're not going to invade" -- the guys picking up the piece after Putin look to be as, maybe even more, hardline and aggressive.
There is a reason someone tried to assassinate Dugin.
The point of deterrence is that you spend the money so the chance of Russia doing something like a land invasion of Europe is decreased.
The much more likely scenario that Europeans are wanting to prevent is a limited invasion in the Baltics or Balkans in order to politically divide and damage western democracies.
Not a single NATO partner has consistently met the 2% GDP spend mandate historically outside the US. The US spends aorund 50-60B a year for our 40+ bases in europe. But this is offset by nato expenditures. For example, Germany gives us a $1B a year for our bases.
Googling "Ukraine" the first words on the results page are "Ukraine,
Country in Europe".
I guess you are thinking of the more western bits of Europe or the bits that are in NATO but there isn't really a fundamental boundary.
That seems to be a bit of a flaw in the current 'peace negotiations' - Putin just wants a deal to carve up Ukraine agreed with the US and not involving Europe or the Ukranians but I'm not sure they are ok with that.
The caveat is that there's almost nobody in Germany who'd be physically fit and or motivated to actually fight a war. Germany was systematically drained off anything even remotely resembling patriotism. This was politically and legally enforced by borderline criminalizing terms like Heimat (home / homeland), forget about displaying its flag without raising eyebrows. Its cultural DNA is diluted to an extent that I'd be hesitant to even call it a country - it's basically just an area with lots of people living on it. There's no coherent society anymore. The war machines will all be sold to other countries. Rich people will get richer and the plebs will be brought to heel with orchestrated fear. It's a funny irony that the warmongers in German politics are the same people who'd have taken any opportunity to express their contempt for anything military up until only a few years ago.
Everyone except the US is going to come out stronger on the other end of this mess. Too many Americans believe the world would be screwed without the US and the USD, they can’t imagine trading being done in RMB or EUR, yet it is already happening. As a German that has lived in the US for over 10 years I just watch and wonder. Moving back to Germany is a more enticing prospect than it has been for a long time. I know a lot of Europeans that have moved or are planning their move. I don’t mean they talk about plans, they are buying land, building houses, etc.
I don’t agree with the current direction, but I also think most people don’t understand how large the US defense budget is relative to other countries.
The US defense budget is around $850 billion.
Depending on the year you look at, the US defense budget is larger than around 7-9 of the next largest budgets from other countries combined.
If you add up all of the countries in the world, the global total is around $2.5 trillion. The United States makes up 1/3rd of that.
The US defense budget also hasn’t been a target for cuts, which is a topic of debate.
So while there’s a lot of headlines being made about other countries increasing their defense spending, the numbers are closer to a rounding error in the US defense budget than a massive global power shift. People scoff at the idea of the US being a global military powerhouse because they don’t like the idea, but the bottom line is that when you look at the numbers there really is a reason that the US military is so important, and it comes down to sheer size and spending.
The US defense complex is large but it’s also inefficient and sclerotic, partly as a direct result of those fat budgets that have created a many decades old culture of graft and waste.
A country with less of this cost disease could probably be competitive with 1/4 the spend or less, especially if they skip big heavy Cold War era tech in favor of faster cheaper stuff like drones and smart munitions. Aircraft carriers and manned fighters look cool but I’m not sure how much they matter anymore.
What I see from the EU is that while they do also have cost disease, it might not be as entrenched in that sector. They also have Russia directly adjacent to them, which motivates people to actually care.
If Mexico were belligerent with a history of imperialism, had nuclear weapons and a huge army, and had just invaded and taken Cuba, we’d be in a similar situation and similarly motivated. As it stands we have a “big beautiful ocean” between us and Russia and do not face a direct threat. The US is almost uninvadeable unless you sterilized it with nukes first, and we have those too.
If you're not using your defense assets to fight your enemies, but start siding with your enemies, your defence budget is a sink of which I wouldn't be proud that it is big.
I previously cofounded a miltech startup in the US (as a foreigner), and have currently funded a European-based one (again as a foreigner). Nothing big, although we were able to exit the first one at a good-enough situation via an IP sale (which was practically forced upon us).
The US and European defence markets are very different. USA has a larger pie, but it's also very fragmented. More fragmented means more contractors and subs, which keep adding more layers of pricing into the contract. European defence is more consolidated - you have the few big players who get all the contracts, so there's very little room for new entrants to come in but that also means less layers to work with. This makes the final product less expensive compared to the American ones, at the cost of fewer specialized features added in by niche contractors. That's in part due to the nature of the militaries too - the American military will request frequent changes and new features to new battle conditions on the go, to the point of making your product the equivalent of military SAP - very flexible and usable for any battlefield situation, but also very bloated to develop and operate. On the other hand, European military contracts are usually relatively static in comparison, which means that the burden of knowledge acquisition and operating under different situations falls on the operator and not the technology itself. The last bit is also what translates into budgeting - American products are delivered with significant delays and higher costs due to back-and-forth bureaucracy internally, while European products can be delivered sooner if there is a pressure to deliver - like if the customer is a priority customer who has paid significantly upfront (read, Arab militaries).
I would argue that the US military sector is artificially inflated, because it's a significant jobs programme for the huge network of firms, contractors and subcontractors. In a way, it's a military budget that's adjusted for the economy size and not for the actual needs of the military. That lets the US military also fund a ton of whacky pioneering technology that's at the forefront of the innovation (like the internet, or drones, or even social media manipulation), but it also leaks a lot of money through the cracks for ostensibly results that are only marginally better than European countries with comparable militaries such as the UK and France.
That being said, it's much easier and more lucrative to start up in the US than anywhere else, at least till now. Second would be the UK, although with their exclusion from the recent European defence loans programme, that's questionable now. France is increasingly pulling its weight now, and I'm expecting a lot of growth here. The French government has been exceedingly friendly for miltech companies for a while now.
Europa spending on defense was around 280 Billion in 2023. IIRC this is the second highest after the US. But this is just changing now, without the US as a partner anymore.
I have difficultly understanding this point of view, although I'm sure it is not uncommon.
Why do people believe it would it be an economically good decision to buy land and build houses in Germany, a place with negative GDP, no long term energy independence solution except for returning to coal, sharp curtailments on basic free speech, press, and assembly, and a massive military build-up which will require high levels of debt, cutting social spending, or both?
Is it more about a question of national feeling and patriotism and the details aren't as important as the national pride, or is there an underlying economic analysis? It's also possible that Germany will simply deindustrialize, financialize, do debt-based stimulus, and accelerate the pace of mass migration further, which would indeed be good for home prices for remote owners who continue to live abroad.
The big difference is if you are comparing the situation of a German citizen in Germany to a US citizen in the US or to a German citizen in the US. If you are an immigrant in a country where you don't have a subjective right to live, you obviously have fewer basic rights than a German citizen in Germany.
Thats not true. There are another 1000 Billion going into social and infrastructure in germany right now. It's not like in the US, where you only can have military or social spending.
Overall the military spendings was 280 Billion in 2023 in the EU. This is just increasing since the US is not a trustworthy partner anymore. FR and Germany just building up a stronger nuclear defence system for the EU and stronger borders to the east.
There are certainly some problems in Germany that need to be solved, but you're painting a very extreme and absolute picture here that is pretty far from the truth.
Free speech is different in Germany than the US, that doesn't mean we don't have free speech in Germany. The US doesn't have the one and only true definition of free speech. And right now Trump is assaulting free speech in the US, so those lectures from Vance and others are just blatant, partisan rethoric.
We're not returning to coal. The economy could be better, but it's not as terrible as you imply.
The funny thing is that if you listen to Trump and the MAGA folks, they explicitly do not believe that the world would be screwed without the US and USD, and further do not believe that the US should care if they were. Trump's whole schtick with NATO is that Europe should be defending itself, not relying on the US.
So while the left and center of the US largely views this whole saga as a catastrophic loss of the US brand and foreign policy aims, this kind of rearmament is exactly what Trump promised his base he'd make happen.
That sounds true to me, at least related to the MAGA-adjacent people I know from the US.
The thing is that I never expected the US to just willingly throw away what I (and many others) perceived to be its actual greatest source of strength. The US had built, along with its impressive military, an equally impressive web of friendly nations that allowed it to project its power to a degree that was impossible to match. Even in a world where China kept rising, they would have trouble to compete with the US in this field, because the window of opportunity to build this was like 70 years ago.
China was trying for the next best thing, wooing countries in Africa and Latin America to slowly build a web of friendly nations of its own. Not the same, if you ask me.
That the US would freely squander all their multi-decades investments in a matter of months was unthinkable.
I personally enjoy what is happening. As someone that lives in an EU country, I thought the EU needed this kind of nudge to further integrate, and the US influence always irked me. I am cautiously optimistic for the next few years here.
"We have a lot of leverage, and even if we don't, then we don't have to pay to be the worlds police" - is largely how I (also a european) have seen Trumps actions.
The "issue", is that this is a populist take.
It's weirdly not in Americas interest to take that stance, because they are a defacto world government with the amount of soft power they are able to exert, militarily and in trade.
So, the GP is quite right, people are waking up to the idea that this soft power was running kinda deep and we shouldn't just allow ourselves to get soft too.
Just like an insurance company will find a way not to pay: the US may never have actually come to the aid of Europe; and nobody thought about that, they just accepted most of what the US was asking in the hope that they would.
The lesson will be painful in the short-term, but I'm also hopeful that we take it seriously and start investing in ourselves.
> So while the left and center of the US largely views this whole saga as a catastrophic loss of the US brand and foreign policy aims, this kind of rearmament is exactly what Trump promised his base he'd make happen.
It's a catastrophic loss of influence. It's a good thing for Europe but terrible for the US. I think that Trump will end up fulfilling his promise is co-incidental. Trump's a lose cannon who's alienated all of America's friends, that he achieved some relatively minor goal is like being proud of losing weight because you have cancer.
Europe has a chance here to become a political superpower, strongly eroding the US centric world view and having influence though something other than brute force of money or military power, which is what China and US are trying to project.
One promise i would love to see him keep is turning the liabilities in europe into an asset. Instead of paying for european security, if we can charge them for security and sell them weapons and tech from our big contractors, the US wins.
But i think the states should take responsibility of the casualties of the wars they started.
The people seeking shelter here wouldnt knock on our door if foreign people funding their rebel groups or religious extremists.
Ever wonder why they got so many weapons and ammo? Russia and china was also interfering there so they grab the assets.
We provided airbases and barracks for the us-army, time to cash in the rent for so many years.
We dont have to take the risk getting our cities bombed because our lords and saviours found it funny to start a war in a foreign country...
I would suggest Trump should seek another country housing his war gear...
Funny. For me it's the other way around. I'm just laughing out loud at all the craziness. Maybe it depends on where you're living, on your citizenship status, wealth, whatever.
When I read this, as an American it really strikes me what a trade-off the implementation of social democracy is. It does seem like they are correlated.
I wish that the USA did better on taking care of people, (because it sucks right now) but some on the left act as if there are no consequences to deciding to implement these things.
Keep in mind: republicans are low information voters, and additionally they tend to be single issue voters.
So 99% of them probably don't care about this particular thing. They care about abortion, or "corruption", or welfare queens, or something else.
They have no idea the entire point of this exercise is to gut our public infrastructure so they can give hand-outs to their cronies companies to do the exact same job, but more expensive.
> Too many Americans believe the world would be screwed without the US and the USD, they can’t imagine trading being done in RMB or EUR, yet it is already happening.
Most Americans who voted for this (and to some extent their representatives) genuinely and seriously do not think about this matter with any depth and don’t care about the knock-on effects one bit.
They lack any desire to know if the world would be screwed or not by US actions. They really just don’t care.
They (think that they) want isolationism, less trade, less immigration, less interacting with others.
> Presumptive Chancellor Friedrich Merz has decided that now is the moment for Germany to invest in its military, on levels not seen since the Cold War
Now? After spending billions funding Putin’s war with gas money. Especially after watching him annex Crimea in 2014, or taking Ukraine’s NATO’s membership off the table after Bucharest summit.
Now they finally see how dangerous he is! Better later than never I guess…
In perverse way they are also doing Trump’s bidding who chastised them for not investing enough in defense.
I don't understand the angle of remarks like this. Russia invaded Ukraine, Germany pulled back money going to Russia, and Germany is now investing where it's appropriate.
Are we expecting them to re-litigate this problem until the end of time instead of addressing the problem?
Currently as it stands for all great chest thumping for "supporting Ukraine" EU as a whole is spending more money funding the war by buying gas and oil from the Russian than helping Ukraine. But somehow in the media domain, they managed to position themselves as great friends and supporters of Ukraine. It's quite baffling.
Unless we're talking about an authoritarian regime and it falls with a revolution, then it's hard to blame the new leaders that much. But in case of democratically elected government it is worth pointing out the electorate and the people around the government apparatus when they made a strategically bad choice. Not just to berate them but with an eye toward improving the situation in the future.
Readit News
Germany must be having a spontaneously explosion of defense competence, just in the nick of time. We're going to see tangible results regardless of obsticles in the near future, I'll hold my breath for it.
Odd, though, that when the phrase "the Germans are rearming" pops up the French and British are notably calm.
Since the USA and companies based there are no longer reliable partners, Europe will stand alone in the future. This means that France and Germany are working together on a joint nuclear defense shield to ensure Europe's security and strengthen NATO's eastern borders.
Problem for the military is that money doesn't buy soldiers anymore for the most part and very few like to pursue a military career.
No, the money is definitely not meant for social programs, neither for affordable housing.
On the contrary, the debt brake was introduced to justify cutting social spending after the 2008 banking crash.
Social spending is still limited, debt financed military spending however is unlimited.
The money will go into fortifying bridges, roads for Truppentransporte, programs to protect civilians from disasters, emergencies, and armed conflicts. Military Keynesianism.
The political class is now debating ways to increase pressure on the population.. higher VAT, deregulate working hours, dropping public holidays, re-activate mandatory military service etc.
Could you share links to those discussions?
Going into debt for*
Next big buyers of German debt are individual European banks (members of the cartel) and pension funds (also known in Wall Street as “Dumb money”).
The words would have been different if the proposal came from the political opposition.
Since that's going to be cut back Germany and to a lesser degree France are the only countries left to take up the slack.
I don't have a really strong opinion either way in terms of what's happening in the US or in Europe, but the argument claiming that there's no real reason to spend money on the military seem pretty disingenuous re. Russia.
What's the real chances that Russia would do something like a land invasion of Europe? Really, really small.... But military spending is the thing helping keep those chances very small.
Imperialist Russia is in its final throws prior to becoming "a normal country," like the rest of Europe. From the European point of view, keeping those insane throws to a minimum is worth every penny, both in human and economic costs.
That is about as likely as "they're not going to invade" -- the guys picking up the piece after Putin look to be as, maybe even more, hardline and aggressive.
There is a reason someone tried to assassinate Dugin.
The much more likely scenario that Europeans are wanting to prevent is a limited invasion in the Baltics or Balkans in order to politically divide and damage western democracies.
Remember, part of being in NATO is the requirement to spend a % of your GDP on your own military, which the US will do regardless.
I guess you are thinking of the more western bits of Europe or the bits that are in NATO but there isn't really a fundamental boundary.
That seems to be a bit of a flaw in the current 'peace negotiations' - Putin just wants a deal to carve up Ukraine agreed with the US and not involving Europe or the Ukranians but I'm not sure they are ok with that.
The US defense budget is around $850 billion.
Depending on the year you look at, the US defense budget is larger than around 7-9 of the next largest budgets from other countries combined.
If you add up all of the countries in the world, the global total is around $2.5 trillion. The United States makes up 1/3rd of that.
The US defense budget also hasn’t been a target for cuts, which is a topic of debate.
So while there’s a lot of headlines being made about other countries increasing their defense spending, the numbers are closer to a rounding error in the US defense budget than a massive global power shift. People scoff at the idea of the US being a global military powerhouse because they don’t like the idea, but the bottom line is that when you look at the numbers there really is a reason that the US military is so important, and it comes down to sheer size and spending.
A country with less of this cost disease could probably be competitive with 1/4 the spend or less, especially if they skip big heavy Cold War era tech in favor of faster cheaper stuff like drones and smart munitions. Aircraft carriers and manned fighters look cool but I’m not sure how much they matter anymore.
What I see from the EU is that while they do also have cost disease, it might not be as entrenched in that sector. They also have Russia directly adjacent to them, which motivates people to actually care.
If Mexico were belligerent with a history of imperialism, had nuclear weapons and a huge army, and had just invaded and taken Cuba, we’d be in a similar situation and similarly motivated. As it stands we have a “big beautiful ocean” between us and Russia and do not face a direct threat. The US is almost uninvadeable unless you sterilized it with nukes first, and we have those too.
The US and European defence markets are very different. USA has a larger pie, but it's also very fragmented. More fragmented means more contractors and subs, which keep adding more layers of pricing into the contract. European defence is more consolidated - you have the few big players who get all the contracts, so there's very little room for new entrants to come in but that also means less layers to work with. This makes the final product less expensive compared to the American ones, at the cost of fewer specialized features added in by niche contractors. That's in part due to the nature of the militaries too - the American military will request frequent changes and new features to new battle conditions on the go, to the point of making your product the equivalent of military SAP - very flexible and usable for any battlefield situation, but also very bloated to develop and operate. On the other hand, European military contracts are usually relatively static in comparison, which means that the burden of knowledge acquisition and operating under different situations falls on the operator and not the technology itself. The last bit is also what translates into budgeting - American products are delivered with significant delays and higher costs due to back-and-forth bureaucracy internally, while European products can be delivered sooner if there is a pressure to deliver - like if the customer is a priority customer who has paid significantly upfront (read, Arab militaries).
I would argue that the US military sector is artificially inflated, because it's a significant jobs programme for the huge network of firms, contractors and subcontractors. In a way, it's a military budget that's adjusted for the economy size and not for the actual needs of the military. That lets the US military also fund a ton of whacky pioneering technology that's at the forefront of the innovation (like the internet, or drones, or even social media manipulation), but it also leaks a lot of money through the cracks for ostensibly results that are only marginally better than European countries with comparable militaries such as the UK and France.
That being said, it's much easier and more lucrative to start up in the US than anywhere else, at least till now. Second would be the UK, although with their exclusion from the recent European defence loans programme, that's questionable now. France is increasingly pulling its weight now, and I'm expecting a lot of growth here. The French government has been exceedingly friendly for miltech companies for a while now.
Also it's not fair to compare the US to Germany. The US compared to the combined EU spending is more of a fair comparison.
Why do people believe it would it be an economically good decision to buy land and build houses in Germany, a place with negative GDP, no long term energy independence solution except for returning to coal, sharp curtailments on basic free speech, press, and assembly, and a massive military build-up which will require high levels of debt, cutting social spending, or both?
Is it more about a question of national feeling and patriotism and the details aren't as important as the national pride, or is there an underlying economic analysis? It's also possible that Germany will simply deindustrialize, financialize, do debt-based stimulus, and accelerate the pace of mass migration further, which would indeed be good for home prices for remote owners who continue to live abroad.
But, that is bad news for freedom if everybody else, so.
Germany seems like a better country to live in for most people. Plus, affordable Healthcare system and public education system.
Free speech is different in Germany than the US, that doesn't mean we don't have free speech in Germany. The US doesn't have the one and only true definition of free speech. And right now Trump is assaulting free speech in the US, so those lectures from Vance and others are just blatant, partisan rethoric.
We're not returning to coal. The economy could be better, but it's not as terrible as you imply.
So while the left and center of the US largely views this whole saga as a catastrophic loss of the US brand and foreign policy aims, this kind of rearmament is exactly what Trump promised his base he'd make happen.
The thing is that I never expected the US to just willingly throw away what I (and many others) perceived to be its actual greatest source of strength. The US had built, along with its impressive military, an equally impressive web of friendly nations that allowed it to project its power to a degree that was impossible to match. Even in a world where China kept rising, they would have trouble to compete with the US in this field, because the window of opportunity to build this was like 70 years ago.
China was trying for the next best thing, wooing countries in Africa and Latin America to slowly build a web of friendly nations of its own. Not the same, if you ask me.
That the US would freely squander all their multi-decades investments in a matter of months was unthinkable.
I personally enjoy what is happening. As someone that lives in an EU country, I thought the EU needed this kind of nudge to further integrate, and the US influence always irked me. I am cautiously optimistic for the next few years here.
"We have a lot of leverage, and even if we don't, then we don't have to pay to be the worlds police" - is largely how I (also a european) have seen Trumps actions.
The "issue", is that this is a populist take.
It's weirdly not in Americas interest to take that stance, because they are a defacto world government with the amount of soft power they are able to exert, militarily and in trade.
So, the GP is quite right, people are waking up to the idea that this soft power was running kinda deep and we shouldn't just allow ourselves to get soft too.
Just like an insurance company will find a way not to pay: the US may never have actually come to the aid of Europe; and nobody thought about that, they just accepted most of what the US was asking in the hope that they would.
The lesson will be painful in the short-term, but I'm also hopeful that we take it seriously and start investing in ourselves.
It's a catastrophic loss of influence. It's a good thing for Europe but terrible for the US. I think that Trump will end up fulfilling his promise is co-incidental. Trump's a lose cannon who's alienated all of America's friends, that he achieved some relatively minor goal is like being proud of losing weight because you have cancer.
Europe has a chance here to become a political superpower, strongly eroding the US centric world view and having influence though something other than brute force of money or military power, which is what China and US are trying to project.
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https://x.com/DouglasCarswell/status/1893374276327137367
I wish that the USA did better on taking care of people, (because it sucks right now) but some on the left act as if there are no consequences to deciding to implement these things.
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So 99% of them probably don't care about this particular thing. They care about abortion, or "corruption", or welfare queens, or something else.
They have no idea the entire point of this exercise is to gut our public infrastructure so they can give hand-outs to their cronies companies to do the exact same job, but more expensive.
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Most Americans who voted for this (and to some extent their representatives) genuinely and seriously do not think about this matter with any depth and don’t care about the knock-on effects one bit.
They lack any desire to know if the world would be screwed or not by US actions. They really just don’t care.
They (think that they) want isolationism, less trade, less immigration, less interacting with others.
This isn’t hubris — it’s simply ignorance.
Now? After spending billions funding Putin’s war with gas money. Especially after watching him annex Crimea in 2014, or taking Ukraine’s NATO’s membership off the table after Bucharest summit.
Now they finally see how dangerous he is! Better later than never I guess…
In perverse way they are also doing Trump’s bidding who chastised them for not investing enough in defense.
Are we expecting them to re-litigate this problem until the end of time instead of addressing the problem?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Bucharest_summit
> The Alliance did not offer a Membership Action Plan to Georgia or Ukraine, largely due to the opposition of Germany
US govt warned Merkel to wind down purchasing gas and oil from Putin:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/trump-scolded-germany-for...
Currently as it stands for all great chest thumping for "supporting Ukraine" EU as a whole is spending more money funding the war by buying gas and oil from the Russian than helping Ukraine. But somehow in the media domain, they managed to position themselves as great friends and supporters of Ukraine. It's quite baffling.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/01/03/europe-russia-ukraine-w...
(https://archive.is/1ULVQ)
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