Whatever the economic merits and demerits of this deal, politically it's a disaster, as this article indicates. There wasn't even an attempt to sell this to the public. But as there are no elections until 2028, I expect major changes in strategy in a year or so, otherwise the center-right parties in charge now will be wiped out in favor of the anti-American factions of the far right and far left.
My suspicion is that there's a quid-pro-quo regarding Ukraine. Economically, the EU is in a strong position, but militarily, a mercurial US has the EU over the barrel due to the Ukraine war.
I predict that Europe's notoriously hard-nosed negotiators (Brexit) will ramp up the pressure as the midterms get closer and if the situation in Ukraine improves.
> European security depends on winning the Ukraine war.
This is absurd.
Before 2021 and people were told to "care" about it, Ukraine was a "Westworld" type place for Europeans and others.
If European security depends on Ukraine, why didn't Europe sent any troops there?
This is very new, we fight an existential war now without sending any troops, money should be enough.
Anyway the fact is almost 4 years in Ukraine is probably dead demographically. You can't really reboot a country after having so much of its "fighting age" male population dead. Especially because the one who will be left will be deranged, violent and addicted to all sort of things.
And then having this type of nightmare on or within your borders is another pandora box.
So now whether the EU declares it wins or looses the war, it has lost anyway.
On the EU internal politics side, we are literally living in the Star Wars prequel trilogy. No need for much explanations.
My guess the negotiators had somehow the information that the tariffs will soon be declared illegal so would be smart to let the narcisist think he won, I hope I am right and there is still rule of law in USA.
Compared to who/what/when? The US? China? Not a chance. Economically, the EU is as weak now as it ever was.
About 2 decades ago, EU had the same GDP as the US, or even slightly more. Now it's at half of the US and stagnating or even shrinking due to a series of issues it has no solution to, since a lot of it's economy hasn't recovered much post-2008 crash. The EU knows the economic deck is not staked in its favor so it has to bend over to the US now. 2 decades ago the EU would have been able to fend of such actions from a hostile US administration and even more so fron China. But it can't today because it's twice as weak and the US and China are much stronger.
And it's actually very easy to understand why we're here in this situation. If you look at the government budgets in most EU countries today, about a third everywhere is going to welfare and retirement spending with retirement spending dwarfing absolutely everything else in the country by far, with some pensions being higher than some full time wages, which is absurd IMHO. Now, caring for the people and the elderly is noble and all, but you can't win any competition against nations that take that third of GDP that you spend on retirees and they spend it on on economic and military development instead. You just can't win like this, straight up, the math doesn't math. Eventually over the long run, they'll economically or militarily conquer you. So you'll have to choose between spending on providing a cushy lifestyle for retirees, or ensuring a prosperous future for your country.
EU fell asleep at the wheel for over two decades and woke up today that it needs to start the fire again, but it has no money to do so because it's in a economic downturn, an energy crisis, a demographic crisis, a cost-of-living crisis, political extremism crisis left and right, and war next door needing to fight all these fires at once. Very bad timing for EU, and China, Putin and Trump know this and are taking full advantage of "buying the dip" now in Europe the same way European powers were "buying the dip" in their (former) colonies in Africa and across the world. All, and I really mean ALL countries, engage in economic imperialism every chance they get, and Europe somehow forgot its own lesson thinking they are somehow untouchable.
The EU economy is $20T vs USA $30T, so 60%. Also, Britain was part of the EU 2 decades ago. The EU economy has almost doubled in that time, with large regional differences (Ireland, Poland on fire, southern Europe flat), but the USA has done better than the eu average.
Is there such a thing as the "anti American far right"? As far as I can tell, all these wannabe despots are buddy-buddy with Trump, Musk and MAGA in general.
I wouldn't mind "security in exchange for better economic treatment" deal, but I don't understand how anybody still trusts US in terms of security. They clearly showed that they fear Russia, plus Trump made several allegations that they may not provide military help even to NATO allies. I am from Poland, theoretically we have US troops stationed here but over 70% of population (including myself) don't believe they will stay here long once we're attacked.
US got concrete economic concessions in writing in exchange for words about security.
A good example we just saw today. Countries with security arrangements with the USA can be bombed freely by those with more favor with the current US leadership.
They think things will go back to normal. Once/if they do, they think (probably correctly) that the "normal" rulers will reward those who deferred to the crown despite disliking the one who wore it.
That's the essence of normalcy to them. They cannot imagine any alternative to the US foreign department dictated world order - or they just don't want to imagine it.
They rose in a system where imagination in foreign policy matters -- well, if they had it, they wouldn't have risen to the top in this system. The height of irresponsibility to them is to imagine something outside the present order (such as Varoufakis making practical plans for leaving the Euro during the Greek debt crisis). The very action of imagining things threatens the stability which is the base of everything they actually value, which is little more than peer prestige and comfort for themselves.
Wow there is a lot to unpack here.. Firstly don't speak as if 'they' in some absolute consensus please, in the EU we are nothing if opinionated about our own interests, hence the amount of bureaucracy and the length of time it takes to enact certain things.
> They cannot imagine any alternative to the US foreign department dictated world order - or they just don't want to imagine it.
Dictated or not, you're missing the main point that we are 'aligned'. Why would we not embrace an open and free market. That's what works for the EU itself and so when a world leader also shared the same policies, naturally we would embrace that and vice versa. It's not some dictator sitting in the US, a good example of this are how many products are not allowed to be sold in the EU from the US due to health risks we asses as unacceptable. We decide that, free market.
> The height of irresponsibility to them is to imagine something outside the present order (such as Varoufakis making practical plans for leaving the Euro during the Greek debt crisis)
Again you are assuming that mitigations and considerations haven't been considered, there are MANY provisions for leaving the EU, but why would we focus primarily on those situations when we as a union have a parliment to come together and work together. That is always the priority. We don't have one overarching federal system. We have a collection trading block who internally are independant and externally we can negotiate trade deals as one union, meaning better deals. That's it.
> The very action of imagining things threatens the stability which is the base of everything they actually value, which is little more than peer prestige and comfort for themselves.
This makes no sense and it's purely conjecture. Is the EU perfect, no, does anyone think it is, nope. Is it constantly in flux to improve, absolutely.
Sure, it's how I see them. My view of them has been pretty good for me personally, for predicting what they're going to do, though.
I'm sure they have considered a very limited number of mitigations, but nothing radical. But they always end up with the default choice. Do you disagree? If so, tell me when they did something the slightest bit imaginative or radical, or even surprising. I don't think you even disagree with me, you just think it's good that they don't.
> Why would we not embrace an open and free market.
Because it's not actually on the table when dealing with Trump?
I see no benefit in ginning up tensions for myself, but I accept that there are power centers that do benefit from it. In a very practical sense, having a slightly less bad situation is better than a bad one.
I could offer a real life anecdote, but I am not certain where you are going with this conversation.
It was a ridiculous capitulation. The bright side is that key points of this deal are unlikely to go through EU parliament, essentially killing it in its inception.
Yeah but EU leadership did everything in their powers to work themselves into these set of cards. I would bet Russian political elites are laughing their asses of because they were successful in their pivot to Asia and away from Europe. Into a westless world order, where they are actually sitting at the table and are not part of the menu.
Europe just fell for Trump's oldest trick: ask for the world and get a large concession in return. Doesn't anyone in EU know how to deal with con men like Trump? Look at other countries like China and Brazil. They're not conceding anything.
Trump has backed down on most of the outrageous tariffs (200% tarriff on China). The alternative was a false reality that the EU believed because they are scared of Trump and bad at negotiating.
I'm glad the American people at least know how weak the EU is, we should elect someone next time that will bring those tariffs up to 100%, and the EU will have to take it because it's better than a 200% tariff alternative. That's just being realistic, right?
As far as I know (am I mistaken?) the US reduced tariffs to 10% in return for China reducing tariffs to 10%, and reducing restrictions on the exports of rare earths.
That sounds more like China backed down than the US did.
The EU is a lot weaker than China. China dominates critical areas of manufacturing, and does not have the level of dependence Europe (non-EU as well) has on the US - I hardly need remind people here of the dependence in IT systems.
This is a rather confused view of the situation. 30% tariffs on EU imports would be very bad for _the US_.
Trump tends to present trade as a zero sum game, but it very much isn’t; outside of limited scenarios (generally developing countries protecting otherwise unviable local industry with targeted tariffs), tariffs generally hurt both sides.
Europe took PTO after the wall fell, and stayed on it long enough that now a new generation has grown up thinking its the norm. Tech? We have the US's tech. Defense? We have the US's defense. Energy? We have Russia's and the US's energy
Obviously Europeans don't want to be the US's b*tch, but even more so they seem to want heavy regulations ensuring their right to relax and cripple growth, err, evil corporations.
But the fact that US's diplomatic policy USED TO make us not want to do it.
Europe using US tech was a bonding measure between the two parties.
We can quickly and easy build european "FAANG" overnight, even now more with AI search making it easy to replace Google.
We even already have it: think Ecosia, Protonmail etc. There are tons of those.
The same is for social media. It would be very easy to flip a social media app akin to Instagram, or FB.
The issue is getting users and have alignment that this would be the "european version".
We never had to do this, or think of it, because US had a very benevolent and good relationship with Europe, and US big tech used to make us feel even more connected.
It is the fault of the EU leaders. No question about it.
> Under the presidency of Charles de Gaulle, France pursued diplomatic independence and promoted a vision of European collective security that conflicted with American leadership in NATO, especially regarding the integration of member states' armed forces under a US-led unified command and the control of NATO’s nuclear arsenal.
Charles de Gaulle believed that France and the EU countries should stay out of NATO so that it could foster it's own military defense, yet the French leaders and their other EU countreparts decided that it was much more convenient to have the US as a back-stop because they needed the cash that should have gone to their armies for other purposes. This has been happening for decades.
That lead to the situation that we are in today where most of the EU's defense strategy is in fact subsidized by the US. The NATO EU countries despite signing the treaties have barely managed to keep up with the minimum NATO required spending on their own defenses.
Doesn't the existence - and lack of adoption - for Ecosia and similar services suggest that Europe cannot easily build FAANG overnight?
Technically, we can do it.
But unless we go the Chinese route of blocking US vendors, a lot of people will always flock to the better product that has the bigger marketing budget. And there I do not see how Ecosia could compete with Google, Xing with LinkedIn, Mistral with OpenAI, OHV/IONOS with AWS, or Hetzner with GCP.
Sorry; it is Europe’s fault. They could have taken the hundreds of billions in savings from not having to fund a defense industry and used that to fund amazing technologies for this moment.
Europe cannot easily build FAANG because it requires punishing working conditions and free/low tax capital flow. It would also have the side effect of creating many European billionaires and skewing wealth equality metrics.
All the things that Europe prides itself on having transcended, are the things needed to build theses industries. So while it's totally physically possible, and Europeans are both smart and industrious (well they ancestors were industrious at least), the knife in the side of Europe is the prevailing psyche of low-work/high-benefits as a human right.
The problem now is that institutions are literally infected with strongly US leaning people. I don't even mean politicians but just people who tied their careers and lives to some US technology. Look at Microsoft - there is whole industry of IT admins who have lifetime of experience in that Microsoft stack. You will have many Microsoft former employees at top positions at universities teaching programming with Microsoft stack.
Even in just economical sense it never really made sense when you have local companies like SUSE that could give you well functioning IT infrastructure. The money would at minimum stay in EU. It probably made sense for export of the talent (which countries don't make money on) but you just locks yourself to infinite Microsoft payments.
There are many conservative european corporations (like postal services) that never were on Microsoft stack. It was always hailed as the "poor" economical but secure solution. They probably still reap benefits. But afaik it was always uphill battle with governments because of the strong lobby from US.
Imagine if the europe started to switch to something like SUSE. It would make so many peoples skills immediately outdated. So many will fight this.
And the EU could have a thriving competitor to silicon valley that had US engineers falling over themselves to come. There are a lot like me who would love to do so (even giving up some salary) but the opportunities aren't there.
And I'm astonished Hetzner hasn't built a proper AWS competitor already.
Yes, the reality that China and the US are driving is that you can't take off 5 weeks in the summer, have 42 public holidays a year, only work until 4pm, and not be able to fire underperforming people and hope to be magically be competitive.
I know this isn't popular, and I wish it was different too, but you can't have it both ways.
The EU could defend itself against Russia on its current budget.
Germany had to reduce its army as part of the reunification deal and is now criticized for not having a big army. Only France has nuclear weapons and the incentive to spend huge amounts on defense while being dependent on leased and US controlled nukes is not great. Do you prefer that all EU countries get their own nukes?
The EU has real tech like ASML, Airbus, Siemens, Alsthom etc. What the US calls "tech" is not regarded as vital in the EU and somewhat belittled. This kind of "tech" is only possible with US hype and massively speculative investments.
The US is begging (and blackmailing with tariffs) countries from all over the world to build factories in the US. That doesn't sound like a great success.
Energy? The US tries to control all energy choke points of energy flow to the EU. The Nord Stream sabotage was hailed as a great operation, enabling the US to sell overpriced LNG to the EU. The US leased a corridor from Azerbaijan to Turkey to control vast amounts of natural gas from Turkmenistan. A Trump adjacent billionaire floated the idea to buy and revive Nord Stream.
What exactly should the EU do? Switch to nuclear energy and buy uranium from Russia like the US does (the US also buys fertilizer)?
The EU needs to do the things that it has prided itself on not doing for the last 30 years. That is the fundamental problem, and I don't see how it can change. Germans work 400 hours less per year than Americans. 400! That's 50 days!
How do you get people to work 50 more days a year without mass voting to keep (or even "improve") the status quo?
And this doesn't even touch on the heavy regulatory side, which just makes the EU a generally unattractive place to invest.
I don’t believe it. Part of the deal is that EU has to buy certain amounts of LNG and weapons from the US. That sounds like a win for the US, but the EU wanted to secure this anyway, to build up defence, send equipment to Ukraine, and reduce dependence on Russian gas.
Sure, that's why Germany was building NordStream-2. EU secretly just wants to buy Russian gas because it's cheap and easy.
I guarantee ~5 years after the war is over new deals will be made in place to start pumping gas from the biggest gas station in the world which is right next to EU.
> EU secretly just wants to buy Russian gas because it's cheap and easy.
It's no secret, reliable cheap source of the most important resource on the planet right now is essential for any economy today.
What do you expect us to do? Please enlighten me. Buy from ships for much higher prices because the US doesn't like Russia ?
There's a war on now and we are reducing our dependency greatly, did we get complacent, absolutely. Are we working towards getting away from it, absolutely.
Your attitude is just negative for negatives sake.
It's simply another nail in the coffin of the narrative that the EU countries need the "EU" to survive.
The EU was sold as tool that would bring prosperity to the EU countries and this is less and less the case as the years go by. Sure, you have a few bright spots here and there but those are few and far between.
Spain, Italy, Greece and the other sick "countries" of Europe were sacrificed in the 2010s to save the Euro and now France and Germany are going through some tough soul-searching.
Then there is the the growth of many Euro septic parties throughout Europe which are gathering steam year after year.
The EU needs to reform itself very quickly because for a lot of people, the question that is being asked is: do we really need it?
UK is much better without EU. Or actually it is not?
Countries don't need EU to survive, but growth and development is better in the union. Try to travel somewhere outside the EU. Get a visa, exchange money, get health insurance, get sim for roaming.
Everyone is so accustomed to benefits of the union that forgot how it was without it.
And we still don't even know what we paid for the COVID vaccines. They're about to roll out ChatControl with exemptions for themselves, while they're using Signal with disappearing messages despite transparency of government rules... I'm not feeling a lot of love for our leadership recently tbh.
Readit News
My suspicion is that there's a quid-pro-quo regarding Ukraine. Economically, the EU is in a strong position, but militarily, a mercurial US has the EU over the barrel due to the Ukraine war.
I predict that Europe's notoriously hard-nosed negotiators (Brexit) will ramp up the pressure as the midterms get closer and if the situation in Ukraine improves.
European security depends on winning the Ukraine war.
Anders Puck Nielsen explains it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxapAZRYJ6I
This is why it makes sense to eat the tariffs as long as it keeps the weapons flowing from the US and why EU doesn't mind much paying for them.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
This is absurd.
Before 2021 and people were told to "care" about it, Ukraine was a "Westworld" type place for Europeans and others.
If European security depends on Ukraine, why didn't Europe sent any troops there?
This is very new, we fight an existential war now without sending any troops, money should be enough.
Anyway the fact is almost 4 years in Ukraine is probably dead demographically. You can't really reboot a country after having so much of its "fighting age" male population dead. Especially because the one who will be left will be deranged, violent and addicted to all sort of things.
And then having this type of nightmare on or within your borders is another pandora box. So now whether the EU declares it wins or looses the war, it has lost anyway.
On the EU internal politics side, we are literally living in the Star Wars prequel trilogy. No need for much explanations.
Compared to who/what/when? The US? China? Not a chance. Economically, the EU is as weak now as it ever was.
About 2 decades ago, EU had the same GDP as the US, or even slightly more. Now it's at half of the US and stagnating or even shrinking due to a series of issues it has no solution to, since a lot of it's economy hasn't recovered much post-2008 crash. The EU knows the economic deck is not staked in its favor so it has to bend over to the US now. 2 decades ago the EU would have been able to fend of such actions from a hostile US administration and even more so fron China. But it can't today because it's twice as weak and the US and China are much stronger.
And it's actually very easy to understand why we're here in this situation. If you look at the government budgets in most EU countries today, about a third everywhere is going to welfare and retirement spending with retirement spending dwarfing absolutely everything else in the country by far, with some pensions being higher than some full time wages, which is absurd IMHO. Now, caring for the people and the elderly is noble and all, but you can't win any competition against nations that take that third of GDP that you spend on retirees and they spend it on on economic and military development instead. You just can't win like this, straight up, the math doesn't math. Eventually over the long run, they'll economically or militarily conquer you. So you'll have to choose between spending on providing a cushy lifestyle for retirees, or ensuring a prosperous future for your country.
EU fell asleep at the wheel for over two decades and woke up today that it needs to start the fire again, but it has no money to do so because it's in a economic downturn, an energy crisis, a demographic crisis, a cost-of-living crisis, political extremism crisis left and right, and war next door needing to fight all these fires at once. Very bad timing for EU, and China, Putin and Trump know this and are taking full advantage of "buying the dip" now in Europe the same way European powers were "buying the dip" in their (former) colonies in Africa and across the world. All, and I really mean ALL countries, engage in economic imperialism every chance they get, and Europe somehow forgot its own lesson thinking they are somehow untouchable.
It's unlikely to go through as even parties that support VDL are against this deal: https://www.politico.eu/article/european-socialists-come-out...
US got concrete economic concessions in writing in exchange for words about security.
Dead Comment
EU policy about everything in a nutshell. We are not consulted or taken into account about absolutely anything. What would we even do about it?
That's the essence of normalcy to them. They cannot imagine any alternative to the US foreign department dictated world order - or they just don't want to imagine it.
They rose in a system where imagination in foreign policy matters -- well, if they had it, they wouldn't have risen to the top in this system. The height of irresponsibility to them is to imagine something outside the present order (such as Varoufakis making practical plans for leaving the Euro during the Greek debt crisis). The very action of imagining things threatens the stability which is the base of everything they actually value, which is little more than peer prestige and comfort for themselves.
> They cannot imagine any alternative to the US foreign department dictated world order - or they just don't want to imagine it.
Dictated or not, you're missing the main point that we are 'aligned'. Why would we not embrace an open and free market. That's what works for the EU itself and so when a world leader also shared the same policies, naturally we would embrace that and vice versa. It's not some dictator sitting in the US, a good example of this are how many products are not allowed to be sold in the EU from the US due to health risks we asses as unacceptable. We decide that, free market.
> The height of irresponsibility to them is to imagine something outside the present order (such as Varoufakis making practical plans for leaving the Euro during the Greek debt crisis)
Again you are assuming that mitigations and considerations haven't been considered, there are MANY provisions for leaving the EU, but why would we focus primarily on those situations when we as a union have a parliment to come together and work together. That is always the priority. We don't have one overarching federal system. We have a collection trading block who internally are independant and externally we can negotiate trade deals as one union, meaning better deals. That's it.
> The very action of imagining things threatens the stability which is the base of everything they actually value, which is little more than peer prestige and comfort for themselves.
This makes no sense and it's purely conjecture. Is the EU perfect, no, does anyone think it is, nope. Is it constantly in flux to improve, absolutely.
I'm sure they have considered a very limited number of mitigations, but nothing radical. But they always end up with the default choice. Do you disagree? If so, tell me when they did something the slightest bit imaginative or radical, or even surprising. I don't think you even disagree with me, you just think it's good that they don't.
> Why would we not embrace an open and free market.
Because it's not actually on the table when dealing with Trump?
If the deal was the best available then its not "selling out", its being realistic.
I could offer a real life anecdote, but I am not certain where you are going with this conversation.
It’s better than pretending for decades and then getting wiped out.
This was always going to happen eventually.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
I'm glad the American people at least know how weak the EU is, we should elect someone next time that will bring those tariffs up to 100%, and the EU will have to take it because it's better than a 200% tariff alternative. That's just being realistic, right?
That sounds more like China backed down than the US did.
The EU is a lot weaker than China. China dominates critical areas of manufacturing, and does not have the level of dependence Europe (non-EU as well) has on the US - I hardly need remind people here of the dependence in IT systems.
Trump tends to present trade as a zero sum game, but it very much isn’t; outside of limited scenarios (generally developing countries protecting otherwise unviable local industry with targeted tariffs), tariffs generally hurt both sides.
Obviously Europeans don't want to be the US's b*tch, but even more so they seem to want heavy regulations ensuring their right to relax and cripple growth, err, evil corporations.
But the fact that US's diplomatic policy USED TO make us not want to do it.
Europe using US tech was a bonding measure between the two parties.
We can quickly and easy build european "FAANG" overnight, even now more with AI search making it easy to replace Google.
We even already have it: think Ecosia, Protonmail etc. There are tons of those.
The same is for social media. It would be very easy to flip a social media app akin to Instagram, or FB.
The issue is getting users and have alignment that this would be the "european version".
We never had to do this, or think of it, because US had a very benevolent and good relationship with Europe, and US big tech used to make us feel even more connected.
> Under the presidency of Charles de Gaulle, France pursued diplomatic independence and promoted a vision of European collective security that conflicted with American leadership in NATO, especially regarding the integration of member states' armed forces under a US-led unified command and the control of NATO’s nuclear arsenal.
Charles de Gaulle believed that France and the EU countries should stay out of NATO so that it could foster it's own military defense, yet the French leaders and their other EU countreparts decided that it was much more convenient to have the US as a back-stop because they needed the cash that should have gone to their armies for other purposes. This has been happening for decades.
That lead to the situation that we are in today where most of the EU's defense strategy is in fact subsidized by the US. The NATO EU countries despite signing the treaties have barely managed to keep up with the minimum NATO required spending on their own defenses.
This was entirely the doing of Europe.
Technically, we can do it.
But unless we go the Chinese route of blocking US vendors, a lot of people will always flock to the better product that has the bigger marketing budget. And there I do not see how Ecosia could compete with Google, Xing with LinkedIn, Mistral with OpenAI, OHV/IONOS with AWS, or Hetzner with GCP.
Wups
All the things that Europe prides itself on having transcended, are the things needed to build theses industries. So while it's totally physically possible, and Europeans are both smart and industrious (well they ancestors were industrious at least), the knife in the side of Europe is the prevailing psyche of low-work/high-benefits as a human right.
Even in just economical sense it never really made sense when you have local companies like SUSE that could give you well functioning IT infrastructure. The money would at minimum stay in EU. It probably made sense for export of the talent (which countries don't make money on) but you just locks yourself to infinite Microsoft payments.
There are many conservative european corporations (like postal services) that never were on Microsoft stack. It was always hailed as the "poor" economical but secure solution. They probably still reap benefits. But afaik it was always uphill battle with governments because of the strong lobby from US.
Imagine if the europe started to switch to something like SUSE. It would make so many peoples skills immediately outdated. So many will fight this.
And I'm astonished Hetzner hasn't built a proper AWS competitor already.
I know this isn't popular, and I wish it was different too, but you can't have it both ways.
Germany had to reduce its army as part of the reunification deal and is now criticized for not having a big army. Only France has nuclear weapons and the incentive to spend huge amounts on defense while being dependent on leased and US controlled nukes is not great. Do you prefer that all EU countries get their own nukes?
The EU has real tech like ASML, Airbus, Siemens, Alsthom etc. What the US calls "tech" is not regarded as vital in the EU and somewhat belittled. This kind of "tech" is only possible with US hype and massively speculative investments.
The US is begging (and blackmailing with tariffs) countries from all over the world to build factories in the US. That doesn't sound like a great success.
Energy? The US tries to control all energy choke points of energy flow to the EU. The Nord Stream sabotage was hailed as a great operation, enabling the US to sell overpriced LNG to the EU. The US leased a corridor from Azerbaijan to Turkey to control vast amounts of natural gas from Turkmenistan. A Trump adjacent billionaire floated the idea to buy and revive Nord Stream.
What exactly should the EU do? Switch to nuclear energy and buy uranium from Russia like the US does (the US also buys fertilizer)?
How do you get people to work 50 more days a year without mass voting to keep (or even "improve") the status quo?
And this doesn't even touch on the heavy regulatory side, which just makes the EU a generally unattractive place to invest.
Dead Comment
Deleted Comment
Sure, that's why Germany was building NordStream-2. EU secretly just wants to buy Russian gas because it's cheap and easy.
I guarantee ~5 years after the war is over new deals will be made in place to start pumping gas from the biggest gas station in the world which is right next to EU.
It's no secret, reliable cheap source of the most important resource on the planet right now is essential for any economy today.
What do you expect us to do? Please enlighten me. Buy from ships for much higher prices because the US doesn't like Russia ?
There's a war on now and we are reducing our dependency greatly, did we get complacent, absolutely. Are we working towards getting away from it, absolutely.
Your attitude is just negative for negatives sake.
Then the war started and nordstream got blown up, so now the EU looks to other sources of LNG.
Meaning they require this from the US, so securing this is a win.
The EU was sold as tool that would bring prosperity to the EU countries and this is less and less the case as the years go by. Sure, you have a few bright spots here and there but those are few and far between.
Spain, Italy, Greece and the other sick "countries" of Europe were sacrificed in the 2010s to save the Euro and now France and Germany are going through some tough soul-searching.
Then there is the the growth of many Euro septic parties throughout Europe which are gathering steam year after year.
The EU needs to reform itself very quickly because for a lot of people, the question that is being asked is: do we really need it?
Countries don't need EU to survive, but growth and development is better in the union. Try to travel somewhere outside the EU. Get a visa, exchange money, get health insurance, get sim for roaming.
Everyone is so accustomed to benefits of the union that forgot how it was without it.