▲ | WJW 9 days ago | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
If I were to summarize: - Europe chooses to fight a war it wants to fight; - with the weapons it has decided are the best choice available at the moment (even though many of those are not yet produced domestically and so need to be imported); - while hugely increasing its own weapons manufacturing; - paid for by its own money. (aka the factories built and new weapon systems introduced will not be controlled by the US) You seem to argue (but correct me if I'm wrong) that this is somehow a huge win for the USA and proves the European states have barely any sovereignty as in your previous post. But the more logical result of all this would be that the European countries come out of this war with a significantly larger defense-industrial base. In addition this bigger DIB will be used to shift away the composition of EU armed forces away from American systems and towards domestically produced systems. Like you mention the USA will not pay for anything anymore, but as the saying goes "the one who pays is the one who gets to decide". Pulling support also means you no longer get a say in decision making. Finally, the USA not helping in Ukraine makes it much easier for politicians to say "no thank you" when the US wants help in a future Taiwan conflict. None of these things improve US influence over Europe. Tariffs are completely separate and are mainly a US thing being paid for by US importers to the US government. Natural gas imports are Trump overstating his dealmaking skills: countries do not buy gas but companies do, and the global energy companies are not bound to this trade deal. Finally this: > Trump has never once opposed Europe continuing to fund Ukraine however long they want. Yes he did. He proposed a peace deal to Putin in which Ukraine would basically surrender, then tried to pressure Zelensky and the EU leaders into going along with this. This very much included Ukraine giving up the fight and EU halting support. Obviously, this didn't happen and now Trump tries to pretend he meant this occur all along. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
▲ | somenameforme 9 days ago | parent | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Your entire argument hinges on the claim that Europe is choosing to do these things which I think can be plainly falsified by looking at what they're agreeing to. Here are the notes [1] on the recent trade "agreement" with the US. ------ US gets: - EU investment of $600 billion in the US, invested at Trump's sole discretion - guaranteed sales of $750 billion in US energy resources at a nice fat premium - guarantee sales of an unstated other than "significant" amount of US military equipment - elimination of all EU tariffs in many sectors, including on all US industrial goods EU gets: - Pay new and increased tariffs to the US, ranging from 15-50%. ------ Claiming anybody is choosing this is simply unbelievable. [1] - https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/07/fact-sheet-th... | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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▲ | chrisco255 9 days ago | parent | prev [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I'm with you all the way up to the last paragraph. There has been no explicit peace deal with Russia. There has been an ongoing negotiation and attempts at agreements but my no means was Trump suggesting to surrender all of Ukraine to Russia. You do realize that EU support and weaponry is completely insufficient to fight Russia, right? Their military is far stronger than anything you've got. The only reason Ukraine has been doing as well as it has is because of American training, intel, weaponry, drones, etc. If America walked away, Ukraine would collapse quite quickly, regardless of empty pledges by the EU. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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