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| ▲ | epolanski an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| It doesn't matter how much is this repeated by politicians: it's a lie to suggest that the EU does not spend enough for defense. We spend multitudes of times more than our only realistic threat. And that threat can't even wage war with Ukraine, you expect Russia to be able to fight Poland, yet alone the rest of the European countries? Also, just a reminder: US servicemen have not been sent to fight a war for European souls since almost a century. Whereas European soldiers are actively deployed even now in the middle East for wars that Washington started. Please start looking more at facts and less about propaganda. Of course Europe should step up in being more independent defense-wise, but you'd be a fool if you think the US does not enjoy and leverage the current status provides. |
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| ▲ | n8cpdx 31 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > Of course Europe should step up in being more independent defense-wise, but you'd be a fool if you think the US does not enjoy and leverage the current status provides. > it's a lie to suggest that the EU does not spend enough for defense. Which is it? Is Europe spending enough, or does American have influence because Europe is still cripplingly dependent on the US? I wouldn’t argue that the US isn’t abusing that dependence at the moment. What I would argue is that the US spent 20 years telling Europe to get its act together, and finally in the last 3 years that has started to change, but notably that was years after NATO was publicly declared braindead. So it was pretty irresponsible of the Europeans to leave themselves beholden to the US for so long. | | |
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| ▲ | witheredspirit 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is a bogus statement. EU countries have met or surpassed defense budget goals, usually the ones that don't have the contracts in progress but the full payouts not done yet since they are still in progress. Percentage of GDP to military spending has been criticized as a bad way to measure how much military spending is done and needed.
Additionally, the European countries are paying for the war while the US is taking that money and the optics of providing certain military supplies. This whole situation is just exploitation of the EU with the benefit of the US' companies. |
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| ▲ | n8cpdx an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Only about a third of European defense spending goes to the US. Europes struggles to ramp up production have been an ongoing story for many years now. There is still about a trillion dollars of NATO defense spending to replace if Europe does not want to be reliant on America. Doable, but spending a third of that on American equipment wouldn’t help matters. Perhaps if Europeans got an earlier start, instead of ignoring nearly two decades of warnings and a clearly deteriorating security situation, they wouldn’t need to care so much about US policy. Better late than never. https://economist.com/europe/2025/12/01/europe-is-going-on-a...
from The Economist | |
| ▲ | ExoticPearTree an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | No they did not. Just a handful of countries are spending close to 5% of their GDP on defense, the rest are doing everything in their power to pay as little as possible. | | |
| ▲ | witheredspirit 44 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | The 5% GDP deadline is 2035. The 2% by 2024 was met. Not even the US spends 5% of their GDP on defense. Again as I've stated, it's been criticized as a bad goal to use this metric. In actuality, people who push the narrative that Europe is being bankrolled by the US will never be satisfied by any percentage. | |
| ▲ | LunaSea 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Just a handful of countries are spending 5% of their GDP on defense And the US is not one of them | |
| ▲ | trinix912 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Just a handful of countries are spending 5% of their GDP on defense Have you even read the comment in full before responding? I'm talking about this part of it: > Percentage of GDP to military spending has been criticized as a bad way to measure how much military spending is done and needed But since you wouldn't get it anyways: The "5% of GDP" is a number that US politicians came up with, seemingly out of nowhere, because they figured they want to boost their military industry. EU countries are already spending that or even more - just look at Ukraine spending by EU countries - but since it's spent on their own domestic defense industry, US politicians don't like it. That's the point. They don't want us spending 5% of the GDP on defense unless we buy their stuff. So here we are. | | |
| ▲ | ExoticPearTree 43 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Here, so you get it, as I was a bit wrong: https://www.nato.int/content/dam/nato/webready/documents/fin... - page 3. Poland spends 4.5% and that is the highest number, the rest are spending much much less. Tell me again how they're spending more??? | | |
| ▲ | trinix912 41 minutes ago | parent [-] | | By sending stuff and people to Ukraine. But that doesn’t end up in the Nato GDP spendings, because it goes through their governments not NATO. |
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| ▲ | n8cpdx 44 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | The 5% number is fudged, much of the increase over 2% comes from civic infrastructure investment. They’re fluffing the numbers. Most EU defense spending isn’t on US equipment (only ~35%); I don’t get where the European victim mentality is coming from here - Europe can and is building up its own defense industry. There’s some Trump nonsense more recently about buy American, but the demands to take security seriously have been going on for nearly 20 years, and have been largely ignored until Ukraine round two. | | |
| ▲ | trinix912 23 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > I don’t get where the European victim mentality is coming from here It’s coming from the fact that we’re already in a difficult time with a slowdown in economy and then get bullied into spending the money we could be using to help our own people on new US weapons. All for Trump to then sign half of Ukraine off to Russia. |
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| ▲ | nutjob2 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| A correct statement would be that the Europe didn't want to pay for US equipment for its own defense. The US has previously discouraged Europe from building out its own defense industry, the current situation is due to that a dovish view of Russia therefore less of a need to spend money on equipment and troops for a land war. |
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| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | lawn an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The European countries are already paying more than the US, both in therms of money and lives. |
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| ▲ | iso1631 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| America doesn't want Europe paying for its own defence. It wants Europe paying American defence contractors. The entire strategy for the last 80 years has been built around this edict. |
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| ▲ | watwut an hour ago | parent | prev [-] |
| It is even tougher when America is helping the enemy as much as it can. Like, Trump is literally helping Putin at this point. |
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| ▲ | trinix912 an hour ago | parent [-] | | Not to mention it's going to be the EU that will partially bear the cost of rebuilding Ukraine after war and Trump will not even let them have a say in how the land should be split. |
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