The U.S. Is Bullying Europe Like Never Before

rayiner

You can’t “bully” a continent that is entirely dependent on you for its security. The Ukraine war has proven that Europe is utterly incapable of putting out a fire in its own back yard without American military and financial support.

petcat

Unfortunately Europe and the EU have allowed themselves to be squeezed on all sides by USA, China, and Russia through several decades of short sighted policy and extreme over-reliance on globalism. The financial crisis in France and Italy, and the general societal unrest everywhere has not just come out of nowhere. Europe is just simply not competitive in the industries of the next 50 years and that is very unsettling to people.

jkic47

To be blunt, the major countries in the EU have not adapted to their diminished status in a world where economic and military power have concentrated elsewhere. The EU has lagged the US in economic dynamism (link below). This deficit drives the inability to project economic or military power, forcing the EU rely on the US to support its foreign policy objectives in Ukraine - a conflict considerably more relevant to the EU than to the US. Couple that with unaffordable, state-funded entitlements, and massive immigration significantly burdening (some) exchequers, and you end up with active urban conflicts in major EU cities, forcing a diversion of resources, and even more dependence on US military support. None of this comes for free. And Applebaum, playing the role of a wide-eyed ingenue, claims that the EU is "being bullied", instead of presenting it as the inevitable result of decades-long unwise, failing stances taken by the bloc. A more interesting question is whether the current political, economic, and social model of the EU is compatible with the desire to be a major global power. https://nextbigteng.substack.com/p/american-vs-european-star...

quaddoggy

Yes, we love bullying places that have 100 million more people us but also $9.3 trillion less GDP than us. It appears the "sick man of Europe" is…Europe? Heal thyself. We need you guys back in the game.

wolvoleo

https://archive.is/V9RvT

OgsyedIE

The comments at time of writing are blissfully ignorant of the European political culture inside and outside of the EU. On the one hand, there are only politicians available in two kinds: those who insist on blindly glazing the US regardless of the harm it does to Europe and those who insist on blindly glazing the Russia/China/Iran axis regardless of the harm it does to Europe. All of them occasionally implement one-off military spending programs while permitting long term trends of worse military, energy, machine tools, infrastructure, mining, smelting and reserve readiness spending. In Italy, Spain, Austria, Romania, Sweden and Britain (the six cases I'm familiar with, three from business travel, one from holidaying and two from deep interest) the occasional politician (one person per country per 3-5 years) who does want Europe to have independent expeditionary military partnering with Africa and the Middle East, totally disconnected from either superpower bloc and their goods, services, politics and ideologies is ridiculed up until they say something negative about [emotional support ethnostate of either bloc, they both have them], at which point they are dealt with through lawfare, debanking, travel bans and intimidation of their families. . On the other hand, it is entirely predictable that thoughts of military self-determination are taboo given the historical political economy of Europe. Sovereignty in Europe was dismantled by the US and Russia over the 20th century, the 1944 conferences being the most irreversible moment, and it can only recover if they both implode, not just one. Every party system Europe has relies on sovereignty backstopped externally and neither of the superpower blocs reneging on their backstop offers are imploding at the present time. Adapting, avoiding being squeezed, these are the loser options of a bully victim whining that they aren't being left alone. Keeping to the metaphor of a bully, you're only worth leaving alone the minute you die and not a moment before, and the world is run by bullies. Using a more unsanitised and true metaphor, dogs and wolves get a dopamine-reward signal in their ventral striatum when they hear the prey animal in their jaws squeal.

tmgldn

Americans here saying that the world is a zero sum game and we Europeans should be doing the same back to the US govt as they do to us miss a few key points: - we want to but cannot because we could not project that the country which convinced us to embrace our current political and economic system would abandon it and punish us for following - saying the world is dog eat dog is a self fulfilling prophecy; after the 20th century in Europe was characterised by war, the post-war federation and economic cooperation has made intra European bloc war impossible. This is rightly considered a success in Europe, and explains why we tend not to see world matters as zero-sum. American education teaches war in a transactional economic way that does not resonate with our collective imagination, due to our own scars from war It is easy (and partly fair) to blame the European bloc for a lack of organisation and foresight but in fairness, it was hard to imagine the US govt would act in a form of economic self-sabotage as a means of political pressure. And deterrents and preparation for the possible are not free. Hindsight is not an answer.