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I'm pretty sure the threatened invasions are just distractions to change the conversation from the H1B debacle. If for no other reason than Canada is a country

I'm pretty sure the threatened invasions are just distractions to change the conversation from the H1B debacle. If for no other reason than Canada is a country a lot of Americans actually care about (many have relatives there), and without a formal declaration of war congress could step in at any time and declare the whole thing illegal, enabling the military to refuse orders relevant to the invasion. But as an American who has been a little sick of Europe mooching off of our military overwatch (see various European nations running out of bombs during the Libya campaign), I'm all for an independent European military command with independent capacity. The Cold War is over, the Russian tank hordes that once threatened to roll across Western Europe haven't managed to roll halfway across Ukraine with even reluctant, intermittent, indirect western support. We don't need to be under some monolithic military command anymore, Europe does not (or at least should not) need US strategic overwatch to fend off Russia. As for the "European militarization has historically led to world wars" argument, the UK, France, and Russia all have nukes. Germany could probably build a few in a long weekend if sufficiently motivated. We aren't going to see a WWI or WWII rematch unless the AI "revolution" actually turns out to be more than smoke and mirrors for dumb money and enables perfect missile defense or something. So yeah, please get an ex-US NATO off the ground so we can focus on China.

jltsiren 2y ago
> So yeah, please get an ex-US NATO off the ground so we can focus on China. If the US does not care about its European allies, it no longer has the economic power to "focus on China". From an European perspective, China is far away and not particularly threatening. If there are no specific reasons to support the US, it's better to not take sides and trade with both sides. BRICS is already a serious challenge to the Western hegemony. If the US thinks that "the West" has no longer a reason to exist, it will be seriously outnumbered by those who don't share its ambitions.
- nradov 2y ago
  BRICS is a total joke. Some of the member countries have taken limited unilateral actions to challenge Western hegemony but BRICS as a group has never taken any meaningful coordinated action and never will. India won't go along with anything that benefits China. South Africa is a failed state. Brazil has no global ambitions. And the Russian Empire is bleeding to death in Ukraine; even if they eventually "win" their ability to challenge us has disintegrated.
  - jltsiren 2y ago
    BRICS is not supposed to be a coordinated power. It's a tool for creating the multipolar world order Putin has been dreaming of for decades. A world where the US is just one power among many and the dollar just one currency among many. And the best way to achieve that is creating a wedge between the US and its allies.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > It's a tool for creating the multipolar world order Putin has been dreaming of for decades India and China just barely wrapped up hostilities, and maintain geopolitical contest with each other. India is increasing defence ties with America. Egypt and the UAE host American armed forces. BRICS is a propaganda tool for leaders who want to blame their failures on a foreign boogeyman. About the best thing for American (and dollar) hegemony would be BRICS continuing to exist. (Versus e.g. China internationalising the renmimbi.)
  - oneshtein 2y ago
    > And the Russian Empire is bleeding to death in Ukraine; even if they eventually "win" their ability to challenge us has disintegrated. LOL. USSR had plan how to win war with NATO called «icebreaker» («ледокол»): influence elections or bribe politics in enemy countries to put puppets into powerful seats, then use puppets to start internal conflicts between members of NATO, then support a single side or both sides in the proxy war.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      Sowing dissent is relatively easy, so I hope we defend against it. However, on a military level, Russia is being held off by the Ukrainian people (and 37% of the Ukrainian economy) supported by foreign donations equivalent to the current military spending of any one of the United Kingdom (2.33% of the UK's GDP), Germany (2.12% of German GDP), or France (2.06% of French GDP). If Poland was both threatened and totally isolated from allies, they could triple their military spend to equal the current Ukrainian forces plus all donations, and do so with only half the percentage of their GDP as compared to Ukraine. Everyone would rather that this war goes away and they can return to spending money on things that are directly valuable, rather than the necessary but un-productive task of defending all the things we value. But from a purely military perspective, ignoring how they may sow dissent, my only worry about Russia is that the nukes might not have had all their critical elements sold off in separate black market deals since the end of the cold war.
- throw0101a 2y ago
  > BRICS is already a serious challenge to the Western hegemony. A semi-joke-y observation: > Pretty straightforward really. You combine Brazil's history of monetary stability, with Russia's respect for property rights, India's domestic tranquility, China's financial transparency, and South Africa's investment opportunities - and hey presto, you've got a new global money. * https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1665053372402081792 https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1665053372402081792 If the 'BRICS currency' is made up of only a small group, then it's not going to be useful, especially the restrictive countries that are in the name. But if you expand it, sure it could become more useful, but then you've got competing interests and desires and a coördination problem on policy and such. Further: I've yet to see an explanation of how this thing will actually work. Does each country given up their own currency, Euro-style? Is there a 'theoretical currency' that everyone pegs their own to? What are the consequences for de-pegging (if any)? Are bonds issued in BRICS or the country's own currency?
- salesynerd 2y ago
  This European perspective is one of the reasons that many developing countries outside of Europe didn't condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine. As India's External Affairs Minister had remarked, "Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe's problems are the world's problems, but the world's problems are not Europe's problems."
dageshi 2y ago
My impression is the US has pretty consistently tried to dissuade the EU from developing any kind of capable military organisation and to instead do it as part of NATO. Although I have to assume that with Trump as president for a second time a lot of people in europe are going to have to worry that the US can't be relied on in the way it could in the past so I think you might get your wish. Where that leaves NATO afterwards, I don't know.
- roughly 2y ago
  > My impression is the US has pretty consistently tried to dissuade the EU from developing any kind of capable military organization It’s been a policy of the US government to discourage strong independent European militaries since about 1945. Same policy towards Japan, too.
vlovich123 2y ago
> and without a formal declaration of war congress could step in at any time and declare the whole thing illegal, enabling the military to refuse orders relevant to the invasion. I’m pretty sure that war requires congressional approval BEFORE an invasion full stop. Congress in recent history has been fairly cavalier about letting the executive launch military action and looking the other way, but it’s not actually supposed to work this way. > The Cold War is over, the Russian tank hordes that once threatened to roll across Western Europe haven't managed to roll halfway across Ukraine with even reluctant, intermittent, indirect western support This is a gross mischaracterization of the situation that significantly underplays what actually happened I think. Without what Biden did right before the war saying “it’s going to happen” and mustering broad domestic and international support as well as using sanctions to freeze Russian assets and use them to pay Ukraine for reparations, Ukraine wouldn’t exist today. We’re talking about $70B of military HW and $23B in terms of economic and humanitarian aid and another ~87B for the Ukrainian government to keep the lights on. That’s from the US alone. The international community has also contributed another $100B. > We aren't going to see a WWI or WWII rematch unless the AI "revolution" actually turns out to be more than smoke and mirrors for dumb money and enables perfect missile defense or something. It’s a slower burn. Putin isn’t going to try to take everything at once. It’s the Hitler annexation strategy over a longer time period. A little Georgia here, a little Crimea there, now it’s the entirety of Ukraine. Partly because his country is weaker but also because war is more expensive to prosecute than 100 years ago due to technology and the resistance is much better prepared for such an attempt. Where do you think Eastern and Western European civilians will flee if any of those countries is drawn into conflict with Russia? Conflict forces desperate immigration which then creates anti-immigration counter responses in domestic populations here in the US. China is important but what are we going to do there? Do you think we’re going to successfully defend an invasion of Taiwan when it happens? Cause that’s going to be their first military action. And if people are complaining about supporting Ukraine, how do you think they’ll fair regarding Chinese nationalists? Finally, I’m pretty sure the troops and equipment we need there are also fairly different. If China is delivering huge numbers of land troops to Taiwan in the first place I’d say the battle is very lost. It’s going to be a sea/land siege so if the US gets directly involved it’ll be a meeting of the navies.
fastasucan 2y ago
>But as an American who has been a little sick of Europe mooching off of our military overwatch Thousands of european soldiers have died because of US war on terror the last decades, not the other way around.
forgotoldacc 2y ago
Even if it's just a distraction, countries usually distract from their internal problems by targeting un-allied countries as the source of their problems. For example, when China has some internal issue, they start complaining about Japan or Taiwan. When Iran has problems, they threaten the US. When countries start threatening those who aren't their active enemies, it's a first step into normalization of the rhetoric and building up support for inhuman actions. Iraq wasn't even in anyone's mind until suddenly America needed to invade and "liberate" it just for some president's personal ego, and the overwhelming majority became convinced that Iraq was involved in 9/11 (it wasn't) and steamrolling the entire country was doing the world a public service (it wasn't)[1]. Nobody was even thinking about Greenland or Denmark in the US until someone with a big ego started talking about liberating it. Now the same political faction that had 89% support for the Iraq War is starting up the same thing. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/03/14/a-look-back-at-how-fear-and-false-beliefs-bolstered-u-s-public-support-for-war-in-iraq/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/03/14/a-look-back-...
- mnky9800n 2y ago
  I think it’s a bit unfair to say Iraq wasn’t in anyone’s mind. Clinton spent the 90s bombing Iraq after coalition forces invaded to stop the Kuwait invasion in 1991. And saddam hussein was regularly declaring America as moral enemy of Iraq. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 but I feel like he was regularly discussed throughout the 90s and so was easy to inject back into the conversation in 2003. This is really different than randomly saying that Canada is Americas hat or Greenland should be liberated. All that being said, Americans grew up, long before Donald trump entered the political discourse, learning that they live in the greatest country on earth and that everyone wants to move there and become American. This is a core component of Donald trump’s political message of make America great again. So why wouldn’t the average American be accepting the idea that other places want to join in on the fun? Democrat or Republican most seem to buy in to American exceptionalism.
  - ArnoVW 2y ago
    Having personally lived through the 90's and 00's, I can confirm that: * Sadam Houssein (and Kadhafi, and Khomeini) regularly moaned about the US * everybody was indeed aware of them * and everyone ignored them * for most people outside the US, the second gulf war was perceived a transparent lie One look at the ridiculous "coalition of the willing" that GWB managed to drum up makes that clear. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_the_willing_(Iraq_War) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_the_willing_(Iraq...
wklauss 2y ago
> But as an American who has been a little sick of Europe mooching off of our military overwatch As a European (now living in the US) I think this perspective might be an oversimplification. Access to EU soil has been incredibly important for US military strategy over the last 50 years. Having bases in Germany, Spain and Italy is instrumental in US campaigns in Middle East or Asia. Not to mention the amount of European lives lost in conflicts initiates or led by US interests.
- redmajor12 2y ago
  Maintaining NATO also ensures American hegemony over Europe and potentially the most disruptive global competitor. It may be expensive, but we know that left to their own devices the Europeans are wont to start a war amongst themselves, over some trivial border dispute, and then involve the rest of the world in it. So it's cheaper in American lives and material this way.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    That may be the predominant American belief, but I would point out that about over half of Europe — by population, making the zone larger than the USA — now has borders slightly more porous than the ones between American states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Border_Protection_Stations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Border_Protection_S... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area

jltsiren 2y ago

> So yeah, please get an ex-US NATO off the ground so we can focus on China. If the US does not care about its European allies, it no longer has the economic power to "focus on China". From an European perspective, China is far away and not particularly threatening. If there are no specific reasons to support the US, it's better to not take sides and trade with both sides. BRICS is already a serious challenge to the Western hegemony. If the US thinks that "the West" has no longer a reason to exist, it will be seriously outnumbered by those who don't share its ambitions.

nradov 2y ago
BRICS is a total joke. Some of the member countries have taken limited unilateral actions to challenge Western hegemony but BRICS as a group has never taken any meaningful coordinated action and never will. India won't go along with anything that benefits China. South Africa is a failed state. Brazil has no global ambitions. And the Russian Empire is bleeding to death in Ukraine; even if they eventually "win" their ability to challenge us has disintegrated.
- jltsiren 2y ago
  BRICS is not supposed to be a coordinated power. It's a tool for creating the multipolar world order Putin has been dreaming of for decades. A world where the US is just one power among many and the dollar just one currency among many. And the best way to achieve that is creating a wedge between the US and its allies.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > It's a tool for creating the multipolar world order Putin has been dreaming of for decades India and China just barely wrapped up hostilities, and maintain geopolitical contest with each other. India is increasing defence ties with America. Egypt and the UAE host American armed forces. BRICS is a propaganda tool for leaders who want to blame their failures on a foreign boogeyman. About the best thing for American (and dollar) hegemony would be BRICS continuing to exist. (Versus e.g. China internationalising the renmimbi.)
- oneshtein 2y ago
  > And the Russian Empire is bleeding to death in Ukraine; even if they eventually "win" their ability to challenge us has disintegrated. LOL. USSR had plan how to win war with NATO called «icebreaker» («ледокол»): influence elections or bribe politics in enemy countries to put puppets into powerful seats, then use puppets to start internal conflicts between members of NATO, then support a single side or both sides in the proxy war.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Sowing dissent is relatively easy, so I hope we defend against it. However, on a military level, Russia is being held off by the Ukrainian people (and 37% of the Ukrainian economy) supported by foreign donations equivalent to the current military spending of any one of the United Kingdom (2.33% of the UK's GDP), Germany (2.12% of German GDP), or France (2.06% of French GDP). If Poland was both threatened and totally isolated from allies, they could triple their military spend to equal the current Ukrainian forces plus all donations, and do so with only half the percentage of their GDP as compared to Ukraine. Everyone would rather that this war goes away and they can return to spending money on things that are directly valuable, rather than the necessary but un-productive task of defending all the things we value. But from a purely military perspective, ignoring how they may sow dissent, my only worry about Russia is that the nukes might not have had all their critical elements sold off in separate black market deals since the end of the cold war.
throw0101a 2y ago
> BRICS is already a serious challenge to the Western hegemony. A semi-joke-y observation: > Pretty straightforward really. You combine Brazil's history of monetary stability, with Russia's respect for property rights, India's domestic tranquility, China's financial transparency, and South Africa's investment opportunities - and hey presto, you've got a new global money. * https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1665053372402081792 https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1665053372402081792 If the 'BRICS currency' is made up of only a small group, then it's not going to be useful, especially the restrictive countries that are in the name. But if you expand it, sure it could become more useful, but then you've got competing interests and desires and a coördination problem on policy and such. Further: I've yet to see an explanation of how this thing will actually work. Does each country given up their own currency, Euro-style? Is there a 'theoretical currency' that everyone pegs their own to? What are the consequences for de-pegging (if any)? Are bonds issued in BRICS or the country's own currency?
salesynerd 2y ago
This European perspective is one of the reasons that many developing countries outside of Europe didn't condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine. As India's External Affairs Minister had remarked, "Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe's problems are the world's problems, but the world's problems are not Europe's problems."

dageshi 2y ago

My impression is the US has pretty consistently tried to dissuade the EU from developing any kind of capable military organisation and to instead do it as part of NATO. Although I have to assume that with Trump as president for a second time a lot of people in europe are going to have to worry that the US can't be relied on in the way it could in the past so I think you might get your wish. Where that leaves NATO afterwards, I don't know.

roughly 2y ago
> My impression is the US has pretty consistently tried to dissuade the EU from developing any kind of capable military organization It’s been a policy of the US government to discourage strong independent European militaries since about 1945. Same policy towards Japan, too.

vlovich123 2y ago

> and without a formal declaration of war congress could step in at any time and declare the whole thing illegal, enabling the military to refuse orders relevant to the invasion. I’m pretty sure that war requires congressional approval BEFORE an invasion full stop. Congress in recent history has been fairly cavalier about letting the executive launch military action and looking the other way, but it’s not actually supposed to work this way. > The Cold War is over, the Russian tank hordes that once threatened to roll across Western Europe haven't managed to roll halfway across Ukraine with even reluctant, intermittent, indirect western support This is a gross mischaracterization of the situation that significantly underplays what actually happened I think. Without what Biden did right before the war saying “it’s going to happen” and mustering broad domestic and international support as well as using sanctions to freeze Russian assets and use them to pay Ukraine for reparations, Ukraine wouldn’t exist today. We’re talking about $70B of military HW and $23B in terms of economic and humanitarian aid and another ~87B for the Ukrainian government to keep the lights on. That’s from the US alone. The international community has also contributed another $100B. > We aren't going to see a WWI or WWII rematch unless the AI "revolution" actually turns out to be more than smoke and mirrors for dumb money and enables perfect missile defense or something. It’s a slower burn. Putin isn’t going to try to take everything at once. It’s the Hitler annexation strategy over a longer time period. A little Georgia here, a little Crimea there, now it’s the entirety of Ukraine. Partly because his country is weaker but also because war is more expensive to prosecute than 100 years ago due to technology and the resistance is much better prepared for such an attempt. Where do you think Eastern and Western European civilians will flee if any of those countries is drawn into conflict with Russia? Conflict forces desperate immigration which then creates anti-immigration counter responses in domestic populations here in the US. China is important but what are we going to do there? Do you think we’re going to successfully defend an invasion of Taiwan when it happens? Cause that’s going to be their first military action. And if people are complaining about supporting Ukraine, how do you think they’ll fair regarding Chinese nationalists? Finally, I’m pretty sure the troops and equipment we need there are also fairly different. If China is delivering huge numbers of land troops to Taiwan in the first place I’d say the battle is very lost. It’s going to be a sea/land siege so if the US gets directly involved it’ll be a meeting of the navies.

fastasucan 2y ago

>But as an American who has been a little sick of Europe mooching off of our military overwatch Thousands of european soldiers have died because of US war on terror the last decades, not the other way around.

forgotoldacc 2y ago

Even if it's just a distraction, countries usually distract from their internal problems by targeting un-allied countries as the source of their problems. For example, when China has some internal issue, they start complaining about Japan or Taiwan. When Iran has problems, they threaten the US. When countries start threatening those who aren't their active enemies, it's a first step into normalization of the rhetoric and building up support for inhuman actions. Iraq wasn't even in anyone's mind until suddenly America needed to invade and "liberate" it just for some president's personal ego, and the overwhelming majority became convinced that Iraq was involved in 9/11 (it wasn't) and steamrolling the entire country was doing the world a public service (it wasn't)[1]. Nobody was even thinking about Greenland or Denmark in the US until someone with a big ego started talking about liberating it. Now the same political faction that had 89% support for the Iraq War is starting up the same thing. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/03/14/a-look-back-at-how-fear-and-false-beliefs-bolstered-u-s-public-support-for-war-in-iraq/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/03/14/a-look-back-...

mnky9800n 2y ago
I think it’s a bit unfair to say Iraq wasn’t in anyone’s mind. Clinton spent the 90s bombing Iraq after coalition forces invaded to stop the Kuwait invasion in 1991. And saddam hussein was regularly declaring America as moral enemy of Iraq. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 but I feel like he was regularly discussed throughout the 90s and so was easy to inject back into the conversation in 2003. This is really different than randomly saying that Canada is Americas hat or Greenland should be liberated. All that being said, Americans grew up, long before Donald trump entered the political discourse, learning that they live in the greatest country on earth and that everyone wants to move there and become American. This is a core component of Donald trump’s political message of make America great again. So why wouldn’t the average American be accepting the idea that other places want to join in on the fun? Democrat or Republican most seem to buy in to American exceptionalism.
- ArnoVW 2y ago
  Having personally lived through the 90's and 00's, I can confirm that: * Sadam Houssein (and Kadhafi, and Khomeini) regularly moaned about the US * everybody was indeed aware of them * and everyone ignored them * for most people outside the US, the second gulf war was perceived a transparent lie One look at the ridiculous "coalition of the willing" that GWB managed to drum up makes that clear. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_the_willing_(Iraq_War) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_the_willing_(Iraq...

wklauss 2y ago

> But as an American who has been a little sick of Europe mooching off of our military overwatch As a European (now living in the US) I think this perspective might be an oversimplification. Access to EU soil has been incredibly important for US military strategy over the last 50 years. Having bases in Germany, Spain and Italy is instrumental in US campaigns in Middle East or Asia. Not to mention the amount of European lives lost in conflicts initiates or led by US interests.

redmajor12 2y ago
Maintaining NATO also ensures American hegemony over Europe and potentially the most disruptive global competitor. It may be expensive, but we know that left to their own devices the Europeans are wont to start a war amongst themselves, over some trivial border dispute, and then involve the rest of the world in it. So it's cheaper in American lives and material this way.
- ben_w 2y ago
  That may be the predominant American belief, but I would point out that about over half of Europe — by population, making the zone larger than the USA — now has borders slightly more porous than the ones between American states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Border_Protection_Stations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Border_Protection_S... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area