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There will be a lot more decisions like this one. For the war in Ukraine and anything immediate they will buy American stuff if there is no EU alternative (and

• macintux 1y ago
  I don't disagree with your theme, but I think in this case it has less to do with the grenades Trump is randomly exploding and more to do with the E-7 simply being the wrong solution.
  • hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
    In the past it was useful for nations to opt for an American solution even if it wasn’t the most optimal precisely because of America being a dependable and trustworthy ally.
    • saubeidl 1y ago
      One could also phrase it more cynically as protection money. Now that no more protection is offered, there's no point in spending the money.
      • jacquesm 1y ago
        That's a good point.
      • lukan 1y ago
        Well this was quite openly communicated, why germany bought the F35 for example. To still get (nuclear) protection. (with the homebuild Tornados phasing out and the Eurofighter not getting a licence so easy, only the F35 is capable of delivering nukes with german pilots). But I think it was a pretty bad appeasement deal.
        • walletdrainer 1y ago
          The F35 is also just a much better plane.
          • jleyank 1y ago
            The F35 is a fighter-bomber/light-bomber. Others are air superiority platforms. Different tools for different situations.
            • walletdrainer 1y ago
              F35 has far better bvr capabilities than the eurofighter and in practice ends up being far more useful in the air superiority role. Eurofighter is really only good for peacetime patrols, the F35 will detect and shoot down enemies in real conflict far before the Eurofighter can do anything. In a bizarre hypothetical conflict you would certainly not want to engage a F35 in an Eurofighter, the Eurofighter would be knocked out of the sky long before it could even see the F35. It certainly couldn’t turn on it’s radar. There are extensive public studies available from e.g. the Danish government that ended up with the conclusion that the F35 is far superior in air-to-air combat. https://www.fmn.dk/globalassets/fmn/dokumenter/strategi/kampfly/-typevalg-af-danmarks-kommende-kampfly-reduceret-vers-20160509-.pdf https://www.fmn.dk/globalassets/fmn/dokumenter/strategi/kamp...
              • jleyank 1y ago
                One would hope, as the Eurofighter is a 20-year-old design. There are older fighters that serve their purposes quite well, but the F35 will end up being compared against fighters yet to appear. And I wonder whether any of these birds will be effective during the day in a modern battlefield before the missile and radar systems are taken out.
    • barbazoo 1y ago
      That sounds like such a made up thing. Any source to back that up?
      • throw_a_grenade 1y ago
        I won't be put in (public) writing, but it's a same thing as “no-one gets fired for buying IBM”. Sometimes it's part of a bigger international agreement, like, you buy food and we buy weapons or sth.
    • tick_tock_tick 1y ago
      Or more realistically because no one else actually produces enough missile or bullets to shoot. It's like France being such a joke right now suggesting that Ukraine use their missile system instead of the USA's. Oh France sure how long until you can supply a fraction of what we are buying from the USA? What a decade!?!?! Ukraine won't exist in a decade if we wait and what's that you won't even ramp production unless you can get guarantees from multiple member nations? What a joke.
  • wbl 1y ago
    How is the E-7 the wrong solution? It's worked fine for Australia.
  • jacquesm 1y ago
    That may well be, but if there had been a different person in the White House (or what's left of it) they would have most likely bought it anyway. They're just not going to come out and say it but the 'strategic' element is what points to that, I doubt the US would have withdrawn in Juli if not for Trump, Hegseth and their buddies. This is just one more program they've gutted. https://breakingdefense.com/2025/06/air-force-cancels-e-7-wedgetail-citing-survivability-and-cost-concerns/ https://breakingdefense.com/2025/06/air-force-cancels-e-7-we...
• usrnm 1y ago
  > The damage to our future world order I don't think "damage" is the right word, especially outside of the US. Changes aren't necessarily bad, and, as someone living in the EU, I actually like the current trend.
  • mmooss 1y ago
    What do you like about it, specifically?
  • kogus 1y ago
    As an American, I am also gratified to see the EU take steps toward independence from US foreign policy. Independence doesn't mean enmity; it just means that the EU and US should both be adults in the room, reaching decisions on equal terms. If one takes a longer view of things, the period from WW2 to now is very much an anomaly reflecting relative European weakness in the aftermath of that war's physical and moral destruction. There is no intrinsic reason that the US should take the lead on, say, policy toward Russia. Quite the opposite.
    • jacquesm 1y ago
      I wouldn't say it was weakness rather than a sense of disgust about anything war related. Europe is tired of it, and precisely because of that may well end up in another major war.
      • bix6 1y ago
        That has more to do with their geography than their disgust no?
        • Yoric 1y ago
          I think GP means that Europe didn't intervene when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and, more generally, has done its best to limit rearmament until now. And we're going to pay for it by having a war against Russia that we might have avoided had we projected more strength. The precedent being France and UK that were so disgusted by war after WWI (and recall that France was the historical biggest warmonger among Western nations at least since the second half of the Hundred Years War) that they didn't react to Nazi Germany annexing Austria, then invading Sudetenland, and in fact not even when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Had they reacted earlier, WWII might have been avoided.
• askchina 1y ago
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  • saubeidl 1y ago
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• askchina 1y ago
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  • tomhow 1y ago
    It's against the guidelines to post flamebait and engage in political battle on HN, and that includes making inflammatory assertions about national/regional governments/leaders. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to keep participating here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• nxor 1y ago
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  • CoastalCoder 1y ago
    FYI, I'm not seeing how this relates to the story or discussion. That might explain the current downvotes.
    • nxor 1y ago
      Obviously it's about the symbolism. I think it's great Europe is breaking away from the US. I just think it's a crazy turn from their previous obsession with the US.
  • saghm 1y ago
    Europe isn't unified in the same sense as the US though, so this feels like a bit of an apples and oranges situation. Even though the US is varied geographically and culturally from an internal perspective, it's very much not in the sense of how the government conducts foreign policy and international trade. From the perspective of a European government pondering a trade deal, the differences between North Dakota and California aren't necessarily going to be super relevant, let alone the differences of various people within those states. This isn't really comparable to how things work in reverse; there's no "president of Europe" who can unilaterally decide to put a bunch of tariffs on anything imported from the US into Europe without regard to how it affects the individual member states.
    • petcat 1y ago
      > there's no "president of Europe" who can unilaterally decide to put a bunch of tariffs on anything imported from the US into Europe without regard to how it affects the individual member states. And it's not even clear if it's legal in the US. The Supreme Court is in the process of deciding that after a dozen US states sued about it.
      • saghm 1y ago
• eduction 1y ago
  > It is abundantly clear the USA is no longer a dependable ally An extreme and inaccurate statement. The US is still party to NATO Article 5, meaning the blood of our young people is pledged to be shed to defend, say, Estonia. That has not changed. What has changed is the US has become more realistic and up front about the limitations of its reduced military. It’s not healthy, for the US /or/ Europe, to indulge the imperial fantasy that US forces in Europe (token deployments in Germany and Poland) are sufficient to defend against Russian attack. Trump is not the first US president to push Europe to do more of precisely what it is doing here (spend its own money on defense). Being clear about limits is what a reliable ally does. Europe ordering an Airbus AWACS instead of Boeing now that the US stopped subsidizing them is not surprising nor does it mean the sky is falling.
  • lukan 1y ago
    "An extreme and inaccurate statement. The US is still party to NATO Article 5, meaning the blood of our young people is pledged to be shed to defend, say, Estonia. That has not changed" What changed is the US President saying things like, he will encourage Putin to invade countries not spending so much on military. What also changed is the US President threatening members of the EU militarily over greenland for example. Reliable allies don't really do that. (you probably do not realize the shock Denmark felt over this, that went deep and the change will not happen over night, but it will happen)
    • thewebguyd 1y ago
      There's also no guarantees that the current president or administration would honor those NATO obligations if Article 5 is called. The president has repeatedly been vocal about the US leaving NATO as a possibility. If I were the EU, I certainly wouldn't be counting on the US honoring any of its agreements and I'd be planning with the assumption that they will not join a NATO response.
  • Yoric 1y ago
    I don't think that the sky is falling. However, I think that many in the US are underestimating the current paradigm shift. Right now, in Europe, leaders and voters need to take decisions while keeping in mind the possibility that the US will invade Canada and Greenland while not reacting if Russia movies to Estonia. Will it happen? Who the f*k knows? Donald Trump has made declarations very much in this direction. Also, Donald Trump has broken a sufficiently large number of treaties since becoming president that _anything_ should be considered possible. That being said, as you mention, it's not clear that any of this is in any way related to Europe not buying the E-7.
• poszlem 1y ago
  Instead of viewing the current world order as collapsing, it's more accurate to see this as a transitional period. The system established after WWII no longer serves the interests of its main creator, the US, making change inevitable. A significant reduction in the quality of life for many in the 'so-called West' appears to be the unfortunate price of the world returning to a more 'normal' historical pattern of international relations.
  • Barrin92 1y ago
    >The system established after WWII no longer serves the interests of its main creator I don't think that's true. The policy of alliance building and containment of their largest peer and competitor still makes sense. It was how the US ultimately overcame the Soviet Union, and is even more vital given the size and talent in China. A US without an alliance system will not win that competition. What's much more concerning is that the rational interests of the US as a nation aren't reflected in its policy making any more. The 20th century had its share of domestic issues but the inmates weren't running the asylum as far as foreign politics was concerned which was coherent.
    • dmix 1y ago
      European countries becoming more capable of defending themselves by scaling up their own military instead of being dependent on a foreign power will only harden containment of bad actors. That applies to my country Canada. What's much riskier to the world is the US having to take the brunt of defending Europe, the Arctic front, and dealing with a conflict in China (which is far far more serious military threat than Russia in 2025). It's difficult medicine to swallow but that's the realpolitiks of it.
      • saubeidl 1y ago
        China might be a threat to the US, but I don't see it being a threat to Europe. The fact that Americans are abandoning us in our struggle with Russia in order to pick a fight with China makes it hard to see them as reliable allies.
• philwelch 1y ago
  > It is abundantly clear the USA is no longer a dependable ally, and that it will use all kinds of strings attached to hobble what they sell to be able to exert political pressure. This isn’t a US-only problem, and if anything the US has been more reliable on this account than some major European countries. For instance, in the first several months of the war Germany actually prohibited other countries from exporting their own surplus Leopard tanks to Ukraine.
  • jacquesm 1y ago
    That's a borderline whataboutism statement. Yes, Germany could have done a lot better. But at least they're not actively trying to sabotage NATO, they're not threatening to invade allies and they're not bombing other countries just because they can.
    • philwelch 1y ago
      Germany also spend the last couple decades buying as much Russian natural gas as possible, even to the extent of decommissioning their nuclear power plants, and only really stopped when someone (probably Ukraine) destroyed their pipelines. They also pressured the rest of Europe to admit a surge of ‘refugees’ that has incited a populist backlash and very likely materially damaged the national security of almost every European country, many of which already have fully endemic terror cells (e.g. the one in Belgium responsible for the Paris attacks in 2015). The US has spent years begging, pleading, cajoling, and now threatening the Europeans to take responsibility for the defense of their own continent. It took the outbreak of war in Ukraine for anyone in Europe west of Warsaw to even start considering rearmament. Also, the shitty anti-American attitude from Western Europe isn’t anything new, it existed for decades before Trump seriously entered politics. I’m just speculating here, since none of us actually know what’s said between world leaders behind closed doors, but the US wants Western Europe to rearm and Western Europe’s leaders probably recognized the necessity of doing so in 2022, so it’s pretty convenient for all parties involved that they can pretend they’re doing it to spite America rather than at America’s request.
      • 1y ago
• torginus 1y ago
  And weirdly enough, most of the sanctions have been softened, or rolled back - there's been little effort on the US side to build up domestic production capability outside of semiconductors - a process that began well under the Biden admin. Another curious thing is despite how the US has been acting in this manner, their stock market still continues to outperform everybody else's Turns out even if you have as much power as the US president with their executive orders, if you start making stupid or insufficiently well-prepared policy decisions, you have to roll them back or your country will crash into the ground. Kind of makes me think that supposedly autocratic leaders of powerful countries have much less power than we thought - once they make a couple stupid decisions, their countries start going down the drain.
  • jmye 1y ago
    > Another curious thing is despite how the US has been acting in this manner, their stock market still continues to outperform everybody else's Only a tiny fraction of the S&P is performing, and it's because it's either part of the AI bubble or because people have memed extreme value into poorly run companies that now have absolutely insane EPS numbers. There's nothing about the US stock market that's even slightly connected to it's financial or economic performance, right now.
• w10-1 1y ago
  An independent Europe is easier for China to dominate. Now that NATO is in question, you'll start to hear about US manipulation of the SWIFT banking system, so Europe will start pushing for an international one, which China will eventually control.
  • WanderPanda 1y ago
    SWIFT is Belgian, though?
    • paganel 1y ago
      It’s just a detail, the international financial market/banking system is basically under active US control, just look at what happened to Wegelin & Co. (at that point the oldest bank in Switzerland) when they thought that that was not the case.
• mensetmanusman 1y ago
  Both parties in the US will celebrate the EU being more independent militarily. We are in a multipolar world with the dominance of China incoming and the western nations need to spread capability.
• tick_tock_tick 1y ago
  It is kinda funny that to become "independent" the EU is going to become even more dependent on the USA while saying at some undetermined future point they will be able to pivot to independence (which we all know is never going to happen).
• Havoc 1y ago
  This is why the aukus thing puzzles me. Thats a huge longterm bet on the US being reliable