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Ukraine

Del Woppio said:
I heard Jeremy Hunt interviewed on the News Agents this morning, in summary he basically said just don't push Trump, agree with whatever he says, because if he pulls out of Nato then Europe will have to double its defence spending, and basically our foreign policy should be centred around protecting their membership - which means keeping your mouth shut.
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In the short term he’s probably correct. Without USA on board the Baltic States could be invaded by Putin within Trump’s Presidency. Justification for Trump to walk into Gaza and Greenland. The world is getting scarier by the day.
 
Del Woppio said:
I heard Jeremy Hunt interviewed on the News Agents this morning, in summary he basically said just don't push Trump, agree with whatever he says, because if he pulls out of Nato then Europe will have to double its defence spending, and basically our foreign policy should be centred around protecting their membership - which means keeping your mouth shut.
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Sadly, he's right.
 
It does seem to have a feeling of inevitability about it all. He's not going to care about the bigger picture, or international order, he just wants to save money. Apparently somewhere between 30-50% of the cost of Nato's protective work in Europe is met by America; like it's an enormous amount of money, and the transactional benefit isn't there for him. He needs to win every conversation and every negotiation, and at the moment he's not seeing the benefit of that spend

I suspect he'll use tariffs from Europe to bridge that gap, but it wouldn't surprise me if people couldn't talk him out of it and he just pulled out.
 
Europe has 2 nuclear powers and a huge GDP compared to Russia, we will have to go it alone.
 
I think we could do it alone, the niggling worry is whether American is able to turn the tech off on F-35 jets and other planes, if they could and did turn it off, thats our two aircraft carriers with Zero planes,plus Canada, Norway,Finland, Denmark, Belgium,Netherlands, Greece, Romania, Czech Republic, Italy, Turkey having unusable jets, massive loss of capability right there
 
Russia, the US and China all have lots of natural resources, compared to Europe. They are also the ones that are going to continue destroying the environment.
Europe will have to concentrate on strengthening our military, which means we will all be poorer.
 
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Tredman said:
Europe has 2 nuclear powers and a huge GDP compared to Russia, we will have to go it alone.
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I don't think we'll be as keen as Putin is to put the ourselves on a wartime economic footing. He doesn't give a fuck about his citizens, that's not a stance European leaders can take unless it's last resort stuff
 
Pulling out of NATO honestly isn’t even all that Trumpian. Even “moderate” conservatives (such as they are, relative to moderate conservatives on y’all’s side) have been whining about how much we spend on European defense for years; really picked up steam after Europe mostly “abandoned” (not my word) the USAF in 2003.
 
Tbh it's not an argument I'm unsympathetic to from the pov of a conservative American. When there's a cost of living crisis, spending money abroad is going to have political opposition. Obviously the bigger picture should win through, but when people are struggling to put food on the table it's understandable that how taxes are distributed is bound to be scrutinised
 
I don't know where I stand on it, personally. I can see the argument that NATO funding should be a bit more proportional, certainly. Equally, the European NATO members aren't going to make up the difference by pulling the money out of their asses overnight.

Where it falls down completely for me is that I don't believe for a second that this would actually reduce our military budget, it'd just shuffle it around. Now, there are absolutely tons of things going on in the "war industry" that, at least from a certain perspective, desperately need the funding. Don't know how much I'm actually allowed to know, but suffice to say that COVID absolutely destroyed the manufacturing sector that our military relies on. I only really know specifics from the naval side (Navy, Coast Guard, units within other USAF branches that do water-based operations), and we're years behind schedule on R&D and production of new subs, warships, etc., and contractors like Electric Boat have been almost completely impotent at filling the shoes of the veteran shipbuilders who retired during COVID in huge swathes. It's left them with far too few workers in general, and even those who are left have barely any experienced engineers around them to learn from.

Combine that with what China is currently doing with its Naval forces, and the sense of urgency becomes so thick you could choke on it.

*sigh*

I just want to get to 2029 without Elon having replaced the dollar with some fucking stupid crypto bullshit.
 
Looks like Russia bounced an explosive drone off the Chernobyl reactor shield last night, bastards had better not trash the place I’d like to revisit it again at some point
 
Keef said:
Looks like Russia bounced an explosive drone off the Chernobyl reactor shield last night, bastards had better not trash the place I’d like to revisit it again at some point
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What the fuck!?
 

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Sheffield for Europe

The historical analogy here should not be lost. The lesson is that Europe - and that includes us - need to be much stronger and stand together. No longer can we simply rely on American money and...
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