Fawning for Trump’s favor, European leaders are ramping up military spending at the expense of public benefits.
Archived version: https://archive.is/newest/https://truthout.org/articles/europe-puts-social-programs-on-chopping-block-to-appease-trump-on-nato-funding/
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This is dumb. European leaders aren’t doing it to please trump, they’re doing it because the US has become an unreliable ally and they need to become self sufficient in defense now.
Blindly raising the % requirement doesn’t improve defensive or offensive capabilties. EU lacks production capacity, so they are entirely dependent on foreign powers. Increasing this limit, will just force them to buy foreign weapons to meet the arbitrary goal. The real goal of this “requirement” is like always to be benefit US domestic military industrial complex.
EU already spends more on military than any of their adversarial countries, but a lot of it wasteful and inefficient. Instead of fixing that, they just are going to dump more, what a great idea…
How else would they increase local production capacity, though? I’m sure some of the spending is going towards local producers
Europe was already doing that before this farce.
https://commission.europa.eu/topics/defence/future-european-defence_en
? The page talks about events in June, which means it was written in the past couple of weeks. How is it not part and parcel of current events?
Right, the page was made after the paper. I don’t get your point, though. This is all in response to trump being an idiot? I feel like we agree on that point
Self-sufficient by buying American weapons and American weapon systems?
It is specifically mandated in the new defense spending act that it has to stay domestic
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/business/money-report/europe-will-buy-more-american-weapons-and-pave-way-for-trade-deal-eu-council-chief-says/3945849/
Are you claiming that 100% of their defense budget is going to the US? If that’s the case then I’ll agree with you
I wonder if it is both