Macron.. Europe should build Army to protect itself from Russia, China & the USA ??

[Dendrek]

I suspect they'll be celebrating, not fighting. The only thing they would really have to worry about if the US had a civil war would be a Reality Trembles kind of person having enough power to do exactly what he supports: If we are going down, we are going to take down the rest of the world too.

A civil war in the US would likely lead to an economic recession in the rest of the world. Also, with the US military mostly occupied, other would-be empires would inevitably try to expand.

[Omega10]

A civil war in the US would likely lead to an economic recession in the rest of the world. Also, with the US military mostly occupied, other would-be empires would inevitably try to expand.

Maybe. Maybe not. I don't think we are as necessary to the rest of the world as you, and many Americans, think we are. Economically, the rest of the world is already starting to diversify away from America, and for the next 2 years at least I see this trend continuing. I suspect that the rest of the world will figure out their own security arrangements with or without America as well.

[Dendrek]

Maybe. Maybe not. I don't think we are as necessary to the rest of the world as you, and many Americans, think we are. Economically, the rest of the world is already starting to diversify away from America, and for the next 2 years at least I see this trend continuing. I suspect that the rest of the world will figure out their own security arrangements with or without America as well.

To have one of the biggest economies in the world suffer severe instability would absolutely affect the rest of the world. I'm not being egotistical in saying that.

[Mormolyce]

Only this is what he ACTUALLY said:

"We are being hit by attempted break-ins in cyberspace and interventions elsewhere in our democratic lives," Macron said. "We have to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia and even the United States. "

"When I see President Trump announce a few weeks ago that he will pull out of a major disarmament treaty, which was signed after the euromissile crisis in the middle of the 1980s which struck Europe. "Who is the principal victim? Europe and its security," he concluded.

Macron went on to make the case for a "true European army" that would give Europe strategic autonomy, meaning that it would no longer have to depend on the US for its security.

https://www.thelocal.fr/20181110/mac...rpreted-elysse

So in context he was talking about (1) cyber-attacks from Russia, China and even the US, and separately (2) creating a European army so that the EU was no longer reliant on the US.

Maybe don't get your news from right wing shills, Whippy.

[Dendrek]

While any instability in the US will certainly cause a global recession, significant and systemic instability will have other effects as of yet unknown. Simply considering that if the US had such massive issues as a civil war that the world would start dumping USD as a reserve currency and flocking to the Euro and perhaps to other currencies (RMB most likely but perhaps GBP and INR as well) and the complete redrawing of the geopolitical map would combined have significant effects. Capital flight and most importantly human flight would also change everything; the US is what it is due to immigration and to a large extend due to World War 2 immigration transplanting there some of the most brilliant scientific minds, creatives and entrepreneurs

You're probably right about the USD being abandoned. That's a terrifying thought as it would absolutely destroy the US. We'd come out of the civil war to find ourselves in a great depression.

[Astalnar]

EU army is just dumb. Macron still refuses to give up his idea of United States of Europe.

[Skroe]

You better be arming up, because when you see civil war break out on US shores, an entire world at conflict is not going to be that far behind.

Oh good lord.

[Astalnar]

WHile Macron's obsession with Federalization when there is no clear mandate fromt he people is absolutely moronic, the idea of European military consolidation is NOT dumb. We will either create massively redundant defense arrangements or we can pool our funds to match US, Russia and China.
Many European states are prosperous but none of them are powerful enough on the global stage by their own beyond the France, Germany and the UK. Together though, the EU is a force to be reckoned.

True. The thing is, that the EU army would instead of protecting from the supposed outside threats be used against the percieved inside threats. And all of a sudden, you have a repeat of Warsaw pact where Soviet tanks came in to topple the Hungarian government.

I'm all in favour of the doctrine "if you want peace, prepare for war," but in EU case, giving up on your national army is dangerous because of the dictatorial nature of Brussels. Right now for example, when EU wants to sanction Hungary or Poland, both of those countries get to say "fuck of" to Brussels. What's EU gonna do? Now if EU has one joint army, the countries implicitly lose their right to dissent, because whoever the central governemnt in Brussels dislikes, they can use force to get them back in line.

[Skroe]

Good. Defend yourselves and stop relying on a country you hate to be your protector. Then you can understand that maintaining armed forces is expensive.

Europe loves America. They don't hate us. Their anger at us is the kind of anger a sister has for a brother when the brother is kind of a douche.

We're family. It's bizarre certain Americans mistake disappointment with hatred.

[Skroe]

Oh, Europe is absolutely dictating its own reality. The US isn't calling the shots here.

Europe dictates it's own reality in Europe. But Europe is not the world. It is an important corner of the world, but while Europe was the main geopolitical theater of the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, the main theater of the 21st century is the Indo-Pacific region, which is mostly ocean and sea lanes, and that requires a large fleet to dictate reality.

Europe will play almost no role here. Europe matters. But in the 21st century, it's the side story as America and China have it out.

We're already past that. You're here, because you're our guests.

Partners more accurately. It's a partnership. Guests are what we were in Iraq. The US has been effectively living in Europe since 1944.

Because we're still in NATO and because we're still friends.

Absolutely. And we always will be.

But this blip called Trump has put that in question for some already.

I hate to put it like this, but there is ample historical example of Europe "getting over it" and vice versa.

You think this is some... temporary moodiness? Remember the 60s and our resistance to those nuclear weapons? That largely resolved itself around a stout pro-American Government seeing the value in the NATO umbrella. If we got that same movement today, we might just quit NATO and drag the rest of the EU with us, aka NATO lite without the US.

And West Germany of the 1960s could not anticipate it (and then Germany's) political and military disposition vis a vis the US in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. The world changed and popular opinion, and leaders desires, changed with it.


You're in luck though, because the idea of putting land based missiles in Europe would only ever be a temporary measure, and even then isn't a good one. As part of our long overdue withdrawl from the INF Treaty the US will be putting nuclear warheads on cruise missile / attack submarines, and produce a low yield variant of one of the warheads in the Trident II D5.

Putting our new "nukes in Europe" on ships in international waters not only makes them more survivable, but sidesteps the whole issue. It's a far more esoteric thing than Perishing II.

Basically the Germany response to its relations with the US fifteen years from now would be over concerns that we can scarcely speculate to at the moment.

We'd simply bank on you not having a good reason to attack Europe,

The US would never attack Europe, ever.

while we remind everyone just why Europe is the master of warfare and buildup. You make the same mistake everyone else does, you keep thinking.. oh Europe, those socialists, they don't spend enough, their military is shit. Yes, it is shit. And we don't spend a lot. By choice. Don't delude yourself into thinking that grabbing German scientists and their innovations somehow means you invented spaceflight or the jet age. Or heck, even stealth. Your radars? Based on British technology. All the cool toys you have? You have because of Europe in no small part.

I've directly credited Europe for these things in this thread, pushing back against idiot Americans who think we have the monoploy on the best toys. But as much as those Americans underestimate you, you overrate yourselves.

Europe has zero surge production capacity. It's most capble platforms are largely produced under industrial policy to keep certain places in the business of making certain things. This is inefficient and would expose Europe to supply disruption during war time. It also has extremely limited air and sea lift. Are these all fixable? Yes. But with huge investment. But there is something else too that we must discuss.

Want to know one of the biggest differences in the American FY2017 Defense Budget and the FY2018 defense budget? The DoD under mattis is building munitions. A lot of them. It's building up an enormous stockpile of everything from cruise missiles to artillery shells, the likes of which the US hasn't bought since the Cold War. We often think of the US buying aircraft or ships or subs. But we don't talk about its stockpile of things it shoots. In truth, since the Iraq War in 2003, and with the required retirement of munitions bought in the 1980s and 1990s (like anything else, parts, such as some older explosives, go "bad" and become unsafe), the stock pile got thin. And now its growing, very very fast.

Why? Is the US about to go to war. No. It's because if the US went to war against China or Russia, the first thing they would do would be to take out the US's capacity fight by destroying factories, shipyards and whatever it could.

To raise the example I gave, I fully expect that in 20 years, if the US gets into a fight with China, the US mainland will be subject to non-nuclear strikes by extremely long range missiles, as China seeks to destroy our capacity to make war. The Lockheed F-35 Plant at Fort Worth? Gone. The Northrop plant for stealth bombers in California? Gone. Places Carriers can be serviced? Gone.

The technology of the time gave the US years to perfect training and technologies to succeed in World War II, and massively pivot its industrial base around the war. That will never happen again. All wars going forward between great powers will see forces have to fight with mostly what they have.

So touting Europe's ability to build up is irrelevant. It would never get the chance. A build up would take years. Your adversary would never give it to you.

What Europe needs is to build big stockpiles and sustain them. Think of it like insurance. Does it honestly think that if it got into a slapfight with Russia, Russia would tolerate France keeping producing cruise missiles? They'd send one of their own cruise missile subs just to destroy such a place.

So yes, we will dictate our own reality.

Only in Europe. Europe is not the world. The world is not your game.


[QUOTE=Slant;50470153] It's up to you if you want to be on our side or not. Entirely up to you. [.quote]
What kind of question is that? Of course we do.

And if you don't care about Europe, that's fine, but don't pretend like we owe you shit.

The US cares deeply about Europe. More than any other place in the world. But it is simply not going to be the focus of the 21st century.

We're getting along fine with China. We will not help you there.

I wouldn't expect Europe to. It has no role to play in the main conflict of the 21st century, that will happen many thousands of miles from it.

If you provoke them into a conflict, you're on your own.

Conflict is inevitable. Its arguably here. We're already circling around each other. The question is when. China has a serious problem. It is not yet strong enough to win against the US, but the US is on course to only get stronger from here on out. Their own military strategists think the idea window for attacking the US is between 2020 and 2024. After that, it rapidly closes as US military modernization zeroes any fleeting advantages China has.

And make no mistake, you are the provocateur. China has made it very clear in the past 100 years or so that their interest is very, very regional.

That's called regional hegemony. The US Grand Strategy since World War I is to prevent the arising of a hegemonic great power in Eurasia that harms US interests.

The response to World War I, World War II and the Cold War all operated in that framework. Basiclaly, had we not operated on that premise, Germany would have conquered Europe. Or the Soviets. Or Imperial Japan in Indo-Pacific.

This is exactly the same. China becoming hegemonic in Asia is a direct threat to US security and will not be tolerated. Eurasia doesn't get to have hegemons. And hell, if we did nothing it'll just invite an even larger war.

Protect Japan if you must, but Taiwan is none of your business. And you have no idea how close to desaster you were when your idiot president Trump even talked about Taiwan that one time. That flew over everyone's radar, but that was way more dangerous than the whole clownshow with NK.

Taiwan is absolutely our business. We have sworn to defend it for 70 years. China doesn't get to decide if they are a free and independent country or not.

Btw, India? Really? They're more likely to drag you into yet another pointless regional conflict with a Muslim state than help you. Their entire arsenal of aircraft is Russian. How exactly are you "building them up"? Because the only one equipping them seems to be Russia.

The India Plan is 40 years out. And They've bought a lot more US weapons recently than Russian. India intentionally diversifies (such as buying French stuff too) in order to not become too dependent on one supplier.

The most important element of our new relationship with them is our continued gifting of strategic technologies.

India is the long game. China will be prevented from a Eurasian hegemony over the next few decades from US action in the region. But beyond that, India will offset it. When it is ready. WHich will not be soon.

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It's not bizarre at all, it is a perfectly expected response considering American Exceptionalism and the binary of self-definition vis a vis Europe which is of mythological importance to the American identity. Any attack by a third country to the US identity does not harm them because they are beneath notice. Any attack by Europe triggers the fragility of the American identity as a better way than that of the Old World.

It is bizarre for you because your understanding of what it is to be American is NOT fragile. But people who focus on white identitarianism as a nonsensical basis for the American identity obviously have a very fragile sense of it.

Yeah I see you're point. You're right of course.

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A joint EU army offers a number of major advantages whether within or without NATO.

It would eliminate redundancy, streamline logistics, equip the smaller nations with more modern equipment (like thinking in US terms, which states would be able to afford better hardware, Alabama and Louisiana or Massachusetts and New York), reduce costs, raise across the board standards and increase the power projection capabilities of European nations.

Right now much of the European defense spending is literally just wasted on running 27 (28 while the UK is still a member) parallel bureaucracies.

But once again though... when the US Defense sector consolidated, it turned large stretches of previously thriving industrial areas into post-industrial drecks. 1990s defense budget cuts saw plants get shuttered. Congress cut a deal to pass a budget, and some places got funded to keep producing and some didn't. Every plant and factory and supplier was looked at. Some were regarded as superfluous. Famously Boeing took over Mcdonald Douglas and inherited some facilities... all because the Navy canceled the A-12 Avenger II. But ten years after the take over, it would be more accurate to say, Boeing ate McD, put on about 5 pounds, and pooped out the rest. Consolidating them was a nice way of saying shuttering one of them and allowing Boeing to walk away with about 5-10% of ex-McD while burying the other 90-95% in a landfill.

For Europe to consolidate - which it needs to do for a lot of reasons - it's going to mean epic job losses. It's going to mean places that have been producing certain things for hundreds of years losing their only business.

It was very painful to America. Some regions of the US will never recover. Massachusetts only got away with it because it went deep into Finance, Computers and Biotech (Raytheon is still the states largest employer).

Europe will be worse, in no small part because so many companies are partially or entirely state owned.

[Skroe]

When you earn it

Exactly how many European troops have to fight and die in Afghanistan, Iraq and Africa in the fight against terrorism - a fight America started, led, screwed up, and directed - before they earn it?

Europe is the best friends America could ever hope to have and China and Russia would kill for what you take for granted. Never forget it.

A partnership means they have the RIGHT do disagree. That's called respect. Do we want partners or slaves? The generation of Americans who were victorious in World War II spent a lot of energy in the years after the war as the world shifted to the Cold War, ensuring that our partnership with our friends in Western Europe was not an analog to the client-state relationship that the Soviet Union had with the Warsaw Pact. Our relationship was real and multidirectional. Theirs, in the Warsaw pact, was forced on them by a superior power.

If that was good enough for the men who literally created the Western Alliance and led the way to winning the Cold War over the next 40 years, why is it not good enough for you?

Multilateralism makes America VASTLY stronger. Maybe I should describe it by another means: defense in depth.

And yet some Americans, so inclined to think with their balls rather than their brains, would insult our allies just to feel tough.

[Astalnar]

There is absolutely no indication whatsoever that this would happen. An EU army would be an army after all, it would have no jurisdiction to act within EU soil and like with everything in the EU its use could be vetoed by any single member. This is just conspiracy theory. The EU is not Iraq.

You're ignoring the fact that the countries who elect for one EU army, would be conceding their own national army. In that they are defenceless. What is even worse, at that point they are sovereign countries only on paper.

[Mayhem]

Thats the way... Move the goal mark to win your argument. Of course, the EU pays more it has more countries we are talking about individual country vs country.

TBH US should just leave NATO it does us no good anyway.

Well, considering this thread is about an european army I'd say it would be fair to compare the NATO payments to all of the EU and not each state on it's own. But that would be unfair to the US because then they couldn't complain about paying more than smaller countries, of course only in absolute numbers. I mean, I really thought the argument couldn't get much more stupid but here we are, an american complaining that the US pays more to NATO funding than countries with 1/20th the population.

Let's see how little self-respect you have left for you and your country.

[Skroe]

And furthermore, the US had the option to transfer cashflows to those areas on a large scale to offset the effects of consolidation. It is blatantly obvious that Europe has no interest whatsoever in similar transfers. Consolidation can ONLY happen if there is some form of federalization and there is absolutely no appetite for that outside of Macron's imagination. Brussels is not even pushing for this.

Yep. As companies consolidated and one company took over anothers facilities, it would move entire production lines and work forces across states. Raytheon used to be mostly a New England thing, but spent much of the past 20 years building up facilities in the American South West. Why? Took over facilities, got more land cheaply, and able to attract talent. And what's it been doing? Moving people from here, to there. And the money, which comes almost exclusively from government made it happen.

Now by contrast could anyone imagine an entire French town based around ship building being mass relocated to the UK or Italy? No. That's not going to happen.

If there is a viable approach, it may be to pick a common platform (say, the "Euro-Bomber") and have multple production lines. This introduces its own inefficiencies, but may be more realistic. There is actually an analog of this: the F-35 factory in Italy builds entire F-35s just for the European Market, using a literal copy of the US Plant at Lockheed Forth Worth. Some countries, like the UK, will fly F-35s built by American hands and F-35s built by Italian hands, and they are no different. THey both impliment the exact same build plan, with identical tooling and everything else.

It still may mean there is too much capacity in Europe for it to be "efficient" (and would itself introduce enormous inefficiencies), but it would achieve commonality without consolidation.

This is a damn hard issue.

[Mayhem]

Going to be the devil's advocate here and ask what exactly unites all those people?

I mean beyond peace and prosperity, i can't think of much else.

Pretty much all the things that don't come to your mind when you think about other countries and their cultures.

[Skroe]

Well, considering this thread is about an european army I'd say it would be fair to compare the NATO payments to all of the EU and not each state on it's own. But that would be unfair to the US because then they couldn't complain about paying more than smaller countries, of course only in absolute numbers. I mean, I really thought the argument couldn't get much more stupid but here we are, an american complaining that the US pays more to NATO funding than countries with 1/20th the population.

Let's see how little self-respect you have left for you and your country.

The best way of thinking about it is that the US spends abut $800 billion a year on a defense plan that covers the entire World, with more and more of those resources being dedicated to the Asia-Pacific region, followed by Europe, then the Middle East.

Europe spends about $350 billion a year in total on JUST Europe for the most part, with a minor in the Middle East.

For defense of the continent, Europe spends more, because America has to defend against threads so many places beyond just Europe.

The NATO 2% target is a nonsense number with no relevance in the real world.

[Mayhem]

Preach it, brother.

Alle Menschen werden Brüder.

I just hope we can get our shit together and start working on a common future, despite how bleak it might look right now, I'm staying positive.

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Yep. As companies consolidated and one company took over anothers facilities, it would move entire production lines and work forces across states. Raytheon used to be mostly a New England thing, but spent much of the past 20 years building up facilities in the American South West. Why? Took over facilities, got more land cheaply, and able to attract talent. And what's it been doing? Moving people from here, to there. And the money, which comes almost exclusively from government made it happen.

Now by contrast could anyone imagine an entire French town based around ship building being mass relocated to the UK or Italy? No. That's not going to happen.

If there is a viable approach, it may be to pick a common platform (say, the "Euro-Bomber") and have multple production lines. This introduces its own inefficiencies, but may be more realistic. There is actually an analog of this: the F-35 factory in Italy builds entire F-35s just for the European Market, using a literal copy of the US Plant at Lockheed Forth Worth. Some countries, like the UK, will fly F-35s built by American hands and F-35s built by Italian hands, and they are no different. THey both impliment the exact same build plan, with identical tooling and everything else.

It still may mean there is too much capacity in Europe for it to be "efficient" (and would itself introduce enormous inefficiencies), but it would achieve commonality without consolidation.

This is a damn hard issue.

Well, if you're talking about 20 year time spans then relocating an entire town to somewhere else doesn't seem impossible or unthinkable. Depends of course from where to where, but younger europeans have little to no problem working somewhere else in europe. Also, don't forget that europe is smaller, much smaller. The time it takes to travel from one end to another is probably a 3h flight tops.

[Skroe]

I support a European Army.

More European countries should embrace the euro as well.

The US will withdraw from the world stage and return to our insular nation. If there's trouble and Europe needs help, we can send troops there in a week or two.

I don't see why the US should keep 65,000 soldiers in Europe, it's a waste of money.

The US is not withdrawing from the world.

We're *literally* doing the exact opposite.

Jesus fucking christ on the cross.

[Crispin]

Europes to stupid to have a unified army. One thing the US gets right is it takes people from all backgrounds and gets them under 1 roof to fight. Europe is a continent full of people with long histories of war against each other. They are not going to be a cohesive fighting force because they never were, If anything they are going to let germany call the shots and when WWIII starts we will know why.

/facepalm, because European countries werent fighting side by side in your wars in Afghanistan and Iraq

The wars you point out, were not experienced by current soldiers "DUH". it's no different than men of different colours fighting in the US army. Some of the white soldiers will be ancestors of slave owners, who are fighting along side ancestors of slaves. I guess I do not have to point out the far greater division between the different races in the US, compared to say Danes and Germans.

[Noradin]

It doesn't matter a damn whether her office has the legal power to do so if the result of her treasonous behaviour in basically saying "everyone's welcome in Germany" is millions of mostly fighting age men coming into Europe. But anyway...

Which she didn't ever say...

It was Hungary that fell her in the back and made up that myth to have someone to blame for their own failures after she offered to help them.

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https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-10470062.html
https://www.vox.com/2015/8/28/922039...migrant-crisis
https://www.euractiv.com/section/mig...rian-refugees/

Etc. Fine, quibble over whether it was "Merkel" or "Merkel's government", but ultimately the buck stops with her, as Chancellor.

Bunch of mistranslated crap.
It is what happens when those who trnaslate have an agenda and are secure in the knowledge that those they translate for are incapable of understanding the source.

It's one of the reasony why I read German newspapers when there are news about Germany, at lest their quotes of German politicans are not tainted by bad translators.