On the one hand, I don’t see the point of raising the defence budget just to hand all that money we are actually taking out as loans over to the US. A major point of the whole shebang should be to drive EU-domestic investment and jobs.
On the other hand, WTF Denmark? Anyone Danish here can explain Danish politics and how this guy is not secretly getting off on being cucked by Trump?
“But I think we could do more here in Europe to have a focus on developing new capabilities,” Poulsen said, adding that military investments would make it “so that we are not that dependent on the US”.
Sounds like he’s saying that we’re so deeply dependent on the US for now that a screeching halt to our purchasing of US military equipment would de facto dismantle our defences. But that we should work to get out of that dependency.
I think it’s just a follow up on the recent NATO meeting where everyone decided to suck Trump’s cock to make him shut up and play along.
Troels Lund Poulsen is the perfect tool for that.
No, we are as baffled as you are. Arrogance and stupidity is good general universal explanation for a lot of the shit that government have been doing these past years. The only admirable thing they have been doing is really their staunch and continued economic support of Ukraine.
A major point of the whole shebang should be to drive EU-domestic investment and jobs.
I agree that IF you have to spend money on defense, you might as well do it domestically but that should be an added bonus, not a major point.
Economically speaking, the defense industry is a terrible investment. At best the goods it produces just sit there and are never needed, at worst they are used up. The US military industrial complex is not a healthy, useful or productive industry. Jobs in just about any other industry are more useful for society and/or the economy.Defense spending should be purely driven by security requirements. Potential jobs created are a nice bonus but should not be part of why you’re doing it.
A lot of the money can and should be spent on dual-use stuff.
For example, the biggest hurdle that prevents the deployment of the armies of Europe to the Eastern flank is the state of the railway network.
Maintaining and expanding the railway network however is equally important for Civilian purposes. It is not that the military adds a need that previously didn’t exist. And we get in a very problematic area, if public infrastructure investments are made dependent on having a military purpose too. This creates a hierarchy of needs where the military is put to the forefront, subsequently creating a militarized society.
Subsequently creating a militarised society
Yup, that’s where we’re heading
The US defense spending is different to ours in that it is economically useful. In short, it enforces the petrodollar, thus forcing everyone to buy dollars, thus everyone pays for their inflation.
And I say the rest of the world should Embargo the US for as long as they continue to threaten world security.
Oh yeah where are you gonna get your oil then, Iran? Hahahahaha
You’re acting like getting oil from Iran is somehow less moral than getting it from the US.
No I’m pointing out that Germany’s decisions about the energy market are driven by its participation in the US system, financialization neocolonialism and sanctions are the priority, not anticorruption, green energy, and industrialism as claimed. Quite the opposite
Canada, Brazil, Norway any OPEC country.
To compare the energy sovereignty issue, this is like believing the US can actually drill enough to become independent from OPEC countries. (Wouldn’t be alone, this was a popular talking point when the call to Drill Baby Drill was sounded!) The whole point of US drilling is to control the oil market. Actually this is a bad example because the US runs the petrodollar system but no Drill Baby Drill and OPEC cannot save Europe now. Opening up to Russia, China, and Iran and going full Asia mode could. The drilling in Norway and Canada you’re talking about is a price management thing. Oil wells that have more limited stores also become far less efficient to extract the more you pump. To say nothing of crap like tar sands lol
We will need a lot less oil in the future. Just one example: in my country the typical way to heat a house in winter was oil. We are now transitioning to heat pumps as fast as we possibly can. Another big consumer of oil are vehicles, which are also transitioning to electric. We will still import oil, of course, but much less. It’s not unreasonable to cut out one or two supplier countries if the demand halves.
demand halves
Stop, I’m going to do a spit take. Look, I would love for Europe to go full solarpunk but that would take sudden growth of industrial capacity beyond its wildest dreams, not maximizing certain tech monopolies and rent seeking in industry. Europe has hitched itself to the US because their dependency relationship (encompassing both US influence and European participation in supply chains mediated by US power, requiring access to undercosted goods from poorer nations) is too important to European political & business leadership to consider industrial development. It’s playing a bad long game because elites can always run somewhere else & they have nothing to do but inherit and die. That’s really the main obstacle here, politics. It feels bad when I hear these common sense solutions combined with neolib premises and jingoism lol, Europe will pass off restrictions on Chinese solar panels, EVs, etc as being sound industrial policy, and you won’t see production increase there or prices drop. Look I may jokingly taunt Euros but it’s almost like you deserve better. Rhetorically you deserve better maybe not karmically
Well you should know from your experience with cutting out Russian oil that a gigantic & cheaper source is not easily replaced! If you think industry there is recovering from that blow to energy prices already you should talk to some pro-Europe people who study this more in-depth, because they’re not happy about it.
All I can say is that Europe doing that would be a huge win for us Asia development fanatics. You’d be handing us your own head on a plate. It’s politically impossible anyways, European access to lucrative trade and finance has all been mediated with US oversight that places them near the top of the food chain. The ruling class the US made rich is not going to bite the hand that feeds them, and Europe isn’t going to depose of its oligarchy overnight. We can dream though
The cheapest, most scalable sources of energy are solar and wind. So the European push has been in two directions, more expensive gas and oil but also, to offset the price issue, more electrification. Granted, it would be great if the right-wing could come to terms with that development rather than trying to block it, either because it sounds vaguely green and different from the past or because they’re actually paid off by Russia to stall any positive development in their home countries.
Lol of course you think it’s Russian infiltration that’s preventing you from taking advantage of solar and wind & not the US, which just got you utterly dependent on its natural gas shipments by increasing the cost of the Russian oil Europe still buys through secondary countries (oil is incredibly easy to launder as it is just grades of hydrocarbons lmfao)
Maybe you should consider what political forces in Europe are aligned against the chief producer of solar and wind technology (China) and whether they were createf by the Russian infiltration your ruling class orders you to attribute all of your problems to (you dutifully comply)
Lol of course you think it’s Russian infiltration
Yeah, lol of course I think that. I watched as Russia tried to pressure Germany with fossil gas, first by running Gazprom Germania’s gas storage low in the winter of 2021/2022, then by progressively cutting off gas flow in the Nord Stream pipelines over the first half of 2022. These pipelines being blown up finally put a hard stop on these tactics, thankfully.
And yeah, lol of course I think that, knowing that various high-ranking CDU/SPD politicians like Kretschmer spend a lot of time trying to popularize the idea of a reopening of Nord Stream while they provably get a lot of mail from Gazprom somehow; knowing that SPD politician Ralf Stegner met ominous Russian fossil executives; knowing that Afd provably gets money from Russia and various Afd politicians give interviews to Russian propaganda outlets; knowing that Afd and Bsw somehow use the same regional bank whose director is known for his friendliness to the Russian regime.
And no, Germany is not mortally dependent on US LNG. LNG as a whole is just the last 10% or so of fossil gas imports in Germany. If our absurdist new government wasn’t quite as irrationally focused on increasing our dependence on fossil gas, we could easily wean ourselves off that in the near future; we already reduced fossil gas usage by 20% in the past three years. The countries we’re now actually dependent on in terms of gas imports are Norway and the Netherlands.
None of that is to say that there’s no influence from US private actors. KKR (an investor in Germany’s largest right-wing publishing house) and Black Rock (former employer of the new chancellor) certainly are major factors. There are also internal strictly domestic factors, such as BASF and Bayer who really like fossil stuff too. In other words, there certainly are colluding fossip interests here; but that doesn’t let Russia off the hook.
You have failed at every level of basic research here lmao Russia was German’s largest provider of all kinds of fossil fuel sources, and what country do you guess is the second largest? Trying to downplay the US as being “only the largest provider of energy” when the prior one had been bringing in three times as much. I mean let’s just not talk about prices at all right? Once we get into prices this is going to be a very bad look for you.
It would quite literally be in Russia’s best interest to have bilateral economic agreements with Germany increasing industrial capacity, geographically these neighboring regions have immense possibilities in rail transit networks for tourism and trade, and this whole division between them suits only Wall St, Brussels, London etc, it’s not in the national interest of Germany at all but the ruling class interest. So I hope that pretending evil spies and not the entire political and business leadership of Germany sold out the green revolution helps you sleep at night. Don’t forget to keep the heat down this winter could be even pricier. That’s not the issue - not being able to make cars and solar panels competitively is the issue
Notice how you count the percentage of natural gas which the US provides, but not the half of Germany’s natural gas that it was getting from Russia. Russia doesn’t have any hand in you destroying your entire industrial capacity because the US told you to. Yes, in this situation losing even 6% of your energy will be crushing because you haven’t yet diversified your energy sources by lowering costs significantly (again industry, which is dependent on labor and energy prices). Cutting out nuclear has made this all even more devastating
“Watched” as in you greedily slopped up everything coming out of the German press about this and repeat it as gospel. You’re truly warped if you’ve convinced yourself that blowing up the pipeline was in German’s national interest. Are you one of Bareback’s goblins or something?
Greenland?
Maybe the swedes are right about the danish…
