I found this on Reddit and I read the whole thing, I thought it was interesting.
The author argues in favour of greater European independence on defence (and less dependence on the US). The article is a year old but I think it’s still relevant.
The author is apparently a journalist with France 24, a French state-owned media company, so you could say that makes him biased in favour of the French position. But I think he still makes valid points.
Thank you for the article. It really feels like the future is unpredictable right now. It feels like it’s come out of nowhere, yet this has also been the endgame of a large group of people that have worked on this for decades.
As a modestly educated American, I understand it would be tone deaf to tell you what you should do in this thread, so I will just give you a first hand account of what it is like here.
1 - As an American, I no longer trust America to keep me safe. This goes doubly true as a liberal and as someone whose best friends are LGBT.
2 - The proposed Republican agenda includes dismantling our education system and rebuilding it as more ethnocentric. I can confidently state that already, probably half my fellow citizens could not point out any continental EU country, possibly besides Italy since it is on half the pizza boxes. If people here can’t even point out France or Germany on a map, how much do you think they really care about you?
Treating us as anything you can rely on with any certainty right now seems insane to me. If you think we’ll be anything more than someone that only bothers to call you when they want something from you but then is always too busy when you need something from them, then you are going to be in for a bad time.
If anything, the sane ones here may even need to rely on you again In the near future, depending on how bad things actually get.
Why the fuck would that be the case. Comes off as patronising, infantilising, “oh your minds are so feeble and gullible I cannot possibly state my opinion without influencing you unduly”. Nah mate we’re perfectly capable of telling you to sod off when you’re spouting bollocks.
American geography education is terrible but I think a majority of Americans could point out the western nations at least, the balkans and baltics are probably a lost cause though unless you happen to get a paradox game enjoyer
I wouldn’t put money on it myself. I don’t say it as an insult even, it just has such little to do with daily life here that any knowledge they did have quickly falls into the “lose it” of “use it or lose it” memory.
I won the school geography tournament twice and watch lots of history documentaries and even I struggle to remember countries that came into being after the mid 90s when I finished highschool.
But my point wasn’t to bring up how ignorant people here are, just that we have not in any type of recent history ever prioritized Europe in any way that is very beneficial to Europeans. If it is something we consider to not impact us, I don’t think many worry about it.
We’re at a place where a third of us want to be good global citizens, a third want to burn everything down, and a third just want cheaper goods and services, and this time around that last third felt the arsonists were going to give them that enough to elect them.
Fair points. You’ve reminded me of what was said by Bonnie Greer on British TV the other night (she’s an American/British author, originally from Chicago). She was saying how Trump is just a transactional businessman who is only interested in what other parties (such as Europe) can do for him.
Even worse, he’s a bad businessman. The kind you would not do business with unless you are trying to suck up to him for one reason or another. He famously does not honour his contracts.
So it’s not even transactional in a functional sense. He’s just a conman.