First Macron, then Starmer, and now Zelensky.

Listening to some of the Trump and Zelensky interaction. Trump and Vance are just shameless.

Sorry US-ians, wishing bad things for the US kind of. You guys have to get your house in order! A Presidential monarchy is not great. Even taking Trump and Vance at face value, the value of US agreements is purely at the whim of the current President. In under 4 years, it could all change. The are speaking only for themselves.

I think of you look at Poland especially, they aren’t messing around. The UK and France have kept their militaries somewhat up to snuff. Sweden, Finland, the Baltics, lots of other countries are pulling their weight. Germany defence spending is up as well.

Germany’s problem is their procurement is so slow. Europe’s problem is they’ve lost a lot of defence production capacity,and don’t have a lot of surplus taking up space on the shelves. Europe’s even bigger problem is that there are Russian friendly politicians on the inside.

What’s inexcusable to me is that Ukraine is still short of artillery shells. It’s three years in, it’s been long enough to spin up a crash production line, but did I mention procurement is slow? The US has ramped up artillery shell production, but it’s still not enough and Trump will probably ramp that back down.

Europe needs to get the lead out. Maybe there needs to be a Visegrad style group of Hawks, countries with decent military capacity that want to coordinate production.

NATO and the EU have been profoundly beneficial, but in times of crisis like this, the need for consensus can really slow things down. A Visegrad style “Hawks” group of EU+NATO countries might allow the more capable countries to cooperate in filling the power vacuum the US is likely to leave on the world stage.

Their new expansion set…

I don’t think the North Korean soldiers have much choice.

If I were a DPRK soldier sent to Russia, I would be taking notes on how to desert, although Russia and North Korea probably have a decent amount of experience dealing with this, so chances might be slim. Still, I’m thinking the chances look better.

Perun does do great videos. The Canada one he just did stings a bit though. All truth though.

Sounds fair. Everyone back to the pre-2014 borders. Even Stevens.

Oh well, if it might be an official act, then I guess he’s presumptively immune, so no one could possibly investigate.

Seems valid. Declare world peace next!

A wrath that can only be described in a detailed one hour long power-point presentation, with footnotes and references.¹

¹ According to SIPRI Yearbook, 2001

Perun group? Any connection to the PowerPoint YouTuber?

What? Mein Kampf has dislodged Protocols of the Elders of Zion?

Love Perun videos. Started watching this earlier, but stopped. I’ll start it over again from the beginning.

Removed by mod

I’ve been half expecting something like this for a bit. I hadn’t realized about redeployment from the Gaza borders, but it’s just one part of this bigger problem that Netanyahu was making.

Hamas was always going to “Hamas” as it were. I don’t believe there ever can be peace with Hamas (as per Hamas’ own constitution and public statements) but Israel absolutely can increase or decrease the amount of support Hamas can generate. Netanyahu has been more focused on his personal political fortunes rather than the long term health of Israel.

I do think normalizing relations with the surrounding Arab countries is necessary, and Netanyahu has made some progress in this regard, but in the meantime he’s been exploiting the retaliation cycle for short term gain back home.

Yeah, the Gripen is amazing! I suppose it’s not the latest thing in the air, but Sweden has kept it updated, and it’s a solid machine. It is pretty much designed perfectly for what Ukraine is facing.

Correct, it is a spending goal, not a requirement. Or at most a soft requirement. Still, my point still stands, every NATO member on the “frontier” with Russia is meeting or exceeding that 2% goal. They are pulling their own weight. At least from what I recall, the three Baltic nations and Poland are all above the 2% GDP target, and I believe Finland, Romania, and Hungary are or will be as well.

The US and Trumps criticism of “freeloaders” could be seen to apply, but to the countries that aren’t anywhere near the frontlines. I think Luxembourg is less than 1% GDP of spending on military, and Canada is around 1.5%. Trumps criticism, if interpreted generously could be taken to mean that the US wouldn’t help Belgium, but if Belgium is invaded, there’s something big going wrong.

Realistically, Trump’s weak assertions would seem to signal that he doesn’t care if Latvia is pulling its weight, because it’s a small country and small countries deserve to be get eaten by bigger countries. This uncertainty is what would seem to have rattled European NATO countries and reignited the effort for a collective EU defence framework.

The other thing that bugs me with Americans whinging about “NATO freeloaders” is that Article 5, the collective defence clause, has been invoked once in the entire history of NATO. By the US after 9/11. And everyone stepped up. The US can complain about Canada’s military spending, but Canadian soldiers that were fighting and dying alongside the Americans in Afghanistan. It’s a bit rich coming from Trump, bone-spurs himself, that other NATO countries aren’t pulling their own weight.

I’m pretty sure that most of the solid anti-war protestors would expect Ukraine to just accept Russian territorial demands, up to and including complete annexation.

It turns into a reductio ad absurdum pretty quickly though. Putin didn’t seem to return Crimea or the occupied regions of Donbass and Luhansk when asked politely. Not even when asked sternly. Indeed, it would seem that when all he faced was stern disapproval he decided to come back for more.

There is no doubt in my mind that supporting Ukraine now is stopping more Russian aggression later. Besides, Putin can end this war any time. Just go back to the original borders. The only reason not to is his yearning for Imperial glory. The irony being that many of these anti-war protestors would probably proclaim themselves anti-colonialists.

It’s diplomacy though. Some things are better said behind closed doors as it were.

Going back to Cold War brinksmanship, the point of NATO was to loudly say that you were ride-or-die, go-to-the-wall with all your NATO homies. It made the risk of messing with NATO countries too high, likewise with the Warsaw Pact.

Now would all NATO allies go all in? 100%, all the way? Who can say with certainty. Still, so far there’s only been one US president who has said… it depends. For the record, Trump walked that back, but it certainly got a lot of NATO countries closer to Russia to quickly point out that they were over the NATO 2% GDP commitment.

Still, Article 5 has been invoked once in NATO’s history, and it was by the US. It’s why Canada was in Kandahar, Netherlands in Helmand, etc. Too my recollection, every single NATO country participated in Afghanistan at the US’s request.

Also, every NATO country on the frontier (as it were) is well over the NATO 2% GDP minimum. The three Baltic countries, Poland, the UK and the US have been over the 2% GDP minimum for a while. Finland is already well past that before joining, and I believe several more countries will hit the goal in 2023.

Trump’s presidency certainly showed that the US is one election away from balking. I’m pretty sure that’s Putin’s plan in Ukraine now.

Trump just wanted everyone to spend more on the military. He wasn’t a threat to nato.

Not US-ian, so I’m going to have to disagree hard. Back in 2016 and 2017 he called NATO “obsolete”, although he later changed his mind and said it was “no longer obsolete”, as well as taking a while to affirm US support for Article 5, and even saying “If they fulfill their obligations to us, the answer is yes,” when asked if the US would defend the Baltic NATO countries.

Now you could argue that he was using this to push the NATO defence spending requirements, which is a fair critique, but it sent a pretty clear message that under his presidency, the US honouring article 5 was conditional. This wasn’t just a message to the other NATO members; it was a message to Putin as well whether intentional or not.

I believe that the silver lining of Trump’s presidency is now being felt as Europe is seriously taking it’s ability to autonomously defend itself seriously. This is probably why Petr Pavl is musing that it may be necessary to go beyond NATO’s 2% spending targets, because Trump could get elected again, or someone like Trump, and there could always be more conditions added to US NATO commitments.