The EU thread

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Much depends to what extent our politicians are capable of taking the big decisions rather than cucking themselves for the  orange utang in the white house.

Playtime is over, but much of Europe (and that includes its citizens) doesn't seem to have gotten the memo.

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Beware the Europe You Wish For
The Downsides and Dangers of Allied Independence
Celeste A. Wallander
July/August 2025
Published on June 24, 2025

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/guest-pass/redeem/JZlfvFLrdKA

hopefully this works

[The Minsky Moment]

So apparently the US National Security Strategy calls for:

• Pulling Poland, Austria, Hungary, and Italy away from the EU.
• Forming a new grouping of countries - the C5 - consisting of the US, Russia, India, China, and Japan as an alternative to the G7 (and unconstrained by G7 rules).

Link here: https://notesfrompoland.com/2025/12/10/fuller-version-of-trump-security-strategy-reportedly-calls-for-pulling-poland-away-from-eu/

It's a Russian wet dream.  An English translation and touch up of something that could have come right out of the Kremlin.

The idea of Russia being of the world's five powers steering the global economy is utterly laughable; their economy is barely larger than to Mexico. It's smaller than Canada.

The US national security establishment has become a straight-up mouthpiece for Kremlin propaganda.  It's heartbreaking to see.

[Jacob]

Much depends to what extent our politicians are capable of taking the big decisions rather than cucking themselves for the  orange utang in the white house.

Playtime is over, but much of Europe (and that includes its citizens) doesn't seem to have gotten the memo.

---------------

Beware the Europe You Wish For
The Downsides and Dangers of Allied Independence
Celeste A. Wallander
July/August 2025
Published on June 24, 2025

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/guest-pass/redeem/JZlfvFLrdKA

hopefully this works

It worked, reading it now. Thanks

[Jacob]

It's a Russian wet dream.  An English translation and touch up of something that could have come right out of the Kremlin.

The idea of Russia being of the world's five powers steering the global economy is utterly laughable; their economy is barely larger than to Mexico. It's smaller than Canada.

The US national security establishment has become a straight-up mouthpiece for Kremlin propaganda.  It's heartbreaking to see.

IMO, it shows the value of seriously investing in influence operations. Russia has - I think - put much more concerted effort into wooing influential individuals (Murdoch, Musk, Orban, etc etc), financing allied parties, and pioneering online internet influence operations.

By any rational metric, Russia does not belong at that table. Except the one metric that lots of influential parties and individuals feel it serves their own interest to act as if Russia does belong at that table.

[HisMajestyBOB]

Russia is absolutely winning the influence game. Social media, and our unwillingness to do shit about anything, will be the West's downfall.

[Sheilbh]

Trouble I see is there are European firms operating I most of those spaces.
Eutelsat, STmicroelectronics... But these tend to be also rans at best. Something is stopping them ever reaching the heights of the American companies.
When we do get genuine world leaders like Arm, we sell them off.

Yeah I like the idea but the lack of support and capital for building up is a big challenge, plus Europe is the only part of the world that genuinely, ideologically, naively believed in the "liberal rules based order". So until recently we didn't block takeovers. I think that has shifed a bit - see the recent kerfuffle over Nexperia in the Netherlands (and interestingly the Chinese firm involved tried to buy a British chips firm and was, after a big campaign, blocked by Johnson's government on national security grounds for fears it would try to do exactly what it seems to have been doing with Nexperia).

But also over-regulation and risk averseness is a real problem in this area. I think the EU understanding of itself as a "regulatory superpower" means it sees regulation as an end in itself. Particularly in the context of digital stuff and particularly after the experience of GDPR which was a ground- breaking piece of law which was copied (with adaptations) by jurisdictions all over the world.

The EU keeps chasing that high and passing very sweeping tech regulations. I've mentioned before but I was at a conference recently with other European tech lawyers and a knowledge lawyer from one of the law firms did a slide of upcoming EU tech regulations and there was an audible groan. There's a huge volume of regulation coming down the pline and we already deal with a lot in this area.

In part I think it is precisely because Europe doesn't have those companies that we instead "lead" by regulating. Thierry Breton who was the Commissioner in charge of the AI Act made this point. He basically said that lots of EU institutions and politicians were celebrating the fact that the EU had passed the world's first general AI law, but that it is very much second prize to actually having European AI companies. He called for massive investment annd building of sovereign digital infrastructure - and in fairness Mistral AI is French and good (but it's the only one off the top of my head). A lot of the European institutions I think are fundamentally more comfortable regulating the American and Chinese companies providing the services than creating a looser, riskier regulatory context in which European coumpanies could more easily experiment.

I also think as well as the slight high on their own supply approach post-GDPR it sort of goes to the nature of European politics. Because it relies so much on "output" legitimacy it is normally framed around doing "something" - that is the mark of being effective in European politics and in part that there isn't a European demos politics can appeal to or make their case to.