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”I'll give it 10-20 years before there's a major decoupling even between the US and Europe.”

I am originally from Germany and I think the main obstacle for this decoupling will be the reluctance of Europe to take defense into their own hands. When things get tough they so far always have relied on the US. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

I still live in Germany and I can echo your concerns.

The majority of society has zero interest in doing military service, no respect for people serving in the military at best, to downright hostility at worst, as urban myths and clichés (like that the Bundeswehr is just for racist nutjobs) go largely unchallenged (it is by far and large more ethnically diverse than say most IT departments).

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a good thing that we aren’t a militarist country.

But the reason for us being able to afford this kind of luxury is US protection.

And thus it doesn’t matter how much some Germans are annoyed with the US, this social shunning of military service is not going anywhere.

You get what you pay for. Or not...

I remember when the war in Yugoslavia went on. This was clearly a European thing but in the end it was the Americans that did the dirty work while the Europeans did a lot of talking but no action.

Every NATO member plus a whole bunch more was involved in that.

Only after the US went first.

Accurate. Much like how Sarkozy really wanted to bomb Libya but nothing actually happened until Hilary and Obama decided to do it.

French people were opposed to that idiotic intervention, just like the ones in Iraq and Syria. Sarkozy was not re-elected (for this and many other reasons).

So what do you deduct from that fact?

"We bombed the hell out of Vietnam while the surrounding countries did nothing!"

I deduce that even when a country commits atrocities in Europe European nations won’t do anything on their own. Or let’s say Russia invaded Poland they wouldn’t do anything either.

Your deduction is correct. Another more recent example is when America destabilized Ukraine. Predictably, we had no interest in that business either.

> as urban myths and clichés (like that the Bundeswehr is just for racist nutjobs

Is it really clichés when there's plenty of evidence for it? Remember that "neo-Nazi doomsday prepper group" from June [0]? Those guys turned out largely to be police and soldiers.

It's reached a point where the Bundeswehr considers discharging the soldiers who blow the whistle on the problem [1], instead of having to admit having one.

[0] https://www.dw.com/en/german-neo-nazi-doomsday-prepper-netwo...

[1] https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2019-05/recht...

Have you ever met actual people serving in the German military? There are whole teams/cells that communicate to each other in turkish-german or russian.

The truth is, in a society like the German, where 50% of high school graduates want to go to university, it's usually just the lower classes to down-right underclass that even consider the military as a career-path.

Alas, apart from white-trash Germans it is a lot of immigrants that you'll find there.

Indeed, I’m sure it would be impossible to find 20 hours of footage of Members of the Left or the Greens saying racist things. Certainly it would be beyond the bounds of possibility to find a group of German IT professionals being incredibly racist. That could never happen. /s

> Indeed, I’m sure it would be impossible to find 20 hours of footage of Members of the Left or the Greens saying racist things

That's a whole other category than people hoarding weapons for some "day X", or members of the police equating police having to identify themselves (not by name, with a number) to citizens with Jews having to wear a yellow star [0], and dozens of other things, is just not even remotely in the same ballpark than "members of the Left" saying racist things. If one belittles the issue of Nazi networks in Germany going back to the 1940s, still murdering, with all the weird stuff happening to witnesses, all the failures to investigate -- that's orders of magnitude worse than a racist slur, to anyone who knows and cares about the actual situation.

Back to the military though, remember Horst Köhler resigning for basically quoting from the manual of the Bundeswehr? [1]

> a country of our size needs to be aware that where called for or in an emergency, military deployment, too, is necessary if we are to protect our interests such as ensuring free trade routes or preventing regional instabilities which are also certain to negatively impact our ability to safeguard trade, jobs and income.

The relevant Bundeswehr document at that time, from 2006:

https://www.bundeswehr.de/resource/resource/MzEzNTM4MmUzMzMy...

> Deutschland, dessen wirtschaftlicher Wohlstand vom Zugang zu Rohstoffen, Waren und Ideen abhängt, hat ein elementares Interesse an einem friedlichen Wettbewerb der Gedanken, an einem offenen Welthandelssystem und freien Transportwegen.

which translates to

> Germany, whose economic prosperity depends on access to raw materials, goods and ideas, has a fundamental interest in a peaceful competition of ideas, an open world trade system and free transport routes.

So basically, the German president had to leave for openly stating what is official doctrine, and people pretended that it isn't. I wonder what would happen to a little grunt who saw or said the wrong things, or said too plainly what the naked emperor support crowd covers up in bloated, dishonest language.

[0] https://twitter.com/vonDobrowolski/status/117832343007413043...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horst_K%C3%B6hler#Resignation

I’m not sure what your point is. Could you clarify it for me please? On the one hand you seem to be saying that there are networks of no shit actual Nazis in positions of power in Germany and that they have some organizational continuity with post war real Nazis. This seems unlikely, if only because the Stasi would definitely have infiltrated them and exposed them at some point for a propaganda coup.

As to the Bundeswehr document and Horst Köhler that does seem insane. If German polite society makes the President reign for saying something that anodyne they might as well abolish the military and declare themselves a protectorate, whether of France or the US.

> On the one hand you seem to be saying that there are networks of no shit actual Nazis in positions of power in Germany and that they have some organizational continuity with post war real Nazis.

To this day neo-Nazis are vandalizing Holocaust memorials with slogans like "Hans Steinbrenner did nothing wrong!", the NSU [0] was murdering and bombing their way trough Germany for years, while being in close contact with the German Verfassungsschutz, who actually organized their murder weapon and has a long and nasty history of financing these kinds of networks.

The files about that particular case have either been shredded (which was freely admitted) or are now locked up for 150 years. Turns out the same VfS guy who was in contact with the NSU, was also responsible for the guy who recently went on a shooting spree in Halle.

The worst terrorist attack in post-WWII Germany? The Octoberfest bombing of 1980 [1], committed by a right-wing nutjob, they even shot cops when those dare to go after their guns [1]. We've reached a point where they are openly marching on their old Nürnberg parading grounds [2].

> This seems unlikely, if only because the Stasi would definitely have infiltrated them and exposed them at some point for a propaganda coup.

The Stasi was only a thing in the GDR when Germany was still split in two, the two halves only reunified in the 90s.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Underground

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oktoberfest_bombing

[2] https://www.dw.com/en/germany-torch-wielding-neo-nazis-march...

You are vastly underestimating Marcon's drive to fill the US American shaped power vacuum that emerges with a French-German filler.

Just like you are completely disregarding the possibility that Russia and Europe might end up on better terms out of sheer practicality.

Because that whole narrative about the Russian boogeyman, barely kept at bay due to US presence, is one that's mostly based on fiction, and not actual real politics.

Even Putin knows that a broke and war-torn Western Europe makes for bad customers for Russian gas, which is among the very few things still keeping the Russian economy alive.

>> If this continues I'll give it 10-20 years before there's a major decoupling even between the US and Europe.

Read Robert Kaplan’s book on this topic of decoupling (Marco polos world). In many ways it’s already happening.

Regards to the Gaia effort, I’ve worked with a number of Europe based tech companies in and I find no lack of skills or innovation relative to the US. In fact, I’d say when you combine London, Dublin, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Oslo, Paris, Frankfurt, Berlin and many other markets in Europe, the tech world is more widely distributed and as innovative if not more than the US market. A big part of this reason is that you have many small teams working across borders and cultures. Europe is not just the EU. For example, Norway, while it mirrors EU policy is still separate. Brexit could further diversify Europe from a regulatory landscape. What I see in the end is a place where cooperation, integration and small team competition is healthy and good for the overall marketplace. Could a Gaia effort make that better? I have my doubts... but why not give it a go? What’s wrong with having another approach added to the mix? That’s not to say there won’t be a reason for google, Microsoft and amazon in Europe... they’ve made massive investments there already and probably will continue to do so.

As for a decoupling, I think it is happening but I don’t think it’s for the worse. The worlds order is reshaping and I think while there always will be a friendly Atlantic partnership, it won’t necessarily need to be supported by traditional alliances like NATO.

>>> the US has been shown to be willing to use its economic leverage for political ends over the recent few years

> The entity list program against Chinese companies, the pressure on Europe to reject Huawei infrastructure (and accompanying threats in particular when it comes to natsec data sharing)

A couple points 1) political ends aren't necessarily bad ends, and 2) it's hard for me to view much of the Huawei stuff as pursuit of a "short-term or one sided" goal, given there are no American competitors for much of the Huawei equipment at issue.

Has this mostly been a Trump thing? Or was it going this direction before him?

I was going to comment about Trump and Brexit showing us how quickly things can change in a democracy. But I'm too ignorant to know if that's a fair analysis of the situation.

This has been long coming. At least 15 years ago I was at a global Cisco conference and I met the regional manager for emea and Northern Africa. His biggest hurdle was getting companies in his region to buy from a US vendor. In contrast, China would show up with loans, equipment, services and it was not just a company, but a team effort. We often see things through the perspective of the Cold War where Western Europe was effectively a satellite state of the United States. It ceased to be that when the Berlin Wall came down. Historically Europe has had stronger ties with its eastern partners (don’t forget the whole reason Colombus even came to America in the first place was to find a route to eastern markets). So it would not surprise me in the least that Europe would over time revert to its historical alignment regardless of who the American president is.

I have no idea what relevance trade history from hundreds of years ago has to modern geopolitics and economic globalization.

Historically, Europeans didn’t know North America even existed and the USA wasn’ta country

The very same economic globalization that turns out to be rather destructive to the environment?

I wonder if such problems might not end up forcing us to reconsider our trading priorities to account more for geographical distance, instead of just taking that as a given.

The US seems to be geographically closer to Europe than China, so I'm not sure how this point would make Europe choose China over the US.

I don’t think I said anything about physical proximity.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/06/china-new-silk-road-e...