Hacker News Reader

Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

EU countries already have a large military in absolute terms - it's just a lot smaller than the US or China. My question is why the EU would want to challenge the US or China - neither who are realistic direct threats.

Similar to how China appears to have decided that it doesn't need the huge numbers of nuclear weapons that the US and Russia have.

View on HN

In order to have free trade with Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, etc. US is using their military force to contain China. In order to do so, their military forces have to be superior to China's. If EU wants to "go alone" and not rely on US power, they would need to do that themselves (or be content to not trade with a lot of the world, where they cannot project military power).

Same with Middle East. Clearly there are competitors for local energy resources - e.g. Russia, increasingly China as well - as well as tensions in the region (e.g. Iran vs Saudi Arabia). EU depends on that energy, so protecting it is a matter of "national security". Currently, EU is relying on the US to maintain that.

I'm not personally convinced that the military involvement of the US has been a net benefit to the stability of the Middle East over the last few decades.

It sure has not. The only stability from this, is the rate of bombs dropping.

I find it quite odd thinking the EU has enough of a military when they de-facto get slowly invaded year on year without doing anything or even attempting to put up a border. Let's not be politically correct here at the expense of civil/safe society. The EU has been welcoming an invasion force for decades, and it's causing absolute havoc and making the EU turn into a specific term that Trump called a lot of countries recently with much media outrage.

Ukraine is not in the EU and I wouldn't say the invasion there started 'decades' ago though I don't remember exactly when the war started, must have been after Maidan

I don't think zo1 is referring to that.... :-)

Normally immigration is not what people are thinking of when they use the term “invasion”.

Of course - I agree fully, immigration is a wonderful thing! My comment is rather around "concerted illegal immigration".

The US has far more illegal immigrants than the EU?

https://www.cato.org/blog/illegal-immigrants-europe

Not to mention the fact that the USA is the #1 CAUSE of illegal immigration, i.e. war refugees.

Living in Europe, I have seen a lot more war refugees than there should be. The immigrants, I am fine with - Europe is resilient. But America's war victims streaming in cross the Balkans: Americans need to understand their own culpability in that situation. They really don't, however.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com