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Comment by DarkWiiPlayer | Hacker News Reader

Excuse me? Germany tries buying gas from Russia and the USA sanctions the fuck out of companies that are even just marginally involved in it.

As for innovation, that's relative. Europe, for centuries, was the undisputed worldwide leader in innovation, now that has shifted a bit to the USA and seems to be on its way to shift to China or maybe India in the next few decades.

There's also the problem that Europe can't really focus on organizing itself in a self-sufficient manner because there's still separatists bitching about everything and always screaming for separation instead of forcing governments to address issues, and the impending rise of fascism in east-europe that may or may not become a huge deal for the rest of the 2020es. The USA has this problem as well, but to a far lesser degree.

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The whole gas thing is classic Diplomacy through Trade. Similarly for continuing to abide by the treaty with Iran to the degree possible while avoiding sanctions across the whole financial system.

Concrete example of European reliance on the US.

  1. NATO
  2. The US Fed for liquidity in the EU banking system
  3. Acquisition market for companies
  4. AWS, Azure, GCE, DO
  5. Netflix

My take is that cultural boundaries will erode once it becomes clear the prevailing cultural identity throughout Europe is not French, German, West or East, but unemployed millennial onward. As you say, it will be interesting to see how this turns out.

I partly agree with those points.

1. There's still a narrative here in Germany that the big bad USA / trump is wrong for demanding we spend money on our military when we literally signed a contract agreeing to do just that. At the same time, we're in a bit of a unique position where our defence is also in the best interest of the USA.

4. Yes, technological reliance on the USA when it comes to the internet is amazing and terrifying at the same time. Mind you, there is no lack of European alternatives, but somehow these big companies injected a brand-oriented culture into the web-development world on a scale I'd usually expect to see in regards to clothing, not software.

I'll risk sounding ellitist, but I do believe this only works because of the recent influx of newcomers to the world of web and their mentality of doing only what gets them employed. This is a way bigger problem that I could write many pages about, but in this context the important detail is that these people often choose to learn products rather than methodologies, buzzwords and brands rather than theory and logical principles.

> Germany tries buying gas from Russia and the USA sanctions the fuck out of companies that are even just marginally involved in it.

Good! Russia is an enemy.

Why?

Why? The Cold War is over.

Russia still wants to dominate Eastern Europe and must be opposed. The US is an excellent partner in that, much better than Western EU.

Exactly; when there was a clash of civilizations between a free west and a repressive soviet union; it made sense that Russia was the enemy.

Now it is just a conflict between different European powers with varying levels of dysfunctional democracy and corrupt elites.

So what is the basis for hating the Russians now; racism?

Yeah I’m fine with framing it like this. It’s just run of the mill geopolitical conflict. Calling Russians “the enemy” today is just shallow and lazy.

Russians are not the enemy, Russia is the enemy.

And this is based on Putin's foreign policy towards smaller neighbors that it historically controlled.

Putin and his policy of destabilization of the West, from financing Brexit supporters, to poisoning his political opponents.

Russia's whole political culture is the one of conquest. Their ambition was pretty much always to conquer as much of Europe and Asia as possible, and the mindset haven't changed in XXI century - neither among elites nor among common folk. They're still pretty much a typical XIX century empire, they didn't yet go the shift to focusing on economic domination that UK, Germany, US, Japan went through since.

> The Cold War is over.

I would have agreed literally with that statement fifteen years ago. Since then, however, the trends in Russia towards state control over independent press, the politicisation of sports and culture, the blurring of lines not to be crossed (e.g. the annexation of Crimea) and overall clinching of Kremlin power at all costs have made lots of people in Europe worried.

I also wouldn't say "Russia is the enemy", for a number of reasons: first of all, it's not true; secondly, it's not helpful; and thirdly, it obviously breeds distrust and antagonism not only between states but between individual people.

But tensions have obviously been rising, and we are not in the pleasant situation we saw 20 years ago when Russia seemed to be heading towards democracy and increased international cooperation. The current regime in Russia, with its increasingly authoritarian and nationalistic pursuits and somewhat erratic foreign politics, has certainly been feeding those tensions. It would be disingenuous to claim it hasn't.

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