Luckily Danish didn't have Huawei equipments, otherwise it wouldn't be possible. Tell me one reason Chinese is building a first world class technology company just to be found out for spying on customers and doomed to be out of business.
You cannot live connected to the net without presumption that the security body of one or more of these has access to your data, and will trawl through this data with impunity.
The only thing you can do is to hedge your bets on which political entity has the most unencumbered access. So either US, China or the local neighborhood friendly authoritarian state security service.
I would imagine everybody of importance in the west presumes NSA listens to them, politely ignore this and just turn off their phones when they don't want to be eavesdropped.
It sucks that either I have to go full edward-snowden-harden-my-kit way, or then just not care about my privacy. I'm a bit lazy and not that idealistic and hence choose the latter.
It’s not nonsense, it’s the current situation. I am not saying Europe would not have the capability to do the things you said theoretically. Pragmatically there is no such capability at the moment. EU is a trade and subsidies -body at the moment. Security is handled by individual member states and by Nato.
The problem is there is no geopolitcal credible entity called ”Europe” - just a bunch of member states.
To gauge EU:s capability level in security at the moment - take the latest Belorussian stunt. Imagine what the US response would have been if KGB had hijacked a plane flying from Miami to New York.
Your example, of course, is much closer to the percieved outrage level.
I have no idea how US would specifically react, but the response likely would have been chosen to a) discourage future actions of the sort and b) to appease angry voters.
Also, Cuba is already quite cordoned off, while Belarus has been part of the international community (they got to co-host Hockey wordl championships 2021).
The EU response felt like "as a geopolitical entity, what is the bare minimum effort to save our diplomatic face".
The lack of voter interest in EU is most critical, I think. I can't find any popular EU citizen sentiment of outrage over the matter. Which means, for all purposes, it's obvious the voting public has no "global eu consciousness" and hence EU is after this again geopolitically that much less credible IMHO.
Could it be because majority of citizens don't use English as their native language / the one used to talk politics?
What EU lacks is offensive overseas operation support, but EU actually doesn’t need that. It is wild fantasy from the most extreme EU supporters who want to build a US replica.
What is the biggest threat to EU/Europe today? Definitely not Russia. Russia is just finishing the Nordstream2 pipeline, sanctions just lifted by the Biden administration, that will increase the capacity of the already existing pipeline between Russia and Germany. Russia wants to sell natural gas to many European countries.
What we are going to see the next few years is the opposite, a closer integration between Russia and EU economies, especially between Russia and Germany.
You could just as well say "Not wanting it is a wild fantasy from the most extreme RT supporters who don't care if the EU is overrun by dictatorships on its eastern borders".
> What is the biggest threat to EU/Europe today? Definitely not Russia. Russia is just finishing the Nordstream2 pipeline,
Precisely that is probably the biggest threat to EU/Europe today.
> sanctions just lifted by the Biden administration,
Maybe Unca Joe really is going senile.
> that will increase the capacity of the already existing pipeline between Russia and Germany. Russia wants to sell natural gas to many European countries.
Yes, it wants to have them all...
> What we are going to see the next few years is the opposite, a closer integration between Russia and EU economies,
...by the balls -- not just, but of course:
> especially between Russia and Germany.
Why does EU sanction Poland, one of the few NATO members that does fulfill its 2% goal and have beefed up it's military against potential Russian aggression, or is that Russia's fault too?
Was it Swedish politicians that downsized the Swedish military so much that it now only can defend one place in Sweden for a week (en-veckas-försvaret, ~ one week defense) or was i Putin?
Was it Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel who opened the EU borders in 2015, which directly lead to a number of terrorist attacks, or was it Putin who did that?
Was it NATO and EU that toppled Libya's dictator Gaddafi, which created a terrorist hotbed just across the Mediterranean, or was it Russia?
If you know the answers to these questions you also know what the biggest threat is.
What has happened in the west is that governments used to work for its citizenry, now they work against them, e.g. the surveillance state.
But if the biggest threat must be a foreign power, let's think about it,
How many every day items do Europeans use that is manufactured in Russia?
How many every day items do Europeans use that is manufactured in China?
Why did the European establishment class outsource manufacturing to a hostile communist dictatorship?
Please explain why Russia is the biggest threat, you haven't come up with any good counterarguments yet. The potential threat of withholding future natural gas deliveries when all the pipelines are completed is not going to be that effective, because European energy sector is much more diverse and larger than Ukraine's, an old failed ex Soviet state with bad infrastructure.
And when we are talking about bad infrastructure, is it Putin pulling the strings or the Swedish Social democrats and Green government that can't provide sufficient power infrastructure to all places in Sweden?
One of the leading brexiteer cries was: "The EU wants to make an Army", so that should tell you that the concept is greatly disliked since it's a core argument _against the EU itself_.
I live in Sweden now and there is a growing anti-EU sentiment here. How do you explain to someone who doesn't like NATO and the concept of the EU that they should join an EU army?
That does not ring true to me. Care to back up that claim with a source?
https://sd.se/our-politics/eu/
https://www.politico.eu/article/sweden-election-2018-results...
But I live in Malmo and see stickers popping up against the EU, I hear from the Swedish workers who have replaced the electrics and plastered the walls in my apartment about how bad the EU is and that Britain did the right thing (I'm british, which is why they came out with it).
I mean, "SWEXIT" is definitely something on the rise.
https://www.expressen.se/debatt/kasta-in-eu-handduken-och-bi...
But maybe this is not in Stockholm or the other major cities, I would even say Malmo itself does not have an appetite for breaking up with the EU, but the surrounding Skane region definitely has a stronger anti-immigrant and anti-EU sentiment.
But that was true for Brexit too, London was quite opposed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_2016_United_Kin...
"SWEXIT" This is the first time I've heard this term. Is it on the rise? I see no proof of it.
Your link to Expressen news outlet is an opinion piece and does not prove your original claim.
2) Actually, come to think of it: You hadn't heard of it; now you have. How's that for it being "on the rise", huh?
3) "Sweden should leave the EU!" is a matter of opinion. Where the heck else would you expect to find proof of its rise, if not in opinion pieces?
You can see it for me here: https://i.imgur.com/yOYpyEH.png
I believe you were downvoted because I cited a prominent anti-EU party that is gaining popularity and you decided to just dismiss it, which is intellectually dishonest.
If there was no other argument, this would be enough to claim "anti-EU sentiment is on the rise" as it is a _core_ policy of their party and featured prominently on their website; in fact it's the only policy that has it's own link in the top banner, a vote for SD is a vote against the EU. Unequivocally.
Of course my experiences with people from the Skane region are anecdotes, and you could have argued that point, but you didn't.
You instead chose to point out that the article I selected was an opinion piece, and claimed your own anecdote that you had never heard of "SWEXIT".
If you would prefer I can walk the streets of Malmo and look for anti-EU stickers, there are many. But I can't convince you of this I don't think.
We don't poll people on EU sentiment, in fact the last vote that Sweden had on it was 27 years ago and "become an EU member" won at only 52% of the vote or something.
The 2003 referendum on joining the euro resulted in the murder of a politician, though I'm not entirely sure that's related to the referendum, only that it affected the referenum.
It's absolutely fair to say the Swedish people are not entirely unified on their vision of the EU.
IC. Did not realize this until now. My apologies for that baseless claim.
"It's absolutely fair to say the Swedish people are not entirely unified on their vision of the EU."
Always has been. Your original claim was: "anti-EU support is on the rise". I argue this is a baseless claim.
But you argue that on even less evidence than he does. He has at least some anecdotal evidence; you have presented none at all.
Of course, unless you choose to revolutionize and destroy the old political framework.
I stopped reading there.
I did not imply this in the "clash of civilizations" sense of inevitable conflict, but just to higlight the cultural alignment within the said block.
I meant "roughly the polities that signed the treaty of Westphalia and their later date offspring plus the five-eyed anglosphere". This is what we consider the modern "west", isn't it?
AFAIK, there is no actual evidence about Huawei spying with its 5G equipment.