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Comment by drumhead | Hacker News Reader

We've entered the era of the nightmare scenario. Under the current US regime, use of Trident cant be guarenteed. We would never have used them independantly before, but with the US abandoning the western alliance and Europe facing Russia alone, that possiblity is more real now than ever before. We either need to develop our own launch capability or cooperate with the French and use theirs.

Whatever happens, we need to break free of the USA for defence procurement.

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Has Europe been in the Western Alliance in the past 2 decades? The US has been shouldering the costs of this alliance while all Europe does is criticize the US while giving empty promises for military investments. This weakness opened the door for Putin to invade Ukraine, something he would never done if Europe had done what it promised. Trump was literally laughed at in Germany when he complained of its reliance on Russian natural gas combined with its weak military investments.

The US has been giving this feedback for over a decade. While I don't necessarily support the President's posture, it took these extreme measures for Europe to start listening. Europe and US are natural allies, but it must be an actual alliance.

What you're advocating entails nuclear proliferation, thus increasing existential risk. This should give you pause and cause you to reflect upon how you arrived at your conclusions.

It’s short sighted to say Europe should spend more on defence. Europe is now going to move away from US weapons and develop its own systems.

That’s a net loss for American defence companies and jobs in the USA. For the US military, costs per unit will go up, because they aren’t mass producing these systems at the same scale.

Trump didn’t just step back from an alliance that existed for 80 years, he also burnt the bridge by destroying trust.

For Europe, it’s probably a good thing to kickstart a new economic recovery, e.g. German automakers can switch to tanks and IFVs.

It very much looks like Europe and US are not allies anymore. I don’t believe there’s a strategy here. I believe that Trump and his electorate are simply much more closely aligned, ideologically speaking, to Russia than to the EU.

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