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Comment by ta20240528 | Hacker News Reader

ta20240528

"The golden prize for America's enemies is to remove the US dollar as a global reserve currency."

I would argue that for this to become even remotely possible, America's list of enemies must not automatically become everyone else's enemies too.

that is to say: the USA's secondary statutes have to become ineffective.

To do this, the EU's blocking statutes (to ignore secondary sanctions) have to be effective. Right now Europe's own companies just ignore the statutes to keep their US trade.

To make the blocking statues effective, the EU's own research recommended fines/sanctions/bans/… on licences for foreign (read US) banks, and companies that ignore the statue and don't serve EU companies trading with sanctioned countries.

But to do that, the EU would need alternatives to American services.

Power and influence follow sovereignty.

€0,02

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Europeans have a lot of alternatives to American services, including building out their own.

What Europeans truly lack is the ability to defend itself without the U.S. They have the technical know how and can build the manufacturing capacity but that will take a decade at least.

Also, European financing is just not as strong.

However, with the U.S. voluntarily walking away from its role as the center of the world, this may not be a problem for too long.

Tech is the easiest service to replace considering American tech workers by insisting on WFH have already largely eliminated the geographical advantages American tech used to have.

Between three and five members of the EU could become nuclear powers complete with delivery systems within a year if there was political will. A couple of them in significantly less than a year. If the EU is truly responsible for its own defense, then it gets to choose how to go about that. There is only one way to do that in the time frame in which it will become necessary.

Nuclear is a bragging tool, but only useful in real war if things are going bad enough that you decide to end the world.

What will take Europe most of a decade is the combination of all the things you really want during war so you are not forced to end the world. Air defense - they have some but not near enough without the US. 5th generation fighter jets. Bombers. A navy - they have some great things but are missing many useful ships. They seem to have enough tanks, but are missing many other parts a modern army needs. And all of the above needs ammunition - they cannot provide Ukraine what is needed 3 years into that war - means they can't scale up to their owns needs if a war were to break out.

Fortunately war with Europe seems unlikely right now, but that can change fast and you need to be ready. Never has a battleship started during a war seen battle in that same war. (I don't know how to verify that claim, but it seems reasonable anyway)

Most of the Iowa class battleships took less than four years from launch to commissioning, so in WW2 your last statement would have been challengeable had the USN not realized the folly of building more BBs.

They were all started before WW2. The Montana class was abandoned - maybe it could have seen service if it was continued but it wasn't. In WW2 battle ships were still king of the ocean - airplanes were showing promise but not yet good enough to replace them (though if the war had gone one just a couple more years they would have)

You mean started before the US involvement in WW2.

And the battleship was definitely NOT the king of the ocean. Carriers quickly took over that role, and aircraft quickly made mincemeat of the best battleships ever built, starting with the destruction of Force Z near Singapore and culminating with the destruction of Yamato and Musashi.

> Nuclear is a bragging tool, but only useful in real war if things are going bad enough that you decide to end the world.

No, it's a deterrent. This is why it's so important that the systems are in place and functional. So they can actually be used, to make sure they never have to.

A deterrent is not like a bragging tool at all.

You don't need a huge navy to battle Russia. It's navy is pretty small (they don't even have a functioning aircraft carrier) and there is anyway a land connection between Europe and Russia.

For fighters I don't think 5th gen is the magic number, you can do well against Russia with more 4th gen, and the generation counter is pretty imprecise anyway, rafale and Gripen are continuously modernized with new software and electronic warfare

Europe has Aster which is a replacement for patriot with similar characteristics. Since the technology exists it should be a small thing to scale up production.

And ammunition has been scaled up since 2022 and every shell used in Ukraina is a shell that does not need to be used in the rest of the countries.

> What Europeans truly lack is the ability to defend itself without the U.S.

Pushing this message is disinformation that has been particularly successful part of the OrangeMan administration.

Europe can defend itself. Combined they have huge military resources and technological replacements for most of what the US can provide.

So - Europe can defend itself. But it prefers to use money, allies and Ukrainian soldiers lives to avoid having to.

The Chinese have alternatives to American services. Europeans could have too if we wanted.

Unless you have a magic lamp, “wanting” is not enough to achieve effective change.

What Europeans need is pragmatic governments and politicians. In fact it might be easier to find a magic lamp than an honest politician.

The TikTok case in US might be a good playbook for the future. Require markets that US based companies have a near monopoly and require them to divest on EU and onshore operations. You solve tech hegemony and tax evasion in no time.

US big tech companies are dominant because they are monopolies not because they are technological marvels.

If we were to ban US social media, European alternatives would emerge very fast.

China has goods and services, but don't underestimate the language barrier for services. Language is a barrier between EU member nations providing each other services, even though machine translation is OK between those languages and most of us learned one of the other nation's languages in school; The gap between Chinese and Latin-Germanic languages is much larger.

I'd give an example, but every time I have previously shown an example of machine translated Chinese to demonstrate that AI is bad at translating English into Chinese, the responses miss the point of the example — criticising the translation whose very errors are meant to demonstrate how bad current AI is.

> Right now Europe's own companies just ignore the statutes to keep their US trade.

If it’s the trade keeping EU companies in line, isn’t the destruction of trade that these tariffs are intended to achieve precisely the kind of thing that will then prevent them from staying in line in the future?

If its like last time, European strategy (ex France maybe) will rise no higher than "let's just try ride out the next four years, then things will go back to normal".

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