On January 18, 2026, tragedy struck Spain’s Córdoba province when two high-speed trains collided, claiming at least 39 lives and injuring hundreds. The crash, which took place on one of Europe’s busiest rail corridors, Madrid-Seville, has caused immense disruption for travelers, especially tourists planning to visit southern Spain
EU discussion / and other European countries
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Note sure why the IRYO left the tracks. Hopefully the outcome will be safer trains.
Spain has a terrific rail network so this is a big setback.
Spain has a terrific rail network so this is a big setback.
Wouldn’t rule out sabotage based on the photos of the damage of the track. We’ve seen eerily similar stuff by Russian agents in other European countries - luckily it was noted before and didn’t result in tragedy.
The track was renovated in 2025 so material fatigue and such stuff seems unlikely. Terrible tragedy
Not sure about that. A mistake while doing the renovation also could be possible. You can't escape the statistics of the bathtub curve...
Of course it’s possible, but judging by the photos of the damage it looks pretty unlikely to have happened due to “natural causes”, though of course majority of people will always prefer the more convenient and soothing explanation… let’s wait for a thorough investigation
Portuguese media saying they've excluded human error.
If they have then they know the cause.
It was very unlikely to begin with but I wonder how open they will be in admitting it seems very much orchestrated with very obvious links to one actor
Another train crash in Spain. One killed and 39 injured.
Feck
Adif, the railway infrastructure company, is a complete disaster, riddled with government cronyism. This includes the former Minister of Transport, Ábalos, now under investigation for corruption, and Koldo.
There had been warnings about a lack of maintenance for months, and now it seems they are also lying, both about the causes and about how they reacted to the accident. In the end, we’ll be left without ever knowing what really happened, just like with the blackout a few months ago.
There had been warnings about a lack of maintenance for months, and now it seems they are also lying, both about the causes and about how they reacted to the accident. In the end, we’ll be left without ever knowing what really happened, just like with the blackout a few months ago.
Trump saying he's holding all the cards when threatening Europe if they dump the US debt....it's obvious what needs to happen now.
Carney's showed them how, now let's see them do it.
And if Orban says ANYTHING out of line then off with his head.
Carney's showed them how, now let's see them do it.
And if Orban says ANYTHING out of line then off with his head.
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The heck?
This is bizarre. How do 4 trains catastrophically fail in 5 days.
In most of the world this is like once a year at the worst.
Cyber warfare. Sabotage.
Could be a somewhat extreme situation of weather problems & bad maintenance manifesting at once?
The dumbing of the US debt is basically mutually assured destruction. Sure, it will hurt the US, but it will hurt the EU even more. You are basically selling your own assets at a discount in order to make the borrowing for the US more expensive. But then, in the process losing hundreds of billions of your dollars and considering that the EU’s economy is significantly worse than the US, it is something that just won’t happen.
Apparently the currently suspected cause for the large train accident in Spain is a broken railway track. Indentations on the accident train's wheels and deformations on the tracks suggest that, according to the investigators. Similar indentations have also been found on the wheels of three other trains which had passed the area of the accident before it occurred. The tracks have been sent in for metallurgic study.
This is however only the preliminary suspicion and the investigation is continuing in all directions.
This is however only the preliminary suspicion and the investigation is continuing in all directions.
Poland is a top 10 economy in the EU but not interested in euro adoption.
I wish portugal wasn't in the euro, our exports clearly suffer.
Portugal's problems right now are not really export driven - but internal.
I usually spend a few weeks in the Lisbon area as my short getaway, since about 2019 and it's insane how much prices have increased. Both in real estate and in basic commodities.
Was last there in November and a basic cod + potato fries is now 12 Euros in a random cafe in Lisbon. When I first started going it was 6 euros.
Heard a lot of locals tell me that basically a bunch of Americans have started coming over and inflating prices rapidly. Don't know how much truth there is to that though.
Americans are finding Portugal but in 2024 they were 20k.
https://www.portugalresident.com/number-of-americans-living-in-portugal-jumps-36-in-a-year/
The euro cost us more than 10 years of the same growth we were having in the late 90s due to exports. It was directly because of the euro.
Economists also agree that the inability to devalue our currency made the 2011 crisis unnecessarily worse.
We got no real benefits other than being able to go to spain without exchanging currency.
Maybe FB isn't a great indicator but there are plenty of groups on that for Americans moving to Portugal.
Some of groups have membership over 125k, but that include Brits, etc too.
I can see a lot of people moving there especially when trump is in power, and then moving back in a few years after they've struggled.
I saw a stat recently that over 70% eventually return to the US.
The prices; yes I was surprised that it's no bargain eating out in Lisbon and even Porto. The common thought was that Portugal is cheap. I suppose it can be, but not in the major cities.
A couple of Bloomberg articles about the EU with regards to recent interactions with global great powers :
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/a...letter&utm_term=260124&utm_campaign=weekendnl
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/a...letter&utm_term=260124&utm_campaign=weekendnl
Europe has been through many ages in its busy history: the age of discovery, the age of reason, the age of expansion, the age of destruction, and the age of unification. Now it is entering a new one: the age of humiliation.
Europe’s tussle with Donald Trump over whether the US can forcibly buy Greenland from Denmark may be surreal. But it fits a broader pattern. The US (or China) acts. Europe reacts. The US (or China) moves decisively. The EU debates and dithers. This week Europe’s elite went into paroxysms over Trump’s threats to use force or tariffs to gain control of Greenland only for Trump to perform a pirouette and claim that he had made a deal with NATO’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, a deal that had, in fact, been on the table for some time. The storm has now blown over until Trump fixates on something else — or decides that the Greenland deal is a rip-off — and Europe has to respond to external provocation once again.
From the 15th century onward, Europe was the primary force in human history — sometimes for good (the Renaissance and the liberal ideal), sometimes for evil (Nazism and Communism) but always with world-changing consequences. Europeans invented the defining technologies of the modern age, from the printing press to the steam engine, as well as the defining political ideas.
Europeans imposed their will on the rest of the world through imperialism and colonization, exporting more than 60 million people from 1600 to 1950 and littering the globe with places such as New Spain, New England, New France, New Caledonia, New Amsterdam. Two-thirds of the current members of the United Nations belonged to European empires at one stage of their history.
Yet for all its gunboat diplomacy, Europe triumphed by attraction as well as compulsion. The colonies adopted European (mainly British) sports such as golf, tennis, cricket and football. Ataturk ordered Turks to abandon the fez in favor of the European-style hat. Jawaharlal Nehru modeled the newly independent India’s parliament on Britain’s, even down to the detail of having a Speaker.
Europe all but destroyed itself in the two most devastating wars in modern history — wars that started in the heart of Europe but spread to the world. Yet when the dust cleared Europe remained at the heart of the great contest between capitalism and communism. Europe also engaged in a history-defining form of self-cleansing, creating a new type of politics and a new type of society: a post-national state and a mixed economy that provided all its citizens with generous benefits and holidays. In 2005, Mark Leonard summed up the exultant mood after the creation of the Euro in his book Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century.
We can kiss goodbye to all that: Europeans are now clearly a history taker rather than a history maker. The lead actor of world affairs for five centuries has been reduced to a mere bystander, a key dynamo of historical change transformed into a potted plant.
European leaders have belatedly woken up to the extent of their impotence. Eurocrats argue that they must earn a seat at the table to avoid becoming part of the menu. Emmanuel Macron worries that Europe must reform or die. In a searing 2024 report Mario Draghi, a former head of the European Central Bank, said that, without radical change, “we will inexorably become less prosperous, less equal, less secure and, as a result, less free to choose our destiny.” But the truth is that the chances of bold reforms may already have gone.
Europe’s political leadership is either unimpressive (Friedrich Merz) or exhausted (Macron) or both (Keir Starmer). The last leader to have any chance of pushing through major reforms, Angela Merkel, wasted her 16 years in power pursuing one of the most misguided policies in recent decades — importing cheap energy from Russia in order to sell manufactured goods, particularly machine tools, to China. Today politics is paralyzed: The European Commission is a zombie bureaucracy, the center is fragmenting and a populist right is on the march everywhere, with the French National Rally at about 33% in the polls and the even more hardline Alternative for Germany at 25%.
Europe’s share of global GDP has shrunk from more than 30% in 1995 to less than 20% today. Only four of the world’s top 50 tech companies are European — and there is little chance of that changing: From 2008 to 2021, close to 30% of European “unicorns” (startups that went on to be valued over $1 billion) relocated their headquarters abroad, the vast majority of them in the US. Even the old-fashioned industries that dominate the European economy and R&D funding are suffering: European electricity prices are two to three times higher than prices in the US and China, and a new generation of cheap Chinese electric vehicles is poised to devastate Europe’s biggest manufacturing industry, car-making.
Economic stagnation is undermining Europe’s two remaining claims to history-making: its standard of living and its intellectual firepower. On a per capita basis, real disposable income has grown almost twice as much in the US since 2000 as in the EU. The 2026 QS World University Rankings puts only five European universities in the top thirty, and four of those are in England.
Europe has made a series of big bets that have gone spectacularly wrong. It bet on the benign nature of both Russia and China. Both turned out to be malign. It bet on freedom of movement — and then doubled down in 2016 when Angela Merkel welcomed close to 300,000 Syrian refugees. But the combination of high immigration and free movement drove the British to leave the European Union — marking the first time the organization has contracted since its foundation — and fueled the rise of populism.
Europe’s bet on the US being willing to stump up about two-thirds of the cost of NATO until Kingdom Come is unraveling. European politicians have been unusually bold in their denunciations of Trump in Davos this week. Macron warned about a “new colonial approach.” The Belgian prime minister, Bart De Wever, urged Europeans to defend their “self-respect.” But what could Europe have done if Trump had not performed his pirouette? Could strong words really have been turned into strong actions? Europeans have more to lose from the breakdown of NATO than America does, just as they have more to lose from a tariff war.
Europe’s other big bet, on the durability of the free market, is also going south. The European economy is the most open to the world — its trade to GDP ratio exceeds 50% compared with 37% in China and 27% in the US. It is also the most exposed to international headwinds: Europe sources about 40% of its imports from a handful of suppliers; about half of those imports originate from potentially hostile nations (and that does not include the US). With protectionism on the rise, mercantilism a la mode, Trump wildly swinging his tariff axe and conflagrations breaking out all over the place, Europe is horribly exposed.
Driving all these bets was the desire for the easiest option. The Europeans have habitually either argued that there are no difficult tradeoffs (between greenery or growth, for example) or else punted tough decisions (like paying for defense) into the indefinite future. No one is loathed more in the EU than Boris Johnson. But Johnson’s slogan of having your cake and eating it defines Europe’s weakness.
The sidelining of Europe is a tragedy. Europe embraces a collection of principles — global cooperation, liberal universalism and calm decision-making — that the world sorely needs. Yet Europe has brought upon itself a tragedy by underinvesting in hard power and allowing generous feelings to crush economic dynamism. The chances of a continent of political homunculi miraculously producing a new generation of de Gaulles or Churchills are slim.
The historian A.J.P. Taylor once said that Europe had produced more history than it could consume and was therefore bound to export it abroad. Today Europe seems doomed to produce less history than it can consume and watch idly by as more vigorous nations shape the future.
Europe’s tussle with Donald Trump over whether the US can forcibly buy Greenland from Denmark may be surreal. But it fits a broader pattern. The US (or China) acts. Europe reacts. The US (or China) moves decisively. The EU debates and dithers. This week Europe’s elite went into paroxysms over Trump’s threats to use force or tariffs to gain control of Greenland only for Trump to perform a pirouette and claim that he had made a deal with NATO’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, a deal that had, in fact, been on the table for some time. The storm has now blown over until Trump fixates on something else — or decides that the Greenland deal is a rip-off — and Europe has to respond to external provocation once again.
From the 15th century onward, Europe was the primary force in human history — sometimes for good (the Renaissance and the liberal ideal), sometimes for evil (Nazism and Communism) but always with world-changing consequences. Europeans invented the defining technologies of the modern age, from the printing press to the steam engine, as well as the defining political ideas.
Europeans imposed their will on the rest of the world through imperialism and colonization, exporting more than 60 million people from 1600 to 1950 and littering the globe with places such as New Spain, New England, New France, New Caledonia, New Amsterdam. Two-thirds of the current members of the United Nations belonged to European empires at one stage of their history.
Yet for all its gunboat diplomacy, Europe triumphed by attraction as well as compulsion. The colonies adopted European (mainly British) sports such as golf, tennis, cricket and football. Ataturk ordered Turks to abandon the fez in favor of the European-style hat. Jawaharlal Nehru modeled the newly independent India’s parliament on Britain’s, even down to the detail of having a Speaker.
Europe all but destroyed itself in the two most devastating wars in modern history — wars that started in the heart of Europe but spread to the world. Yet when the dust cleared Europe remained at the heart of the great contest between capitalism and communism. Europe also engaged in a history-defining form of self-cleansing, creating a new type of politics and a new type of society: a post-national state and a mixed economy that provided all its citizens with generous benefits and holidays. In 2005, Mark Leonard summed up the exultant mood after the creation of the Euro in his book Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century.
We can kiss goodbye to all that: Europeans are now clearly a history taker rather than a history maker. The lead actor of world affairs for five centuries has been reduced to a mere bystander, a key dynamo of historical change transformed into a potted plant.
European leaders have belatedly woken up to the extent of their impotence. Eurocrats argue that they must earn a seat at the table to avoid becoming part of the menu. Emmanuel Macron worries that Europe must reform or die. In a searing 2024 report Mario Draghi, a former head of the European Central Bank, said that, without radical change, “we will inexorably become less prosperous, less equal, less secure and, as a result, less free to choose our destiny.” But the truth is that the chances of bold reforms may already have gone.
Europe’s political leadership is either unimpressive (Friedrich Merz) or exhausted (Macron) or both (Keir Starmer). The last leader to have any chance of pushing through major reforms, Angela Merkel, wasted her 16 years in power pursuing one of the most misguided policies in recent decades — importing cheap energy from Russia in order to sell manufactured goods, particularly machine tools, to China. Today politics is paralyzed: The European Commission is a zombie bureaucracy, the center is fragmenting and a populist right is on the march everywhere, with the French National Rally at about 33% in the polls and the even more hardline Alternative for Germany at 25%.
Europe’s share of global GDP has shrunk from more than 30% in 1995 to less than 20% today. Only four of the world’s top 50 tech companies are European — and there is little chance of that changing: From 2008 to 2021, close to 30% of European “unicorns” (startups that went on to be valued over $1 billion) relocated their headquarters abroad, the vast majority of them in the US. Even the old-fashioned industries that dominate the European economy and R&D funding are suffering: European electricity prices are two to three times higher than prices in the US and China, and a new generation of cheap Chinese electric vehicles is poised to devastate Europe’s biggest manufacturing industry, car-making.
Economic stagnation is undermining Europe’s two remaining claims to history-making: its standard of living and its intellectual firepower. On a per capita basis, real disposable income has grown almost twice as much in the US since 2000 as in the EU. The 2026 QS World University Rankings puts only five European universities in the top thirty, and four of those are in England.
Europe has made a series of big bets that have gone spectacularly wrong. It bet on the benign nature of both Russia and China. Both turned out to be malign. It bet on freedom of movement — and then doubled down in 2016 when Angela Merkel welcomed close to 300,000 Syrian refugees. But the combination of high immigration and free movement drove the British to leave the European Union — marking the first time the organization has contracted since its foundation — and fueled the rise of populism.
Europe’s bet on the US being willing to stump up about two-thirds of the cost of NATO until Kingdom Come is unraveling. European politicians have been unusually bold in their denunciations of Trump in Davos this week. Macron warned about a “new colonial approach.” The Belgian prime minister, Bart De Wever, urged Europeans to defend their “self-respect.” But what could Europe have done if Trump had not performed his pirouette? Could strong words really have been turned into strong actions? Europeans have more to lose from the breakdown of NATO than America does, just as they have more to lose from a tariff war.
Europe’s other big bet, on the durability of the free market, is also going south. The European economy is the most open to the world — its trade to GDP ratio exceeds 50% compared with 37% in China and 27% in the US. It is also the most exposed to international headwinds: Europe sources about 40% of its imports from a handful of suppliers; about half of those imports originate from potentially hostile nations (and that does not include the US). With protectionism on the rise, mercantilism a la mode, Trump wildly swinging his tariff axe and conflagrations breaking out all over the place, Europe is horribly exposed.
Driving all these bets was the desire for the easiest option. The Europeans have habitually either argued that there are no difficult tradeoffs (between greenery or growth, for example) or else punted tough decisions (like paying for defense) into the indefinite future. No one is loathed more in the EU than Boris Johnson. But Johnson’s slogan of having your cake and eating it defines Europe’s weakness.
The sidelining of Europe is a tragedy. Europe embraces a collection of principles — global cooperation, liberal universalism and calm decision-making — that the world sorely needs. Yet Europe has brought upon itself a tragedy by underinvesting in hard power and allowing generous feelings to crush economic dynamism. The chances of a continent of political homunculi miraculously producing a new generation of de Gaulles or Churchills are slim.
The historian A.J.P. Taylor once said that Europe had produced more history than it could consume and was therefore bound to export it abroad. Today Europe seems doomed to produce less history than it can consume and watch idly by as more vigorous nations shape the future.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...letter&utm_term=260124&utm_campaign=weekendnl
If there was one word on the lips of almost every European over the past week — other than Greenland — it was “appeasement.” The term coined in the 1930s to describe Britain and France’s policy of acquiescence toward Germany’s territorial ambitions has been invoked constantly in response to Donald Trump’s threats to annex the Arctic island from Denmark. This weekend, European leaders are congratulating themselves for having learned the lessons of that earlier episode by standing firm against the US president, forcing him to back down on threats to use military force or impose tariffs on Denmark’s European allies in pursuit of his goal.
Whether Europeans are right to be so self-congratulatory remains to be seen. The details of the “framework” for Arctic security agreed between NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and the US president in Davos remain sketchy. Denmark and Greenland were not party to the discussions. And the fact that Trump was prepared to make such threats suggests the transatlantic alliance is irreparably damaged. Trump has continued to claim — outrageously, given the sacrifices made by European forces in America’s recent wars — that he doubts Europeans would defend America, while giving Europeans reasons to doubt America would come to Europe’s aid.
A broader question is whether Europeans are drawing the right lesson from the 1930s. As historian Richard Overy noted in his 2021 book Blood and Ruins: The Great Imperial War 1931-1945, the modern use of “appeasement” as a pejorative term to describe any failure to act firmly against threats to Western security is misleading as a description of British and French strategy in the 1930s. It is more useful, he argues, to describe this strategy in terms made familiar during the Cold War: “containment and deterrence.”
Overy writes that “the record of both states in their approach to international problems in the 1930s was never simply a spineless abdication of responsibility, but a prolonged if sometimes incoherent, effort to square the circle of growing international instability and their own desire to protect the imperial status quo.”
Britain and France went to considerable lengths to contain Germany’s ambitions through a series of treaties. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain even talked of a “Grand Settlement” that would revisit the terms of the Versailles Treaty of 1919 — the source of so much German resentment after World War I — as long as it could be based on negotiated, mutually acceptable grounds.
But a vital part of the British and French strategy in the 1930s was what, even then, was called deterrence. Both moved from limited military spending to large-scale and expensive military preparation. “Rearmament was not a sudden reaction to German moves against Czechoslovakia and Poland,” Overy writes, “but a policy that had been pursued, often with considerable domestic protest, since at least 1934, with accelerated tempo from 1936 onwards. In Britain… a rough four-year plan was drawn up which saw expenditure rose from £185 million in 1936 to £719 million in 1939.
In his 2017 historical novel Munich, Robert Harris attempted to rehabilitate Chamberlain’s reputation by presenting the 1938 Munich Agreement, which allowed Germany to annex parts of Czechoslovakia, as a necessary move that bought Britain and France time to continue rearming. Overy notes that the Munich conference was at the time seen as a setback for Hitler, who had wanted to seize the whole country: “A European war was averted in 1938 not simply because the British and French governments feared it, but because Hitler was deterred from stepping across that threshold.”
Of course, within a year Germany had seized the whole of Czechoslovakia and then set its sights on Poland. At that point, the strategies of containment and deterrence failed, leading to war.
Nonetheless, much had changed in the intervening year. Not only had the two allies continued their rearmament, but public opinion had swung firmly in favor of using force to prevent further territorial seizures. Crucially, both states had ensured that if it came to war, their empires would rally to the cause. In Britain’s case, that was far from certain: The major dominions had earlier refused to support the idea of war over the Czech crisis.
Today, the international order is once again crumbling, economic dependencies are being weaponized and great powers are trying to extend their territory.
Europe finds itself in a much weaker position than Britain and France in the 1930s. In recent years, Europe has shown itself repeatedly vulnerable to coercion. It has been unable to end a war in Ukraine that has now lasted longer than the fighting between Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II. And while there has been much sneering in Europe at Russia’s failure to make major territorial gains, the reality is that Ukraine has been going backwards, struggling to hold onto its land at great human cost.
At the same time, Europe’s high-tech industries were last year brought to the brink of standstill following a dispute with China over exports of rare earth magnets and semiconductors. Last summer, Europe felt obliged to accept a humiliatingly one-sided trade deal with Washington rather than risk losing US security guarantees. And while Europe may hope it has now seen off the immediate threat of coercion over Greenland, the relationship with Washington is likely to remain strained, at least as long as this president remains in office. A formal deal over Greenland that respects both sides’ red lines may be hard to reach.
The lesson of the 1930s is that in such a contested world, containment is not enough. Europeans also need to build their deterrence, so they are better able to resist military and economic coercion, and defend themselves if deterrence fails.
In recent days, a string of European leaders have given speeches that acknowledge the magnitude of the moment. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen declared the death of the old order. French President Emmanuel Macron spoke of “a shift to a world without rules … where the only law that seems to matter is that of the strongest.” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz warned that “a new world of great powers is being built on power, on strength and, when it comes to it, on force. It is not a cozy place.”
Yet, so far, fine words are not yet translating into sufficient action. With the exception of Germany, the pace of rearmament across the continent is slow. There is not yet any plan to replace the 40% of European defense capabilities currently provided by the US, including critical enablers such as satellites and logistics, let alone for the common borrowing needed to pay for them. Nor is there any sign that European electorates are willing to contemplate the cuts to welfare spending needed to fund higher defense spending.
European leaders may congratulate themselves on having last week resisted the ignominy of appeasement. They would do better to ask themselves: What would Chamberlain do?
Whether Europeans are right to be so self-congratulatory remains to be seen. The details of the “framework” for Arctic security agreed between NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and the US president in Davos remain sketchy. Denmark and Greenland were not party to the discussions. And the fact that Trump was prepared to make such threats suggests the transatlantic alliance is irreparably damaged. Trump has continued to claim — outrageously, given the sacrifices made by European forces in America’s recent wars — that he doubts Europeans would defend America, while giving Europeans reasons to doubt America would come to Europe’s aid.
A broader question is whether Europeans are drawing the right lesson from the 1930s. As historian Richard Overy noted in his 2021 book Blood and Ruins: The Great Imperial War 1931-1945, the modern use of “appeasement” as a pejorative term to describe any failure to act firmly against threats to Western security is misleading as a description of British and French strategy in the 1930s. It is more useful, he argues, to describe this strategy in terms made familiar during the Cold War: “containment and deterrence.”
Overy writes that “the record of both states in their approach to international problems in the 1930s was never simply a spineless abdication of responsibility, but a prolonged if sometimes incoherent, effort to square the circle of growing international instability and their own desire to protect the imperial status quo.”
Britain and France went to considerable lengths to contain Germany’s ambitions through a series of treaties. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain even talked of a “Grand Settlement” that would revisit the terms of the Versailles Treaty of 1919 — the source of so much German resentment after World War I — as long as it could be based on negotiated, mutually acceptable grounds.
But a vital part of the British and French strategy in the 1930s was what, even then, was called deterrence. Both moved from limited military spending to large-scale and expensive military preparation. “Rearmament was not a sudden reaction to German moves against Czechoslovakia and Poland,” Overy writes, “but a policy that had been pursued, often with considerable domestic protest, since at least 1934, with accelerated tempo from 1936 onwards. In Britain… a rough four-year plan was drawn up which saw expenditure rose from £185 million in 1936 to £719 million in 1939.
In his 2017 historical novel Munich, Robert Harris attempted to rehabilitate Chamberlain’s reputation by presenting the 1938 Munich Agreement, which allowed Germany to annex parts of Czechoslovakia, as a necessary move that bought Britain and France time to continue rearming. Overy notes that the Munich conference was at the time seen as a setback for Hitler, who had wanted to seize the whole country: “A European war was averted in 1938 not simply because the British and French governments feared it, but because Hitler was deterred from stepping across that threshold.”
Of course, within a year Germany had seized the whole of Czechoslovakia and then set its sights on Poland. At that point, the strategies of containment and deterrence failed, leading to war.
Nonetheless, much had changed in the intervening year. Not only had the two allies continued their rearmament, but public opinion had swung firmly in favor of using force to prevent further territorial seizures. Crucially, both states had ensured that if it came to war, their empires would rally to the cause. In Britain’s case, that was far from certain: The major dominions had earlier refused to support the idea of war over the Czech crisis.
Today, the international order is once again crumbling, economic dependencies are being weaponized and great powers are trying to extend their territory.
Europe finds itself in a much weaker position than Britain and France in the 1930s. In recent years, Europe has shown itself repeatedly vulnerable to coercion. It has been unable to end a war in Ukraine that has now lasted longer than the fighting between Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II. And while there has been much sneering in Europe at Russia’s failure to make major territorial gains, the reality is that Ukraine has been going backwards, struggling to hold onto its land at great human cost.
At the same time, Europe’s high-tech industries were last year brought to the brink of standstill following a dispute with China over exports of rare earth magnets and semiconductors. Last summer, Europe felt obliged to accept a humiliatingly one-sided trade deal with Washington rather than risk losing US security guarantees. And while Europe may hope it has now seen off the immediate threat of coercion over Greenland, the relationship with Washington is likely to remain strained, at least as long as this president remains in office. A formal deal over Greenland that respects both sides’ red lines may be hard to reach.
The lesson of the 1930s is that in such a contested world, containment is not enough. Europeans also need to build their deterrence, so they are better able to resist military and economic coercion, and defend themselves if deterrence fails.
In recent days, a string of European leaders have given speeches that acknowledge the magnitude of the moment. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen declared the death of the old order. French President Emmanuel Macron spoke of “a shift to a world without rules … where the only law that seems to matter is that of the strongest.” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz warned that “a new world of great powers is being built on power, on strength and, when it comes to it, on force. It is not a cozy place.”
Yet, so far, fine words are not yet translating into sufficient action. With the exception of Germany, the pace of rearmament across the continent is slow. There is not yet any plan to replace the 40% of European defense capabilities currently provided by the US, including critical enablers such as satellites and logistics, let alone for the common borrowing needed to pay for them. Nor is there any sign that European electorates are willing to contemplate the cuts to welfare spending needed to fund higher defense spending.
European leaders may congratulate themselves on having last week resisted the ignominy of appeasement. They would do better to ask themselves: What would Chamberlain do?
I feel a bit sceptical about a lot of the criticism. It feels like european leadership want to engage in dick swinging contests with more leverage to avoid 'humiliation' rather than seeking consensus and public support which is slower moving and requires more negotiation. Less dynamism.
But what was the outcome in the end? Nothing tangible was lost. We lost trust in America so have to invest militarily and theres a cost to restarting that. But we saved a shitload of money over the years by not investing.
It feels like a trap - doom and gloom in order to dismantle the rights and living standards expected, demanded by european populations.
But what was the outcome in the end? Nothing tangible was lost. We lost trust in America so have to invest militarily and theres a cost to restarting that. But we saved a shitload of money over the years by not investing.
It feels like a trap - doom and gloom in order to dismantle the rights and living standards expected, demanded by european populations.
One overlooked aspect of this "additional" military spending is Europe actually manufactures a lot of the equipment themselves. Both France and Germany are powerhouses in arms exports (UK & Spain are also in top 10 countries as well in terms of defense exports). This additional spending into local industries actually means boosting the Europe economy and not vice versa due to the multiplier effect on the economy. In the last 40 years, there was no political will to spend because Europeans had no real border threat and US basically had their backs. Neither of those hold good any longer. Of course, all this changes if Trump forces NATO to buy more of "American" made arms and Europeans will frankly be stupid to go down that route to bolster their defense.
The opposite is happening: historically Europe still bought a lot of equipment from the US.That is reducing. Just have a look at defence industry stocks... European companies saw a massive surge in the past year, while many US based perform far less impressive - and this is mostly caused by how different their order books developed.
Right. Trump administration's calculation is probably:
Global chaos -> More spending on defense -> US has best equipment -> Countries buying more arms from US (where else will they buy from?) -> better for US economy
What he doesn't realize is how fast countries are moving towards self reliance in arms globally.
This is typical of the way Trump thinks. Short term. No longer term strategy. And don't forget the incredibly rapid progress China is making in the development of military hardware. Especially fighter jets, including their own jet engines. No longer reliant on Russia.
I think also Americans underestimate that many countries now have quite capable military industries. And not only in Europe. Korea, Turkey, India, Brazil. You no longer need to buy American or Russian only to have decent kit (Russia is doomed in that department. And that tendency is only going to be exacerbated by the rise of the drone as one of the main tools in warfare. You don't need a humongous military industry and decades of know how to build a drone army.
And all of them are working more and more together, like Saab (Sweden) cooperating with Embraer (Brazil) and Bombardier (Canada).
Also India-Germany:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...dia-on-verge-of-8-billion-submarine-agreement
This deal could have very easily been India-US but Navarro convinced Vance/Trump to not sell arms to India, which was looking to replace their aged Russian submarines. Eu/Germany capitalized on this and from what I see, it's a one way ticket for collaboration from here. This is similar to what happened with the Rafales.
I think a US less NATO is still very solid. Collectively I think the only countries that could pose a threat and actually roll into Europe are US.
China might but they would ended up flat themselves. Russia can barely deal with Ukraine let alone the full might of Europe.
And if everything else fails there's nuclear. You don't attack nuclear power anyway.
You also dont need to overspend like US, just enough to deter attackers. I think even without ground breaking spending EU is quite solid to hold their own
Good point. Also notice that this means that two BRICS members (which is often framed as the anti-NATO) closely cooperate and integrate with the European part of NATO. Nice reality check for those talking about "BRICS will replace NATO as the World power". BRICS members are more likely to go to war with each other than with NATO (maybe except Russia).
B
A process already in progress considering the amount of institutions that publicy announced the are getting rid of US bonds recently. It's not yet the big guns, but a few billions here and there already add up. The Dollar is getting weaker and there is little reason to turn around soon.
Question is how much of it is by design? I know no sane economist would ever advise for the US to drop the sweet deal of having their currency being the global standard. But of course the techbros have their own crazy, unorthodox world views. They might want to introduce some sort of crypto or digital currency instead and become even more ridiculously wealthy as a result.
Part of it? It is a bit forgotten by now I feel, but the "Mar-a-Lago Accord" essentially set the tone for the economic policies. It comes down to three main points:
- weaken the Dollar to make exports easier and imports less attractive, essentially minimizing the trade deficit (that's a classic economic policy, nothing wrong with it and this part works as intended)
- set tariffs to motivate industries to move towards the US. This also failed, the lack of predicatibility leads to decreasing investments instead of increasing. Businesses didn't act as expected.
- create "centennial bonds" - long running bunds with low interest rates. It would have massively decreased the interest the government has to pay. Apparently they believed that they could force the bond holders to agree to this. If they had been able to do that it would have massively improved the financial situation of the US. And it absolutely failed, massively. Nobody accepted that, no states, investors, funds...
So in conclusion they tried to get rid of their trade deficit (which is fine as a target) and to soften the burden of debt interests (which also is a good target). But they massively miscalculated their power to force the world to accept their terms. Instead of improving their economic and financial situation they burned their political capital and motivated the EU and others to look elsewhere.