How a French judge was digitally cut off by the USA
heise.de> ..... he calls on the EU to activate an existing blocking regulation (Regulation (EC) No 2271/96) for the International Criminal Court, which prevents third countries like the USA from enforcing sanctions in the EU. EU companies would then no longer be allowed to comply with US sanctions if they violate EU interests. Companies that violate this would then be liable for damages.
That is from that article..
EU is in a very tough spot right now. They're getting squeezed on all sides economically by USA and China while simultaneously facing a Russian invasion on their eastern borders. The relationship with the American administration has deteriorated badly and any action seen as "retaliation", such as this policy blockade, would almost definitely result in USA withdrawing even more support for Ukraine in the war. I think, unfortunately, that will lead to a quick victory for Russia unless EU nations want to put boots on the ground.
It's a bad situation.
It’s kind of hard to see how much more support the US could withdraw from Ukraine, judging by the last article I read that gave Ukraine until Thursday to accept the latest peace deal negotiated between USA and Russia.
If we are in the world you describe, EU might as well do as it wants - its downside has been capped.
Intelligence, targeting info and selling (no longer giving) weapons are all important support but sanctions is the really big one. The most recent round in particular has really bit into Russia's oil revenue.
Of course it would be absolutely disgraceful for the US to drop sanctions on Russia and have normal relations with it while it continued its invasion. But that's what the US voted for.
> Of course it would be absolutely disgraceful for the US to drop sanctions on Russia and have normal relations with it while it continued its invasion. But that's what the US voted for.
The reason US sanctions Russia is because the US has been pushing its oil insustry in Europe. For instance, EU tariff deals included buying a minimum amount of hydrocarbon products:
> As part of this effort, the European Union intends to procure US liquified natural gas, oil, and nuclear energy products with an expected offtake valued at $750 billion through 2028.
In that context, US sanctions on Russia serve a purpose which isn't solely helping Ukraine ; I don't see the US lifting these sanctions anytime soon.
I personally think Trump loves Russia and Putin and generally wants to do business with them. He has wanted a Trump Tower in Moscow for decades and probably still wants that to happen.
Wants to be bribed by them. But to him, bribe = business, I guess.
While US weapons aid has basically been cut off, then somewhat restored through European purchases, US intel sharing has been relatively consistent and continuous throughout, and Ukraine is very dependent on it. When intel sharing was suspended for several weeks, Ukraine lost almost half the ground it had taken in Kursk. At a minimum, satellite intel is key to monitoring Russian dispositions, and Ukraine has no way to replace that.
US also authorized the use of their own ballistic missiles in Russia proper this past week which was a big deal.
They also have another $1B budgeted in defense spending for Ukraine next year https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-committee-backs-m...
I'm very surprised the US doesn't seem to be taking the risk of Ukraine becoming a Nuclear Weapons state seriously. By now, they surely would have had time to develop get to the brink of weaponization as a backup plan - they've after all always had a nuclear industry. If they do so and offer cover to their neighbors who realize NATO may not be sufficient, we are in for interesting times.
Ukraine WAS a nuclear weapons state, until the US agreed to protect them from Russia with the US's nuclear weapons, if they gave up their own.
It wasn't. It had some weapons on their territory but could not use them. The red button was always in Moscow.
> It had some weapons on their territory but could not use them. The red button was always in Moscow
In the 90s. Twenty years buys lots of time for code cracking, reverse engineering and—if that fails—bullshitting.
With the benefit of hindsight, Ukraine should have kept its nukes. (Finland, the Baltics, Poland and Romania should probably develop them.)
Right stealing nukes you cannot immediately operate as a 0-year old nation, to me it doesn't seems like an incredibly bright idea in a world where the existing nuclear states doesn't want anyone else to get nukes too.
And in any case it's was not simply removing the safety devices on the weapons, you need to be able to target the ICBMs at Russia, which Ukraine could not do:
> In fact, the presence of strategic nuclear missiles on its territory posed several dilemmas to a Ukraine hypothetically bent on keeping them to deter Russia. The SS-24s do not have the ability to strike targets at relatively short distances (that is, below about 2000 km); the variable-range SS- 19s are able, but Ukraine cannot properly maintain them. [...] the SS-19s were built in Russia and use a highly toxic and volatile liquid fuel. To complicate matters further, targeting programs and blocking devices for the SS-24 are Russian made. The retargeting of ICBM is probably impossible without geodetic data from satellites which are not available to Kiev.
> Cruise missiles for strategic bombers stored in Ukraine have long been 'disabled in place'.[...] As with ICBMs, however, retargeting them would be impossible for Ukraine, which does not have access to data from geodetic satellites; the same goes for computer maintenance.
From SIPRI research report 10; The Soviet Nuclear Weapon Legacy
So Ukraine did not have usable weapons at hand. But it did, and does, certainly have the capacity to build entirely new weapons, if given time.
> stealing nukes you cannot immediately operate as a 0-year old nation
Agreed. But nobody was invading Ukraine in 1994.
The weapons were seen as a security liability. In reality, they were bargaining chips.
> to me it doesn't seems like an incredibly bright idea in a world where the existing nuclear states doesn't want anyone else to get nukes too
To be clear, Kyiv made the right decision given what they knew in 1994. Non-proliferation was in vogue. America and British security guarantees meant something.
If Kyiv knew what we know today, that the Budapest security guarantees were worthless from each of Washington, London and Moscow; that wars of conquest would be back; and that non-proliferation would be seen through the lens of regional versus global security, it would have been a bright idea to demand more before letting them go, or at least to drag out negotiations so Ukraine could study the weapons and maybe even extract some samples.
> SS-24s do not have the ability to strike targets at relatively short distances (that is, below about 2000 km)
Again, having the nukes would give Kyiv leverage. At a minimum they'd have HEU and a proven design to study.
And again, don't undervalue bullshitting in geopolitics. If Kyiv said they have a short-range nuclear missile, it would not be credible. But would it be incredible enough to green light an invasion?
The US and Russia would have done a joint invasion under UN flag if Ukraine tried to steal the nukes dude, it's downright embarrassing to pretend that's the sort of thing you can do unpunished.
And doing that for some design info is really not worth the risk: just recruit some soviet weapons designers, for sure there are Ukrainians in that project already.
Like they did in North Korea when they obtained nukes. Of wait...
You think North Korea stole its nukes?
What's the difference for non proliferation treaty?
I could be wrong, but I don't think that nuclear warheads have such a long shelf life.
> I don't think that nuclear warheads have such a long shelf life
We literally don't know. A large part of stockpile stewardship programmes at the Sandia national labs is aimed at answering this question.
Oh, please, please, exclude Romania. I live close to our nuclear power plant. I'm scared of our incompetence as it is, without trying to make any nukes.
>Ukraine should have kept its nukes
They would've quickly sold them to Iran like they did with nuclear capable missiles. [0]
https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2005-05/ukraine-admits-missi...
> They would've quickly sold them to Iran like they did with nuclear capable missiles
Unclear. A nuclear Kyiv would have different security incentives than a non-nuclear one.
Unclear? They are busy stealing hundreds of millions dollars[0] while having security incentive in form of ongoing war.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/19/world/europe/ukraine-zele...
Are the nuclear capable missiles worth anything if you don't have nuclear warheads for them to deliver?
What actually happened to the nukes the Ukrainians had? Were they transferred to the US? Destroyed?
Those were Soviet nukes, physically located in Ukraine but not controlled by it, same as any French/US nukes stationed in Germany would not make it a nuclear state.
The ones in Ukraine got moved into Russia, in exchange for Ukraine receiving money and security guarantees.
> Those were Soviet nukes, physically located in Ukraine but not controlled by it, same as any French/US nukes stationed in Germany would not make it a nuclear state.
This is not an accurate comparison.
It's not that Russia had nukes in Ukraine and withdrew them. Many of the Soviet soldiers manning them were Ukrainians and stayed behind. Much of the infrastructure for maintaining the Soviet arsenal was also in Ukraine and had to be rebuilt in Russia. The situation was more akin to if the US broke up and Louisiana (which has a lot of nuclear warheads stationed in it) is dealing with whether they are now a nuclear power, or if they need to hand them over to South Carolina or something.
Ukraine had multiple Long-Range Aviation bases in it, Louisiana only has one (Barksdale near Shreveport)
> It's not that Russia had nukes in Ukraine and withdrew them.
Russia is the single legal successor of the USSR, so all Soviet nukes became Russian nukes, regardless where they were located. So after the USSR broke up, Russia did have nukes in Ukraine and withdrew them.
Legal succession is mostly irrelevant and more complicated than that. Russia had operational control because it had taken physical control of the ex-Soviet command and control systems which were in Russia, and hence had the launch codes, etc.
To be fair, Russia becoming the single successor of the USSR wasn't a foregone conclusion in the early 1990s. There wasn't relevant precedent of a country dissolving I think -- Yugoslavia was still battling it out, Austria-Hungary was too long ago.
It was an explicit decision by both CIS and UN. Russia took USSR's seat on UNSC two weeks after USSR was dissolved, and that happened in 1991. Budapest Memorandum was negotiated 3 years later, by which time this was already a firmly established thing.
> Those were Soviet nukes, physically located in Ukraine but not controlled by it, same as any French/US nukes stationed in Germany would not make it a nuclear state
It's not quite the same, since Ukraine was part of the USSR, and Ukrainian scientists, engineers, and tradesmen contributed to the effort. Germany, on the other hand, was never part of the American federation, and didn't contribute to American weapons development...since Wernher von Braun/Operation Paperclip.
Indeed. There was even a question of whether they could legally be considered Ukrainian or Russian weapons, regardless of where the command centre was. To solve that while the talks were ongoing they set up a ‘joint’ command centre in Moscow with ex-SSR countries theoretically sharing joint control over the weapons with Moscow.
Ukraine at one point wanted to formally claim ownership over the weapons, as after all breaking the permissive action locks wasn’t that difficult. The US talked them out of it, as a lead up to the Budapest Memorandum.
We all know how much the security guarantees of that agreement were worth.
> We all know how much the security guarantees of that agreement were worth.
They were worth 30 years of peace. It wasn't a treaty. Everyone knew it was a handshake agreement without consequences for breaking it. It prevented an immediate war in eastern Europe after the fall of the USSR. A war that could have been much worse involving nuclear weapons.
Unfortunately the war came 30 years later.
20 years, not 30, and not even that. There were other clashes plus massive Russian interference in Ukrainian affairs just a few years after Budapest.
For something as serious as giving up a nuclear arsenal it’s reasonable to expect to get more than 20 years of peace and for the co-signers to actual fulfil their parts of the agreement, whether legally binding or not.
The end result is that no country will soon trust a Russian non-aggression promise and none will trust an American promise of support.
It was signed in 1994? That's 30 years. I guess you're counting Crimea? I was think just starting from the full Russian invasion.
Russia invaded and annexed Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine in 2014. That’s 20 years later.
It is also widely believed to have had a hand in the poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko with dioxin in 2004, in order to give an edge to his pro-Russian opponent, Viktor Yanukovych.
But even if that’s not true there’s ample evidence of overt Russian influence campaigns to support Yanukovych in that election, which was just 10 years after the Budapest Memorandum.
Thanks. Did that happen immediately after the USSR breakup, i.e., when Yeltsin was in charge, or more recently under Putin?
Still under Yeltsin, 1994 I think. If you've heard about the Budapest Memorandum, that's exactly what it was about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum
Signed 5 December 1994
1. Respect the signatory's independence and sovereignty in the existing borders (in accordance with the principles of the CSCE Final Act).[10]
2. Refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of the signatories to the memorandum, and undertake that none of their weapons will ever be used against these countries, except in cases of self-defense or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations. (...)
The same article says the US itself claimed the Memorandum was not legally binding when it sanctioned Belarus. And the Analysis section starts with a clear:
The Budapest Memorandum is not a treaty, and it does not confer any new legal obligations for signatory states.
It also states that many Ukrainians at the time considered that keeping the nukes was an unrealistic option since all maintenance and equipment required to maintain them were located in Russia, Ukraine was under a financial crisis at the time and had no means to develop those things itself. I just can’t understand people now claiming it was a mistake to give up the nukes. Russia might have reasonably invaded Ukraine as soon as it was clear they intended to keep them as they knew they didn’t really have the ability to use them and no Western government would support them using them and starting a war that would likely contaminate half of Europe and cause terrible loss of life. It was absolutely the right thing to do for Ukraine. Even if that didn’t save them from future aggression, which I think was mostly the fault of the West for not being prepared to really sign a binding document and put the lives of their own soldiers on the line.
Mearsheimer was right in 1993 (nukes).
https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Mears...
He was right in 2014:
https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Why-t...
And he is still right:
https://mearsheimer.substack.com/p/who-caused-the-ukraine-wa...
Not really, went through the last post and its an utter pile of shit to be very polite. Basically russian propaganda, seen 1000 times.
It ignores that people should have their right to self-determination, don't want to live under russian oppression. As somebody whose family lives were ruined by exactly same oppression of exactly same russia (err soviet union but we all know who set the absolute tone of that 'union' and once possible everybody else run the fuck away as quickly as possible) I can fully understand anybody who wants to have basic freedom and some prospect of future for their children - russia takes that away, they subjugate, oppress, erase whole ethnicities, whoever sticks out and their close ones is dealt with brutally.
Not worth the electrical energy used to display that text. Unless you enjoy russian propaganda, then all is good.
I think this guy paints a difference in thought that is not really there. Putin sees Ukraine neutrality and impotence as vital to Russia's security. No, he probably does not want to actually annex Ukraine, that would be a ball ache he doesn't need, but he would like it to behave like Belarus.
I think the real difference lies in whether one believes Ukraine deserves to decide its own path, or if it's forever doomed to be a chess piece on the board between spheres of influence, which seems to be the mindset both Putin and Trump are stuck in.
The Senate never ratified that treaty, so no the US never agreed to so that. And the Budapest Memorandum doesn't say that anyway.
afaik Ukraine never got paid for nuclear disarmament as initially agreed - about $200 billions
I wonder where people get these ideas. The Budapest Memorandum is very short, it'll take five minutes to read if you want to know what was actually agreed. It seems like people just sort of imagine what they would have agreed to, and run with it.
thank you, will take a closer look. overheard it from whatever talk. ain't easy to fact check everything
It's pretty easy to avoid repeating unverified things, though.
They got paid mainly in nuclear fuel, there was some disagreement at the rate by which they got fuel in exchange for the weapons and maybe they didn't get quite all the fuel they should have, but for sure they did get paid at least partially.
The US did not agree to protect them. The signatures to the Budapest Memorandum agreed to respect Ukraine's sovereignty. Of the signatories, Russia is the only one that has violated the agreement.
Are you sure about that? Wikipedia says the following: "
3. Refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by Ukraine, the Republic of Belarus, and Kazakhstan of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind.
4. Seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance to the signatory if they "should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used".
Both seems to not happen as stipulated.
Edit: I didn't read properly, 4 obviously didn't happen, my bad.
The actual memorandum is shorter than the Wikipedia article about it. The English-language portion is literally only three pages of double spaced text.
https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%203007/P...
But the quotes you seem to challenge are also part of the original document you just linked.
I didn't challenge anything. Just posting a link to the actual source documentation.
I guess you could argue the US is kinda violating 3, since I think the Trump administration tried to ask for future financial reparations in exchange for support during the war. But 4? This isn't a nuclear conflict yet right?
Gladly not this condition: "in which nuclear weapons are used"
I don't think 3 has happened. 4 definitely has not happened. Did you miss the last 4 words you quoted?
the US trying to coerce Ukraine into surrendering territory, and then having to pay the US to do it is a violation of their sovereignty
What's the threat? "Do this or we'll stop helping you" is not a violation of sovereignty, distasteful though it may be in this case.
Article 3 of the Budapest memorandum[1]:
> 3. The United States of America, the Russian Federation, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine, in accordance with the principles of the CSCE Final Act, to refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by the Republic of Belarus of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind.
the US regime is attempting to do this
[1]: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Memorandum_on_Security_Assura...
Minerals deal that US pushed for was already against this.
I don't see how this qualifies. Being given weapons isn't part of sovereignty, and putting conditions on the continued flow of weapons isn't a violation of it.
Economic coercion attempting to violate sovereignty would be something like the threatened (actual?) tariffs on Brazil for imprisoning Bolsonaro.
That’s a hell of reply, and shame on the US.
I don’t know this. Thank you.
The ideal scenario would have been if Ukraine had secretly retained 30-100 warheads. Everyone likes to prattle on about how they couldn't even have used them: those people are mentally retarded. A sophisticated government with nuclear and aerospace scientists could have easily dismantled interlocks and installed their own. Maybe not in a hurry, but they had 3 decades more or less. And if they didn't have the expertise, they might have outsourced it to Taiwan for the fee of a few nukes to keep.
Ukraine *desperately* needs to be a nuclear weapons state. Nothing else will suffice. They need more than one bomb, really more than three or four. Putin has to be terrified that no matter how many nuclear strikes he endures, another waits to follow. When he fears that, the war will end.
The war might end in Ukraine being flattened by Russian nuclear weapons if that happened. Putin would be backed into a corner. End the invasion after suffering a nuclear strike (or just the threat of one) and he'll risk being deposed and meet a gruesome end. Retaliate overwhelmingly and risk escalation from other nuclear powers. It's not clear to me that the second risk would be worse, and definitely not clear to me that Putin wouldn't see that as the better of two bad options.
As has been illustrated so well over the past few years, the power of nuclear weapons is a paradox. It allows you to make the ultimate threat. But that threat isn't credible unless people believe you'll use them. Because the consequences of using them are so severe, they're only credible if used in response to a correspondingly severe threat. Russia's arsenal hasn't allowed it to stop a constant flow of weapons to its enemy, an enemy which has invaded and still controls a small bit of Russian territory, and which frequently carries out aerial attacks on Russian territory. Ukraine faces much more of an existential threat (Ukraine has no prospect of conquering Russia, but the reverse is a serious possibility) so a nuclear threat from Ukraine would be more credible, but it could easily still not be enough. Certainly they're not an automatic "leave me alone" card.
I agree with most of what you said but there’s zero possibility Russia will take over all of Ukraine. Even Putin never claimed they would, this seems like a fantasy some people like to propagate to instigate fear in Europe or something. They spent three years on a gruesome fight to take less than a fifth of the territory and the rest is much harder as the further West you go, the more nationalist Ukrainians are. Check the maps of political opinion on Russia before the war started. Looks pretty close to the current frontline where the divide between pro and against Russia lies. Attacking a NATO country would mean the end for Russia and both sides know it perfectly well even if they may say otherwise publicly to either scare people into supporting their militarism or to gain political points.
I don't think it's likely, but I do think it's possible. If the US and EU get tired of helping Ukraine, they'll have a much harder time resisting Russian attacks. Once they do, why would Russia stop? Maybe they would. Maybe they'd pause, declare peace, and take the rest a year or three later. Maybe they'd just keep going. Putin saying he doesn't want it doesn't convince me in the slightest. He's a Soviet Union revanchist in terms of territory if not political system, and they owned the place before.
Not sure what the consequences of attacking NATO has to do with this.
Russia would still stop because controlling the rest of Ukraine would be more trouble than it is worth for them. And they might gain some concessions from the West. Attacking NATO is a common talk point in the West about what happens after Russia takes over Ukraine and Zelenskyy is more than happy to suggest that is to be expected as he says they are fighting for all of Europe.
Invading Ukraine in the first place appears to have been far more trouble than it was worth, and it didn’t stop them.
On the contrary they seem to be doing much better than anyone expected, maybe even themselves, and they appear to have successfully stopped Ukraine from ever joining NATO which was absolutely their main objective, just see what they have been saying since 1992.
The initial expectation was for Ukraine to fall in weeks. The convoys that were headed for Kyiv had Rosgvardia in them - that's basically riot police, not military troops, and they were equipped as such. So no, they were absolutely going for the whole Ukraine (as a puppet state in the west and probably annexations in the east) and instead got stuck in the worst meat grinder Russia has seen since WW2.
>Putin would be backed into a corner.
He'd be backed into the door marked "exit". There is no corner to trap him here.
>End the invasion after suffering a nuclear strike
And why do you believe that Zelensky or whoever is in charge would nuke Moscow first? Do you think that, if they had say 30 nukes (plenty for a few relatively harmless demonstrations) that this would be the first target? Obviously they'd pick something that he could decide to de-escalate afterwards.
>they're only credible if used in response to a correspondingly severe threat.
You mean such as the severe threat that Ukraine has endured for a decade at this point? The war now threatens to make them functionally extinct. Many have fled and will never return, their population is reduced to something absurdly low, many of their children have been forcibly abducted to be indoctrinated or tormented/tortured.
That condition you impose was pre-satisfied.
>Certainly they're not an automatic "leave me alone" card.
Of course not. They'd have to be used intelligently (readers: "used" does not imply detonated). It's not entirely clear to me that this would be the case with Ukraine/Zelensky. But nothing less at this point will suffice. Even if the US promised to put 150,000 troops on the ground, this wouldn't end. It would only escalate. Perhaps to that nuclear war you seem to fear.
I don't think Putin would have an exit. Losing the war would result in a major risk to his continued rule, and thus to his person, from a collapse of domestic support. A Ukrainian nuclear strike would present him with a choice: risk internal revolt, or risk the consequences of nuclear retaliation. I'm not remotely confident he'd choose the first. And, to be very clear, the second would make Ukraine (and likely the rest of the world) a lot worse off than they are today.
I dunno if I agree with them being nuclear. It just ups the possibility of a thermonuclear war instead of a conventional war. Just as I’d prefer that IN or PK or both not having those weapons.
The only historical examples we have of nuclear war occurred when the capability was unilateral. MAD actually works. The fear you have of a thermonuclear war is a good thing, and that fear can exist in Putin as well... but only if Ukraine has the weapons to instill such fear.
> Just as I’d prefer that IN or PK or both not having those weapons.
The only reason we haven't seen a Ukraine-like invasion in that region is that they both have nukes. MAD works.
Mini nukes change the equation. If you get two crazy hot-heads making decisions where no-one can overrule their decisions; things could go in unexpected ways. MAD presumes rational actors. If Iraq and Iran would have had nukes in the mid 80s I’m not sure that they wouldn’t have used them.
> It’s kind of hard to see how much more support the US could withdraw from Ukraine
It would be a major blow to Ukraine if the US stops selling weapons to them via European buyers. There is a real threat of this if Trump feels the need to coerce Ukraine into supporting his peace plan.
I believe this is what is implied by the Thursday deadline. Article certainly implies this.
Maybe the most impactful thing they could do would not be withdrawing support for Ukraine, but removing sanctions on Russia and thus boosting Russian economy.
Perhaps Ukraine could spare a few troops for a quick invasion of the West Bank?
“Peace deal”
The latest demand for Ukraine to just completely surrender.
I've been to Kyiv five times to deliver aid via help99.co, and I've spent many, many hours with Europeans driving trucks from Tallinn to Kyiv.
The people volunteering and driving know Europe is at war. They all say nobody else where they live realizes this.
It's frustrating.
In my eyes it's more so that we don't care in that sense. My friend group is mostly just keeping in mind that they might have to dip to another country/continent at some point, maybe, unlikely though.
I'm pretty sure everyone I know would rather get imprisoned than go die in the mud to protect property they don't own, on the orders of a government that doesn't care about the same things they care about.
When we talk about it, it always boils down to a discussion on how to best desert/escape at different stages.
If the relationship with America deteriorates, which countries do you think will accept European refugees? Your friends may have to stay and fight not out of patriotism, but necessity. In a total-war scenario, even prisoners will find themselves contributing to thr war effort.
Since europeans are quite wealthy, many will be happy to accept them (as long as they still have money and qualifications).
But leaving all moral questions aside, where to go?
South america might turn into a war zone as well. Africa partly is already. Asia similar.
New Zealand sounds good, but even Peter Thiel found out, that money will get you only so far in buying a safe haven.
So personally I would opt for fixing the problems in europe. And am on it within my abilities. But .. with limits. I do not trust my politicians either and I am multilingual and traveled the world a lot. So in the end I would also rather take my family and leave, then being ordered to go fight in a war with half working equipment, because corruption and proud incompetence prevented preparation. (Many in the german military for instance hold the opinion, that they don't need to learn from the incompetent ukrainians, because they are all fighting wrong)
Luckily for whole Europe russia is very incompetent at doing anything serious, and complex projects like war are as serious as it gets. They routinely fail at logistics even now, corruption and nepotism is how puttin' built his whole empire, you don't suddenly get competent people at key positions of power just because it would make sense.
So whatever happens (apart from nuclear holocaust everywhere around the world) will be so slow we will have time to react. Already biggest arming of whole european continent since WWII is happening, and any bad news is pushing more money and focus into building more and more.
I know it sounds gloomy, but only if you have your head too close to the screens daily. Worse had come and gone than incompetent russians.
"I know it sounds gloomy, but only if you have your head too close to the screens daily. Worse had come and gone than incompetent russians."
Depends where you live I suppose. The baltic states are rightfully worried and take it a bit more serious.
And yes, russia on its own is not that dangerous to whole Europe. But russia in combination with north korean soldiers and supported by china .. and some european states that switch sides (Hungary, Serbia, Bosnia, ..), that would be dangerous. Lot's of things can happen. Also the EU can transform into an evil empire if we don't watch out. So no, I am not too worried about immediate war, but the traction right now is bad.
I don’t fully understand that bit about the EU turning evil. Care to elaborate?
Italy has already a Mussolini (who invented fascism) admiring government. Biggest opposition in france is pretty right wing. The german right wing opposition is pretty strong, ... etc.
Was your point that europe is immune to fascism and imperialism somehow?
We all have relatives all over the place, many have multiple passports/citizenships, most are well educated and/or make good money, most speak 3+ languages.. It'll work out. Countries take in refugees with much different cultures and lower education in the hopes of adding to their workforce. Someone will gladly take us.
I'm guessing in the worst case South America/AU/NZ/JP/UAE/Canada would be the goals.
The only real risk I see is essentially waiting too long and getting detained right as they begin to close off the borders for people of fighting age.
We are not at war. No bombs are falling in our cities. Our children are not being drafted and coming back in coffins. No one is bombing our ships and railways, so we have plenty of food on the table. If you think we are at war you have no idea what you’re talking about.
> No one is bombing our ships and railways
Uh, nuh https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/polish-pm-says-two-resp...
That is not the only kind of war. Russia has totally pwned the USA in the realm of information.
EU got itself a Cuba
too bad that Cuba is right on its own border :)
So literally just like Cuba? The distance between US and Cuba is like 150km, if you're in Donetsk you can't even leave Donetsk Oblast if you travel 150km, and the shortest distance you can take from Ukraine<>Russia to closest EU/NATO member would be something like 600km if you don't take shortcuts via Belarus.
For all intents and purposes, Ukraine's border with Russia is way further away (like magnitude) from EU/NATO than US<>Russia (who are neighbors) or US<>Cuba (who are also neighbors).
Romania shares a border with Ukraine and is a member of both NATO and the EU.
Indeed, and how far would you wager it is between the border of Ukraine<>Romania and Ukraine<>Russia, at the shortest point? I'd wager around a lot longer than US<>Cuba.
I imagine the shortest path Russia->Ukraine->EU Members Romania/Hungary/Slovakia/Poland is far shorter than the shortest path Russia->Cuba->Any US State or territory.
Both Cuba and Russia are literal neighbors to the US, it doesn't get closer than that. Cuba is like 150km from the coast of Florida, and Russia is even closer than that to the US!
You're just randomly creating new positions to argue about because why? There is no factual way in which whatever point you are trying to make holds true re. Russia/Cuba to the US is less than Russia/Ukraine to the EU & NATO.
Kaliningrad literally shares borders with Poland and Lithuania. 0 km is the smallest distance possible. Russia and Ukraine both border EU and NATO countries.
Russia shares borders with Norway, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Poland which are NATO.
What an absurd argument. If Ukraine falls, the Russians will marshal Ukrainian manpower and resources against the EU.
> What an absurd argument
What argument did I even make? Are you saying it's absurd that Russia's border to Ukraine is further away to the closest EU/NATO member than Cuba is to the US? Because if so, I think you need to open up a world map.
The idea that the size of Ukraine and the distance to Russia’s border through Ukraine diminishes the Russian threat. For two reasons:
1. Russia aims to either capture Ukraine outright or exert influence over it, which puts eastern EU states at grave risk. Note that Belarus, a Russian vassal, already borders the EU and was used by the Russians to launch the Ukraine invasion.
2. Russia already borders — and menaces - the EU in the Baltics.
By the way, most material support by the US is actually purchased by other NATO members. The US recycles the facade of support, there is very little actionable support.
From the Russia POV invading Ukraine was a response to NATO expanding there. An imminent invasion of Europe seems outside of Russia’s geopolitical goals.
But Europe’s leaders on the other hand do seem invested in escalating this conflict, a lack of finances notwithstanding.
And NATO is expanding because Russia keeps attacking its neighbors. It is not like it expands on its own, countries are literally begging to be let in.
This is a fake news from Russia... Both Germany and France said no for Ukraine to join NATO several times, exactly to avoid poking the bear and starting a war.
First off, what I stated is a view held by reputable scholars such as Noam Chomsky, Jeffrey Sachs, and John Mearsheimer, not just a view you (also) can find in Russian propaganda.
Second my point is understanding the Russian POV, regardless of the correctness of that POV.
Third, your comment is off base historically. The timeline is:
2007 Putin’s Munich speech warning against NATO expansion to Eastern Europe.
Feb 2008 US ambassador warning that NATO expansion to Ukraine was a red line for Russia.
April 2008 Bucharest summit Ukraine and Georgia were not given MAPs due to France and Germany objections but were promised NATO accession over their objections.
August 2008 invasion of Georgia.
Nov 2013-Feb 2014 Euromaidan protests overthrowing Russia-sympathetic Yanukovych
2014 invasion of Crimea
Feb 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine
Besides this Putin has argued for the invasion of Ukraine as restoration of historical Russia as part of his nationalist ideology. And other examples of NATO expansion such as Baltics, Poland and Finland have not led to Russian attacks.
Overall the concerns many European leaders have about Russia need to be tempered by a better understanding of Russia’s actual perspective (as I said not the same as advocating for that perspective).
They are Russian propaganda, Mearsheimer most notably. His books are financed by the Russian government. If these people are your primary sources, you will end up believing that the Holocaust is a lie, the Americans never landed on the Moon, 5G is for mind control, and vaccines cause autism.> First off, what I stated is a view held by reputable scholars such as Noam Chomsky, Jeffrey Sachs, and John Mearsheimer, not just a view you (also) can find in Russian propaganda.
Who do you think has a better understanding of Russia: those who had the misfortune of being born and raised in the USSR and saw Russian imperialism from the inside (this generation currently fills the top leadership positions in Eastern Europe), or "reputable scholars" from the other side of the world who cannot speak or read a word of Russian and know nothing about the country beyond what their handlers showed them during a conference visit? Do you think that Kaja Kallas, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs, whose mother was deported as a six-month-old baby to Siberian labor camp after the Soviet invasion of Estonia, and whose father later became one of the four architects of the Estonian independence movement, needs to be lectured by Mearsheimers and Chomskys?> Overall the concerns many European leaders have about Russia need to be tempered by a better understanding of Russia’s actual perspectiveIf anything, the Anglo-American world has lived for too long in a fantasy land constructed by reputable and disreputable scholars from afar, instead of listening to those with lived experience and knowledge accumulated over a lifetime.
> They are Russian propaganda, Mearsheimer most notably. His books are financed by the Russian government.
The closest thing I could find about this was that in one of his books he acknowledges partial financing of this one book from a small prize from a Russian internet forum. That’s all I could find. Chomsky and Sachs supposedly fall under this umbrella too, according to you. Presumably criticizing American foreign policy is equivalent to Russian propaganda in your view.
Nor are any of the conspiracy theories you attribute to them something I could find evidence of.
My point there in my comment about these three holding these views was that this isn’t simply Russian fake news. It’s held by some reputable scholars as well. Your response is to claim these scholars too are Russian propagandists, bolstering your case with outright fabrications.
The US leadership openly refers to Ukraine as a proxy war. I do think it’s worth listening to critics of US foreign policy in that context, and not limiting our information diet to European politicians.
The Valdai forum[1] is not "a small internet forum" but the most prominent event run by the Russian government to bring Western politicians, scholars and other notable figures to Russia, treat them like royalty, surround them with agents of influence, and manipulate them into adopting Russian propaganda narratives, which they then repeat in their essays and articles once they return home.> ... from a small prize from a Russian internet forum.No meaningful discussion takes place there. You can assume that all organizers and domestic attendees are acting under FSB instructions. It is solely an operation by the security services to manipulate Western visitors and turn them into useful idiots. Thus, at least in Eastern Europe, where these tricks are well understood, anyone attending such events is automatically considered suspicious: they must be either utterly clueless or working for Russia. Mearsheimer, somehow, has fallen even deeper and started accepting money.
And it shows. You can look up on YouTube his attempt to debate the Polish foreign minister, completely misrepresenting certain diplomatic events, unaware that Sikorski had been there in person, leading an official delegation. How anyone can take such a buffoon seriously remains a mystery to me. To Russians, he has been one of their best investments. Tens of millions of people have been exposed, through him, to the ideas instilled in him at places like Valdai, believing them to be high-quality expertise from a reputable scholar, when in reality they are nothing more than laundered propaganda.
I didn’t say it’s a small forum but a small financial contribution - to one book. This is the totality of actual evidence you have of Mearsheimer, Chomsky, and Sachs being Russian propagandists. Your argument is paper-thin.
Criticizing American foreign policy doesn’t make someone a Russian propagandist.
> First off, what I stated is a view held by reputable scholars such as Noam Chomsky, Jeffrey Sachs, and John Mearsheimer
You have named 3 people out of 8 billion alive, so 0.00000004%. That doesn't sound like a consensus, or even a majority. It sounds like 3 dudes saying a thing.
> The timeline is: 2007 Putin’s Munich speech warning against NATO expansion to Eastern Europe...
So as far back as 2007, we have recordings of putin threatening other countries against exercising their sovereign rights, in violation of international law. Not great for russia.
Unfortunately for the world, the timeline starts far before that, with russian invasions and annexations of their neighbors. If we look further back, we see russian genocide of Ukrainians during the holodomor. If we look even further back, we see russian ethnic cleansing of Ukrainian Tatars.
Based on this history, and the admissions of russian officials, we can conclude that russia just wants what Ukraine has, and hates Ukrainians for saying no.
From the Russia POV invading Ukraine was a consequence of a deeply entrenched belief that Ukrainians "aren't a real people" and that Ukrainian is "not a real language", and that Ukraine is basically Russian territory that was forcibly separated and "derussified". Putin pretty much spelled it out in the open before the invasion.
Ukraine is not and was never part of EU, FWIW
Ukrainians voted to align themselves more closely with the EU and are now effectively a march. Ukraine is very much within the sphere of EU concern.
Russians would like to have Ukraine in their sphere of influence, but after bungled invasion in 2022 and subsequent grinding war, Ukrainians will go out of their way to be outside of this Russian world. I think we are talking about decades before normalization of relationship between Ukraine and Russia.
>and China
That's the biggest question of the century. Imagine that EU and China make a deal, and they backstab US and Russia respectively. EU and China are physically so far away from each other that there's no way they'd actually run into direct conflict, meanwhile by backstabbing, both of them could easily get what they want. What I'm trying to say is that if you flipped the alliances and aligned EU with China and US with Russia, Russia would collapse within one battle maximum while EU's support would be just enough to push the 50/50 chance of Taiwan invasion towards decisive Chinese victory. Everyone happy - China becomes the world's #1 superpower, while EU remains undisputable #2 and US gets sent back to lick its wounds. Sure, EU might suffer from severing its ties with the US, but if the alternative scenario is US abandoning EU and the latter facing Russia alone, then this stops being such a crazy idea.
> China becomes the world's #1 superpower, while EU remains undisputable #2
How does EU even remotely benefit from this bizarre fantasy scenario where it flips alliances toward China? The fundamentals don't change. EU has no tech and doesn't produce anything. China would only exploit the partnership even more than they already do.
> EU has no tech and doesn't produce anything.
What a poor attempt at trolling!
Yes it was an exaggeration. Withdrawn.
But the point is still that the economic fundamentals don't change by shifting alliances. EU would still be under the same pressure.
I would be curious if the volume of domestically produced goods exceeds the quantity of Chinese-produced goods in Europe. If one excludes food and automobiles, then I suspect very strongly that this is not the case at all, regardless of how you measure the quantity (euro value, volume, weight, etc).
I dont think its trolling.
Ive heard the same sentiment locally and at some conventions with low/no European representation.
Its also a corrolary to "china steals tech"... Except for all the tech they're innovating and creating.
Europe has higher industrial output than the US, its either trolling or misinformed beyond belief.
It benefits by not sending its people to war in case of conflict with Russia. China can pretty much disable Russian army by banning exports of military and dual-use goods. Meanwhile US security guarantees are becoming weaker by the day, especially in the context of potential war US vs China.
> USA withdrawing even more support for Ukraine in the war
USA all but openly support Russia by now.
>USA withdrawing even more support for Ukraine in the war
I thought the only way USA was supporting Ukraine was by no longer refusing to sell them extraordinarily expensive weapons. So, no longer [openly] hampering them.
> unless EU nations want to put boots on the ground.
Is such a thing even possible in the EU? I understand that it's an economic and policy bloc. Does Brussels have the authority to raise an army from EU members?
Read again "EU nations" not the "EU", If some subset of the nations that are members of the EU decide to act cooperatively outside of economic policy that is with in their propagative, and wouldn't be too surprising outside of the sheer volume of politics involved.
No nor does it have logistical capability to deliver even half of the equipment currently being promised/discussed within a time-frame of less then 5-10year.
It's all dependent on the national government voluntarily following the advice of Brussels, and in most cases they don't really have the resources the EU wants them to commit to "The Ukrainian nationalist Cause".
EU has enough logistical capacity, but Russian nationalists like to dismiss EU like some kind of temporary group while they are riding donkeys to battle.
Lets talk numbers, rather then just sling cheap unfounded allegations
The problem with the way they talk at the big conferences is that there is almost no link between the rhetoric of existential crisis and the bills being passed at the national level.
The last numbers from Ukraine was a army of maybe 900k uniformed troops(thats up there with America) and as a response to that army's failure to drive Russia back Germany is talking about raising their armed forces less then a 3rd of that by 2030 thats just not real mobilization and thats my point about not taking the logistics serious.
Were the EU to mobilize as if it mattered to the actual population of the EU it could raise several time the army Ukraine have but nobody is actually suggesting that because the people in charge of the actual policy making don't really believe that Russia is a threat to any of the NATO member states.
> Lets talk numbers, rather then just sling cheap unfounded allegations
> Ukraine was a army of maybe 900k uniformed troops
you have provided only 1 number and it was not about EU.
This is quite a romantic way to describe EU shooting itself in the foot with corrupt politicians and myopic policies.
It's more the US that has corrupt politicians and myopic policies. Trump changes his mind every few days He takes bribes from the Swiss.
The sooner the EU rids itself of the US the better
It's a bad situation allright, but sucking up to Trump even more isn't going to make things better. Europe needs to grow a pair, help Ukraine way more, and be prepared to fight Russia sooner rather than later.
In France recently the army chief-of-staff declared that we must be prepared to "lose its children" in a war, if it wants to avoid it. Of course we should. The resulting outcry may be a sign we've already lost.
Depends on the point of view.
I see it as a great opportunity, that we in the EU get our shit together, to not be dependant on the US anymore. Nor russia. Nor china.
So far we still can afford the luxory of moving the european parliament around once a month, because we cannot agree on one place. Lots of nationalistic idiotic things going on and yes, if those forces win, the EU will fall apart.
If russia graps most of Ukraine, this would be really bad(see the annexion of chzech republic 1938, that gave Hitler lots of weapons he did not had), but it is totally preventable without boots on the ground (russia struggles hard as well). Just not if too many people fall for the russian fueled nationalistic propaganda.
As a European I can agree with the US and China stuff. But a Russian Invasion? Seriously?
As poor of a state that is Europe's various armies, I'd be very surprised if EU couldn't take on Russia even without the US (who FWIW recently reiterated their commitment to the defense of Europe). Russia's advanced SAMs, radars, and Navy have seriously deteriorated. Their main capability left is submarines and mass Shahed drones whose range can't reach much of Europe.
If Russia's jets can't operate over Ukraine they won't do much in Europe except self-defense of their own homeland.
China on the other hand is a very very serious opponent...
Russia's advanced SAMs and radars are getting clapped by one of the poorest nations in Europe. We're at almost four years of full scale war and the worlds no. 2 military has not been able to get air superiority over a small airforce of cold war left overs. Just the airforces of the Nordic countries alone would run rings around the russian airforce and their air defence.
GP is talking about the invasion of Ukraine, taking place just beyond the EU eastern border, and very much shaking up the European security situation, and the EU and its member states are visibly having to "deal with it", diplomatically, economically and in terms of their practical defense postures. That's what they meant with "at the border", and not a literal invasion of the EU.
(Edited for a less confrontational beginning of the first sentence.)
As another European: Yes?
Invasion doesn't have to mean they plan to roll tanks all the way to Paris.
Have you realized Russian agents blew up a train in Poland this week, after some weeks prior flying planes and drones into NATO airspace and disrupting air travel in Denmark with drones started from shadow fleet tankers. The grounds for further action are being tested as we speak.
Invasion just means Russian soldiers enter Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Finnland. Countries parts of which Putin painted rightfully Russian territories in his speeches. I wouldn't bet a lot on that not happening, especially if the geopolitical situation deteriorates in favor of Putin.
> Invasion just means Russian soldiers enter Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Finnland.
So invasion means a full war with NATO?
Given the pained debate here by Western Europeans over the semantics of “Europe” and Ukraine’s relationship therewith, it’s very unlikely NATO would act and that’s precisely what the Russians would bet on.
Russia's best case scenario atm is they take more of eastern Ukraine and the west establishes a DMZ not far from the current frontlines. Pushing up anywhere close to Lviv/Polish border would be like winning the lottery given their current track record.
These sorts of wars are very rare in the modern era. They gambled entirely because they faced an army they were 10x the size and they got embarrassed. There's near zero strategic logic in trying again vs NATO after they lost most of their fancy gear.
Ukraine has a severe manpower problem, while Russia hasn't even implemented full mobilization yet. They can keep grinding down the existing defenses until there are simply not enough Ukrainians in uniform left to hold the tide, and then things would break down pretty quickly in the absence of external support.
They would still have to contend with an insurgency on occupied territory, but that is something Russia has considerable experience with, including Ukraine in the past (mopping up the remaining nationalist resistance after WW2).
Slowly then suddenly. Movements in the frontline are gradual until one side is exhausted and collapses. With Trump’s ludicrous “peace” plan, Ukraine would be barred access to US weapons, the size of its military restricted, and Russia would simply rearm and try again.
And despite how things have fared in Ukraine thus far, the Baltics are a much softer target. If Ukraine does end up falling to the Russians, it’ll be used as a springboard by the Russians, potentially supported by Ukrainians disillusioned with the West’s betrayal. It would certainly not be the first time that Russia has annexed Ukraine and mobilized its people against Russia’s foes.
What would Russia hope to gain? How does this compare to alternative naratives? Assuming we both lack real insider infirmatiin, whixh reasonably is more credible?
> What would Russia hope to gain?
Reversal of what Russia sees as a great injustice. The 2021 ultimatum[1] issued on the eve of the war can be summed up as a return to the Europe of 1989 with everything that it entails.
Yeah it's all very dumb. The rest of Europe is protected by no less then three state nuclear triads. Ukraine was not.
Both USA and China are having much worse systemic economical issues than EU.
The EU is not facing a Russian invasion on their Eastern border. It (or perhaps we should say NATO) is participating in a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.
Sharing intel is another big thing. Without US satellite imagery and gps coordinates Ukraine soldiers would not know what to shoot at.
A referendum about whether the EU should "put boots on the ground" seems like a good idea to me as long as only those who vote yes get deployed.
> A referendum about whether the EU should "put boots on the ground" seems like a good idea to me as long as only those who vote yes get deployed.
Politics (almost) never works like this. In a secret vote, you don't even know who voted yes or no or at all.
Given the demographics of Europe, what this means is that old people will vote for young people to be fed into a meat mincer just so they can keep collecting their pensions for a couple decades more. Let's call a spade a spade then. This guy is doing just that: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2025/11/20/outcry-a...
I think you are misreading the article. The general is warning that if we do not show preparedness and willingness now, in the long run it will cost more.
Si vis pacem para bellum
And all those who vote no get sold into slavery to Russia.
That sounds to me like a bunch of individual countries deciding to independently put boots on the ground. At that point what are they voting on as a group? (Though maybe that’s just what you’re suggesting should be done and I’m missing it)
I also wonder what good any sort of military/defensive pact is if any country can unilaterally decide when or when not to participate. It means you can’t depend on it and you may as well not have it then right? To be clear I am not saying military pacts are a good thing, but they do currently exist and participating counties can’t (at least shouldn’t) just pretend they aren’t part of one when it’s inconvenient.
And the people who vote yes should have to actually go themselves and lead from the front, not pull a Putin and simply declare war (er, special operation) while hiding under a bunker.
I don't understand the point you are trying to make. Could you please explain it?
Im going to go ahead and predict that the EU will not risk it.If it were China ? maybe they would pull the lever to activate this counter.
Previously when the US reneged on the JCPOA viz Iran , they had a similar law/faclity that theoreticall could have been used but never was.
As an addition the EU Commission is currently imposing pretty similar sanction on a Journalist [1] so yeah i dont see much movement on that law being used.Most likely they will try to wait it out.
[1] https://www.public.news/p/eu-travel-ban-on-three-journalists
Thanks for promoting russian propaganda (I mean the framing and source). Unfortunately tolerance has to stop with the intolerant. For anyone actually interested in the substance of why she is banned it seems rather clear and reasonable from the official EU Council decision. These decisions always end in front of the courts, so they only can list things for which they have direct evidence; presumably there is this much more - e.g. a good chance that in the background she is being funded by Russia for this work:
> Alina Lipp runs the blog “Neues aus Russland”, in which she systematically disseminates misinformation about Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, and delegitimises the Ukrainian government, especially with a view to manipulating German public sentiment as regards support for Ukraine.
> Furthermore, she is using her role as a war correspondent with the Russian armed forces in eastern Ukraine to spread Russian war propaganda. She regularly appears in troop entertainment and propaganda shows on the Russian military TV channel Zvezda.
> Thus, Alina Lipp is engaging in and supporting actions by the Government of the Russian Federation which undermine or threaten security and stability in the Union and in a third country (Ukraine) through the use of coordinated information manipulation and interference, and through facilitating an armed conflict in a third country.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=OJ:L_202...
The more USA is going to use this leaver, the likely they will make this leaver useless in the future. Like with China, when they overused chips leaver which stunted China for a while, but eventually gave them a way to establish their own chip industry. Now that leaver is becoming effectively useless. It will ends up same with EU.
The best China has is an internationally uncompetitive "7nm" fab and that's the best they'll have until they can manufacture EUV machines domestically.
So the EUV blockade has absolutely been effective and the fact that the PRC is paying so many shills to convince westerners otherwise just shows how behind they are.
I noticed that people love pointing how far AI field has advanced in a few years and extrapolate next few years. While at the same time being dismissive of Chinese semiconductor manufacturing process. In similar vein I also remember claims that TSMC Fab in Arizona can never work, and yet it does. So I don't know man, I wouldn't underestimate what a billion of enterprising people can do. Especially when paired with the system that has a pipeline of funneling smart people into elite schools.
Underestimating China seems like a really, really, really stupid thing to do.
I don't think the US is underestimating China... I do think that the US is preemptively shoring up a domestic posture against long term changes. It would be a pretty bad strategy to continue to outsource everything and continue to see a massive trade imbalance with the outside world for a prolonged period of time.
> It would be a pretty bad strategy to continue to outsource everything and continue to see a massive trade imbalance with the outside world for a prolonged period of time.
It's not actually a strategy at all. It's the organic result of being the global reserve currency. Foreigners want American dollars so that they can trade with everyone else and are incentivized to do whatever it takes to get it.
Also, the "massive trade imbalance" is only an imbalance in goods. When you take services & the flow of foreign investments/loans into consideration as well, things don't look anywhere near as uneven as Donald Trump would like you to believe.
It’s not even just the flow of services Trump is ignoring: an iPhone is made in China but the design and software is done in the USA, most of the parts come from other countries, most of an iPhone’s value isn’t originating from China.
Trump wants us to give up high value jobs in designing hardware and software so we can make less working in factories again.
No... not everyone is capable of doing hardware or software design... There are over 350 million people in the US. There are nowhere near that many software/hardware jobs.. or other IP generating jobs. Not only that, but corporations are bringing in a lot of people to do those jobs as well, driving down those wages.
It's not even just jobs, it's also the tax revenue itself.. the population is overburdened with taxes and increased prices combined with relatively lower wages due to excessive inflation the past few years. While tariffs can increase prices, they can also eat into the margins of foreign production leading to more insourcing of jobs.
Beyond those aspects is being able to handle production of critical infrastructure in times of supply constraints... such as war or a global pandemic. You can increase from 50% production of medications to 100% of domestic needs pretty easily, but scaling from 0% is almost impossible in any reasonable time frame.
We already have a low unemployment rate and we have plenty of low paying jobs even in manufacturing that are going unfilled now. Surely those workers have to come from somewhere, and China is really eager to switch places with us. A decade from now Americans will probably be manufacturing stuff for rich Chinese consumers who would rather work jobs in product design and software development that we used to do, and we will owe it all to Trump and the voters that put him in power.
Yes, we are doing a bad job of updating our priors.
Is that sarcastic? Isn’t underestimating by definition a bad thing?
Taking this as an earnest question—no, I don’t get that sense from that word. To me it describes the direction of an error, not the error itself.
It’s a thing you’d prefer to avoid, sure; but some degree of prognostic uncertainty is totally routine (in fact I would call that definitional: no predictions are truly certain until they’ve come to pass, and by the time that happens it’s usually too late to act). It’s not “bad” any more than mortality is “bad”—it just is, whether or not we wish it were; wisdom lies in managing it as best you can.
In the sense that the gp used the word, I think they allude to a tradeoff: you can reduce the probability of an underestimate by increasing the probability of an overestimate. I took their comment to imply that it would be wiser to risk an overestimate than to risk an underestimate on questions of “can Chinese society achieve a massive goal on a tight timeframe if their leadership decides it’s important.”
No I get what the GP meant. Your comment sounded like a triviality from Lapalisse a bit, because I cannot think of any occurrence where underestimating something is a good thing. Bit like “15 min before my death I will be alive”. But Lapalisse too didn’t mean it literally, he just wanted it to sound like that, it seems it’s what you did.
Much better than sarcasm then =)
It's definitionally non-ideal, but not definitionally really, really stupid.
Perhaps the USA feels that it has a reputation to downhold?
Okay? There's a lot of chips you can make that aren't the cutting edge. You don't need a 4090 to do AI, as evidenced by all the AI we did before the 4090. You definitely don't need a (random Intel chip) 14900HX to do general-purpose computing, as evidenced by all the general-purpose computing we did before the 14900HX.
For that matter, the 14900hx was already based on a refined 7nm production process, which China already has started using, though maybe not as effectively yet. As you mention, prior to the 4090's 3090 was on an 8nm node, already behind current China capabilities.
If each node provides a 10-15% improvement in power, performance and area, how many of those need to compound until your already uncompetitive 7 nm is 10x less efficient, slower and more expensive?
Being behind doesn't mean they're permanently stuck where they are today - but aren't our processes running into the wall of soon trying to make transistors smaller than an atom?
> Being behind doesn't mean they're permanently stuck where they are today
Without EUV, they very much are.
> but aren't our processes running into the wall of soon trying to make transistors smaller than an atom?
No, the finest pitches are still in the low double digit nanometers in 2 nm processes. The "2 nm" nomenclature hasn't denoted a physical dimension for decades.
One should remember that EUV is necessary only for obtaining profit from the mass production of integrated circuits.
For making a limited quantity of chips, for research purposes or for some special applications where the price is irrelevant, there would be no problem for China to make today ICs with e.g. a 2-nm CMOS process, by using electron-beam lithography. (Obviously, for developing a 2-nm process many other problems must be solved first, but lithography is not a roadblock, so the process can be developed before having EUV lithography, because test wafers can be made with e-beam lithography.)
Moreover, they have enough money and people to ensure that an alternative EUV technology will be developed, eventually. I might take them 5 to 10 years, but not more than that.
The attempts to sabotage China should have been started more than a decade earlier in order to have chances of success. Now it is too late and the cleverer way would have been to try to accelerate progress in USA, instead of trying to hinder progress in China, by using means that have totally discredited USA as a product supplier all over the world (i.e. by using the dubious legal theory that USA can dictate what to do to the owners of products that include components "made or designed in USA").
Not having something today doesn't mean they'll never have it.
You are ignoring the possibility of technological disruption.
Apple disrupted Nokia and Blackberry. ARM is currently disrupting Intel.
What if someone lands on a break-through using a completely different tech: what if X-ray lithography [1] becomes viable enough that they don’t have to acquire state-of-art EUV machines from ASML?
[1] X-ray lithography was abandoned in the 80s but it is being revisited by Substrate https://substrate.com/our-purpose. They are an American company that hopes to make it commercially viable by being cheaper and far less complex than EUV.
Substrate is a scam; their marketing is misleading and they have yet to answer to the fundamental reason why X-ray and e-beam failed over 40 years ago (despite it being generally agreed they were the future of litho and optical would soon be dead): writing one line at a time is extremely slow compared to optical which can scan a whole reticle in a fraction of a second.
E-beam is still used for making DUV/EUV masks where the low write speed can be tolerated but no one in the industry thinks it will replace EUV in the silicon litho steps any time soon.
But lay people eat this crap up and journalists turn a blind eye either because they're literally paid PRC shills or because clicks are everything now a days.
I think you're general point is completely true, but Substrate is a bad example, since the people running it don't appear to be semiconductor experts and it's probably a fraud.
Apart from gaming and llms, most of the chip applications including all of military and consumer electronics is more than happy with 7nm process, whatever that means (proper nanometers those ain't).
I know some people live in the IT bubble and measure whole reality by it, but that's not so much true for the world out there. They have ie roughly F-35 equivalent, minus some secret sauces (which may not be so secret at the end since it seems they stole all of it).
You are making a mistake of thinking of them as yet another russia, utterly corrupt, dysfunctional at every level and living off some 'glorious past', when reality is exactly the opposite.
So, you're saying that China has chip fabrication capabilities which are on par with the world cutting edge as of 2018:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_nm_process
not too shabby of a fall-back.
No, they don't.
Their "7 nm" relied on multi patterning DUV which leads to restrictive design rules, more steps and masks and lower yields, which is why I put it in quotes and said it's uncompetitive.
The last DUV node was 10 nm, that's the best logic node they have which is comparable to TSMC/Samsung/Intel's 10 nm.
> that's the best they'll have until they can manufacture EUV machines domestically.
And how far out is that?
> And how far out is that?
These guys have a 100% market share https://www.asml.com/en/products/euv-lithography-systems at the 'extreme' end and, obviously, everyone else is trying but haven't really shown much promise.
Here's a good background article on the topic: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/03/12/...
> everyone else is trying but haven't really shown much promise
What was the incentive/funding for their attempts? In a non-national-security scenario it makes sense not to try too hard because you can just buy ASML's solution.
With China it's a bit different, if they decide it's a matter of national security and pour Manhattan-project-levels of money/resources into it, they could make faster progress.
Well yeah. No one is saying that China cannot do that. Just that the political calculus is that it's better for China to spend their resources on that, rather than building up troops and warships.
Force Chinas growth to be more expensive. It has nothing to do with not believing China can do it, it's about slowing them down in a task we believe that they can do.
> Just that the political calculus is that it's better for China to spend their resources on that, rather than building up troops and warships.
Note that this calculus only makes sense if you invade China while they are busy with the EUV machines, otherwise they catch up technologically and then build all the scary military.
Of course, the the calculus doesn't make sense at all, because the obvious order when you can't do both is you build enough military to feel safe first, then you try for the tech race.
Their plan was to buy those chips and equipment and have the troops/ships/weapons sooner.
Now China has to build EUV themselves, then mass produce chips. It slows them down regardless and costs them resources.
Cut off the market before it becomes a problem.
---------
Militarily, delaying China into 2040s after the USA has stealth destroyers of our own (beginning production in late 2020s, mass production in the 2030s) means China has to fight vs 2030s era tech instead of our 1980s era Arleigh Burke DDGs.
What, do you want to have the fight in late 2020s or would you rather have the war in late 2030s? There is a huge difference and USAs production schedule cannot change. But we can change Chinas production schedule.
> the obvious order when you can't do both is you build enough military to feel safe first, then you try for the tech race
Literally zero actual wars with a technological component have progressed like this. (The first tradeoff to be made is the one Russia is making: sacrificing consumption for military production and research. Guns and butter.)
That's not true. Mass/quantity can still resist/delay/push back until you're exhausted and done.
We're not anymore in the swords vs guns era. We're talking about hypersonic missiles vs super intelligent hypersonic missiles. Still, all it takes is 1 dumb missile to pass through the defenses and an entire city can be wiped off. At the end of the day, they don't care if a missiles didn't reach the precise target. As you can see in Ukraine, Russia is bombing all types of buildings, they don't give a damn about schools, kindergarten or so.
The tech component is not everything.
> We're not anymore in the swords vs guns era. We're talking about hypersonic missiles vs super intelligent hypersonic missiles
These are still hypotheticals. Every war since the Civil War has had a decisive technological component. If the model doesn't apply there, this time probably ain't different.
Like the Vietnam War? Or the wars in Afghanistan...?
> Like the Vietnam War?
Yes. Concern around Soviet space and missiles capabilities overtaking America’s directly lead to Kennedy changing his mind on no boots on the ground.
(The Vietnam War started with America betting on BVR, with the long-seeing but minimally-agile F-4 Phantom. Soviet MiG-21s, on the other hand, blended into civilian traffic. This lead to disaster. When the MiG-25 rolled out, we countered with the F-15 Eagle. But it came too late, which meant we couldn’t establish air superiority with long-range aircraft alone.)
Note: I’m not saying this was the decisive component. It was one among many, and not the most important. But if we had F-15s at the outset, when the Soviets had MiG-21s, there is a better chance the skirmish would have stayed in the skies and Vietnam would have stalemated like Korea.
> it's about slowing them down in a task we believe that they can do.
But it's not slowing them down. It's forcing them to accelerate development ( aka investing more into the sector ). Has china invested more or less? It's amazing how blind people are to this counterintuitive fact.
Oh, and your plan is to just give them the chips they want directly?
Of course investing into chip development is slowing China down. Its slower to build their own than for us to give them those chips.
> Oh, and your plan is to just give them the chips they want directly?
"Give them"? I love sneaky propagandists. No, make them pay for it. It's what we do to our "allies" so that they are dependent on american tech.
> Of course investing into chip development is slowing China down.
From a myopic narrow point of view. But viewed more broadly, it has accelerated china's tech development.
> Its slower to build their own than for us to give them those chips.
In the short term, but not the long term. Just like banning china from participating in the international space station forced china to accelerate their development of their space program.
> From a myopic narrow point of view. But viewed more broadly, it has accelerated china's tech development.
Yes. I'm fine with this.
Weakening China in the short term means pushing the Taiwan war timeline by years. Years that we will spend building up the DDG(X).
As I said before and I'll say again: USA is weak in 2020s but strong in the 2030s. We only need to delay China by a few years and the DDG(X) changes everything.
----------
You need to understand that I make my view based on the perceived strength of the US Navy. The US Navy is getting huge upgrades and a few years of delay makes an incredible difference.
"We"? Okay buddy.
> USA is weak in 2020s but strong in the 2030s.
The US is the largest economy with an unparalleled military at the moment. What are you talking about?
> The US Navy is getting huge upgrades and a few years of delay makes an incredible difference.
For what? The US Navy will play no role in a war between china and taiwan.
No offense, but who gives a shit about taiwan? Not americans. Only chinese people care about taiwan.
> For what? The US Navy will play no role in a war between china and taiwan.
Uhhhhh, Taiwan is an island dude. That's either Marines or Navy. I'm betting Navy will do the heavy lifting given that China is missile heavy.
Marines might be used to shore up anti-landing defenses if China decides to send boots on the ground. But ideally the US Navy prevents the landing entirely.
Said war taking place while we have 1980s-era Arleigh Burke Destroyers would be an attack while our Navy is at our weakest. Anything we can do to delay said war until after the DDG(X) upgrade is to our advantage.
> No offense, but who gives a shit about taiwan? Not americans. Only chinese people care about taiwan.
I'm American and I care? That's why I'm arguing on this point.
Current wargames suggest that USA will be willing to dedicate like 2 carrier strike groups for the defense of Taiwan. I'm not sure if it's enough (especially with the aging Arleigh Burke destroyers), but that's the level of commitment mostly assumed in this scenario if not more.
We have like 14 Carrier strike groups for a reason. We can spare two of them to this task, maybe more.
> Oh, and your plan is to just give them the chips they want directly?
Yes! Remove the impetus for them to innovate and make them reliant on our exports.
Agree, especially given the track record of China outcompeting in other markets where they got blocked.
If you ask PRC shills, it's just around the corner because this one Chinese lab demonstrated a very small part of the system. And a surprising number of westerners fall for that crap.
My guess is that it's at least 10 years away, but that could obviously change depending on what resources they're willing to commit. But even at that point they'll be 2 decades behind ASML's EUV tech so it probably won't be competitive.
> If you ask PRC shills
GP must have been asking for the non-PRC shill opinion.
> My guess is that it's at least 10 years away,
That doesn't sound at all like a lot. China has a uniquely effective industrial espionage... industry, combined with a very thick geopolitical skin and disregard for international demands. This helps accelerate any process that others have already perfected.
We'll start to see the real deal if/when China eventually catches up to the leaders in every field and the only way to pull ahead is to be entirely self propelled (you can't take advantage of someone else's draft when you're in front of the pack).
I think you may underestimate the ability of China to abuse industrial espionage at scale.
There are things which needs time, even with all or almost all the information at hand, just like with atomic bomb. I’m not sure whether this case similar to that, but that ASML in front for so much time indicates that their moot is probably not just information.
The US finished developing a nuclear bomb in 1945, by 1949 the Soviet Union had their own. I agree that it is probably not the same, there are a lot more moving parts in modern chip design. In fact, I have no idea how close Chinese companies are to developing SotA chips. But I do see China being consistently underestimated in western media and think tanks, so my intuitive reaction would be to cut that timeline in half if it is what western experts believe to be plausible.
See also: military jet engines. They can't replicate high end engines from Pratt & Whitney or GE even though I'm guessing Chinese intelligence services have a huge amount of relevant information. I don't know why that is.
It's probably hands on experience that's missing. Even with the all the technical details, often times there's practical details on using this machine or tiny tweaks that need to be made to get it working well.
You cannot lead if you only copy.
So far only one company in the world has successfully accomplished it, so the answer could be "a very very long time".
According to this video (Asionometry - guy from Taiwan, hardly a PRC shill) Chinese EUV are now tested in Huawei factories and should come into production in 2026.
“Huawei has 208,000 employees and operates in over 170 countries and regions, serving more than three billion people around the world.”
https://www.huawei.com/en/media-center/company-facts
“The company's commitment to innovation is highlighted by its substantial investment of 179.7 billion yuan ($24.77 billion) in research and development (R&D), accounting for 20.8 percent of its annual revenue. Its total R&D investment over the past decade has reached 1.249 trillion yuan ($172.21 billion).”
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-31/Huawei-reports-solid-2...
They have the incentive, the government backing, exist in a mature ecosystem of tech rivalled only by the US, … If any corp can do it, Huawei can
I rewatched the whole video and did not find where he said that. Quite the opposite, he says Chinese EUV academic research is at 2005 levels and is rather unimpressive.
> the fact that the PRC is paying so many shills to convince westerners otherwise just shows how behind they are.
And yet, it's anti-PRC shills that are all over social media. Go figure.
They can just throw power at it, you're delusional if you think it's going to hamper them even mid term.
My understanding, which is not complete, is China has done some amazing things optimizing training on slower chips.
Which is cool, but there are limits to the number of times you can do that.
At the end of the day, the little man has to flip the switch.
It's directly analogous to China issuing export bans. They tried this with critical minerals. Critical minerals aren't actually all that uncommon. They just weren't being actively extracted in most places. Now many extraction projects are starting to roll around the globe because it has become clear China was willing to use access to them as leverage.
My guess is that China will be highly reluctant to restrict exports of manufactured goods going forward. Doing so would directly threaten their own power base, just as the Trump administration's actions are currently taking a sledge hammer to the U.S.'s power base.
Ultimately, this kind of power is illusory. If you ever use it, you lose it.
It is not equivalent. Rare earths are, as you say, not actually that rare, but they are still a finite resource, and the CCP quite publicly discussed that it isn't a good idea to sell their domestic stockpile internationally while a significant amount of their economy runs on it. They raised prices to factor in that future availability might be more important than short-term profit.
The chip ban on the other hand is about R&D and labor, both things that do not diminish over time. Instead, the ban seeks to slow down Chinese advancement in areas relying on those chips, AI in particular. Both measures will lead to short-term issues, long-term lost growth, and mid-term new industries in the respective countries/markets.
> Now many extraction projects are starting to roll around the globe because it has become clear China was willing to use access to them as leverage.
That happened in 2018 too. All the projects at that time broke because China does it cheaper.
The thing that isn't available in most countries isn't the minerals.
> this kind of power is illusory. If you ever use it, you lose it.
But the threat of using it can tie up a significant amount of your adversaries' resources.
Is that true? I think the "we've actually used this leaver, just once" is much more likely to cause European judges to be extremely trepedatious. There's a difference between sanctioning an entire country and it's most important industries, which will force it to react and fight, and just victimizing a single judge, who Europeans can ignore the plight of.
s/leaver/lever/g
(from context)
I apologize, English is not my first language, so sometimes I am freestyling it.
And perhaps you've learned British English.
It is spelled "lever."
But British English pronounces it like "beaver."
And American English pronounces it like "never."
Don’t worry too much, most native speakers make mistakes like this every day.
Tech is often a winner takes all market, but this will go out of the window if it is seen as a national security issue.
> Like with China
The best example with China is actually their rare earth wolf warrior bullshit. It’s taken a lever that could have been decisive in a war and neutered it.
The reluctance of the EU leadership to so anything materially significant about anything they claim to care about is kind of telling.
It's either that the leadership is so caught up in their own ivory tower bubble of pure rhetoric to realize they havent really put in the logistics to actually affect reality or that they somehow don't really want the consequences of actually changing things.
For this is pretty clear what they need to do to create any real digital sovereignty and yet the seem to not really be willing to take the obvious step of just banning the use of any technology that have any dependency of foreign owned/managed cloud services or closed source products, and ordering their technical staff to start making changes even if it makes stakeholders annoyed, and yet the keep letting companies like IBM/RedHat and Microsoft pretend they can and should be a part of the digital sovereignty transformation project.
We saw the same when safe harbour collapsed and with the cookie directive where rather then doing something effective they found some way to fix it by changing a few words in an mostly unenforced set of click wrap contracts/licenses. .
The discussions shifts across the board but it takes time to shift due to momentum. The EU has many nations and many more companies all making strategic purchasing decisions. US dependence skeptics belittled earlier have now concrete examples and more weight. The shift can already observed in weapons system purchasing but won‘t be limited to those. For better or worse the US has lost its position of trust and is sadly working on cementing distrust for the next decades.
We saw how fast and decisively modern states can move doing covid, so what is being suggested here is that at the end of the day the current leadership of the EU(especially some of the more US loyal smaller states) is not really ready to believe the US wont restore that trust at the next election.
I am from Denmark and it's been interesting seeing our politicians dance around the very plausible direct invasion threats made by the current US president against Greenland, where our PM made strong declaration while her ministry of defense kept increasing it's dependency on American planes ect.
And it's the same story almost everywhere for the digital sovereignty stuff, yes they claim to want it but when the legislation arrives it's nothing and there is no urgency within the technical departments actually running government it to change anything.
Creating digital sovereignty requires economic protectionism, which directly contradicts a core value of the European Union: bringing down trade barriers.
> contribute to solidarity and mutual respect among peoples, free and fair trade, eradication of poverty and the protection of human rights [0]
Notably absent from these values are wishes to make the EU more resilient against foreign threats to the global supply chain.
[0] https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-histor...
The EU leadership are a very corrupt group who set themselves up to be open to the highest bidders from day one, and those are mostly US corporations and those of other countries when the US hasn't place sanctions on them.
The antitrust fines they impose on those American companies may simply be regarded as a cost of doing business.
When it comes to being indifferent to the welfare of the general populace, they are just as bad as anything else.
> The antitrust fines they impose on those American companies may simply be regarded as a cost of doing business.
You nailed it right on the head. Those fines are peanuts for big corporations.
But even then they are big enough for these corporations to run and complain to Trump that that big bad EU is punishing them.
The underlying article in Le Monde: https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2025/11/19/nico...
Archive link: https://archive.is/TleMk
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/11/19/n...
There is an English version of Le Monde as well.
This is a weapon that the US has been honing for a long time. Pretty much every modern company has some footprint in the US (for example, maybe trades on a US stock market) and is liable for even mild sanctions violations to the tune of millions at least.
And the EU apparently has the counter ready, which would make such companies liable for millions when they enact US sanctions in the EU.
I'm very curious what would happen then? Nothing presumable, as nothing ever happens, or it might be another step to separate the EU market from the US.
Good. We've been in the age of super national global corporations living playing fast and loose. Maybe this will keep them from gobbling up even more power.
No, it won't. And lashing out with random shots in the dark tends to advance corporate control, as we've seen with the results from the trumpist tantrum. As long as ownership (/controlling interest) of companies continues to be basically unregulated cross-border (because the class of people having it also have the ears (if not the necks) of politicians), then things like sanctions are merely speed bumps on commerce that increase large-scale market friction and thereby increase the domestic power of corpos.
Ah, now I understand why Cloudflare was down.
"All his accounts with US companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, or PayPal were immediately closed by the providers. Online bookings, such as through Expedia, are immediately canceled, even if they concern hotels in France."
How is this legal / OK?
The Law requires that they do it if their (the US) government demands.
If you are asking how it's OK, it's not. It's wrong on many different levels. But it's legal (or at least the US has laws that mandate that same thing, I don't know if they were the ones applied here).
A US company is free to cut off service to whatever foreigner it wants, just like a foreign country is free to ban whatever US firm it wants from operating in it.
Please look up what happened to Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras or Costa Rica when they tried banning whatever US firm they wanted.
Can you link an article or at least mention some more keywords? A super vague search query based on this information, like "costa rica banning us firm consequences", isn't turning up anything that sounds relevant
The EU has more weight than Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Cuba, or Grenada.
They all freed themselves from their captors and became sovereign countries?
The US government is not free to use frivolous sanctions to indirectly make payment processors stop serving a foreigner.
> The US government is not free to use frivolous sanctions to indirectly make payment processors stop serving a foreigner.
You may regard them as such, but they are not in any sense frivolous. It is the law that if-x-then-y, it's not a discretionary item that one interprets. And to be clear, these are not "indirectly" making payment processors stop serving the person, it is very clearly direct and you do not, as a company, have a choice in the matter.
1. The law in question does not compel the US Government to bend over backwards to protect foreign nationals from prosecution for war crimes.
2. The US Government plays incredibly fast and loose with laws that compel foreign policy from it. If its adherence to them is discretionary, you can absolutely piss on it for being discretionary in this case.
It definitely is.
Companies are generally free to choose who they are doing business with.
They quite literally aren't in this case. They would get fined heavily if they did business with him.
Pretty much all companies only offer accounts without any guarantees, that can be realistically closed on a whim without any mandatory notice period.
The only exceptions are the high end enterprise accounts.
Companies can voluntarily close accounts for almost any reason or no reason. The US government needs a legal justification for forcing companies to close an account.
The legal justification literally is “we put this person on the sanction list because national security.” The sanction process is basically its own legal justification.
How is this relevant to my comment?
I didn’t claim any company received a binding order to do this or that?
> For example, accounts with non-US banks have also been partially closed. Transactions in US dollars or via dollar conversions are forbidden to him.
So people don't think this is a new thing; when I worked in retail banking in the (very) early '90s it was made clear to us that any transaction in US dollars is subject to US regulation. The hypothetical scenario was that an Ethiopian arms dealer buys Russian product from a German dealer in Switzerland if they do it in USD it is the purview of the US to prosecute that crime.
My memory is hazy, but I don't think that when I was being taught it that it was a new thing.
I worked on anti money laundering for a Canadian bank in Canada. Our scenarios in 2020 were much stricter than stopping illegal arms trading. We were on the lookout for Iranian-Canadian dual citizens sending Canadian dollar remittances to their Iranian families, which would have invalidated the bank’s status as a money service business in the US (which all Canadian banks require due to our integrated economy!) That is, any transaction in any financial institution in any currency (including eg life insurance, mortgages, paypal, etc) is covered by American sanctions regulations if that financial institution does any business in US dollars.
Must suck to be subjected to extraterritorial jurisdiction from a body you have never acknowledged the authority of.
The ICC in this case is investigating crimes committed in a party to the Rome treaty, that's not extraterritorial jurisdiction
Even ignoring that one of these cases involves death and destruction and the other doesn't
Your comment can be interpreted in two ways:
1) It must suck for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant to be subject to a rogue French judge.
2) It must suck for the judge to face consequences from the US.
> 1) It must suck for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant to be subject to a rogue French judge.
How is the french judge "rogue"?
How is a ICC warrant "extra territorial"? It only calls for the arrest of the individual inside ICC member countries.
Yes, but have you considered US politicians don't like the ICC?
What's a bit of truth in the face of that
I think the ambiguity was deliberate.
And very, very clever.
Actually, Israel _was_ a party to the Rome Statute, and thus the ICC. It withdrew its signature in 2002, during the post-Oslo-process intensification of military action against the Palestinians. So, your analogy is flawed.
Yeah. GDPR is annoying as fuck.
Let us remember what this is about:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFUkfmnCR7U
the scale of destruction in Gaza is horrendous: Its dense cities reduced to rubble, as though after a nuclear strike. The death toll is not yet known. the lower bound - the number of bodies counted by the ministry of health - is at around 69,000, while the Lancet estimated over 186,000 (and that was over a year ago), or nearly 7.9% of the entire population of the Gaza strip. Around 90% of the deaths are civilians (though estimates vary on that point as well).
The US has been participating in this operation, with funding, provisions of services, equipment and most of the weapons platforms, armament and ordnance, diplomatic backing, and even military presence of aircraft carriers and other forces. US tech companies have sold Israel cloud services and various computing solutions; US military, auto and other industries are in on the action as well.
Now we see the US and some of its corporations flexing the imperial muscle to try and deter international institutions for holding Israel accountable.
The ICC has tried several political leaders before, and even convicted and jailed some, but - they were not important enough to US' strategic interests (or if you like, the interests of the donors and backers of the political elite), so the US did not have any such qualms.
Having said all this - it is interesting to note the article does not mention the judge's accounts with Google or Microsoft, e.g. for email or office app services. I wonder if he has any, and whether those have been excepted or whether it's a different story.
It's worth noting that the Gaza Health Ministry is a government agency and the de-facto government of Gaza is Hamas, and therefore the health ministry _is_ Hamas. Casualty numbers released by the ministry have already been statistically dubious, and seeing that Hamas would only benefit from inflating these numbers, it is likely they are not accurate numbers.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-gaza-he...
It's absolutely not worth noting that because it simply isn't true.
If anything, the MoH numbers are lower than the actual death toll. Even the IDF said internally the numbers were right and their own statistics state that 83% of casualties in Gaza have been civilians.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/aug/21...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/israeli-intelligence-health-...
Indeed, Hamas is the governing party in the Palestinian authority following the 2006 elections. So, the ministry of health is "Hamas-controlled", similarly to how, say, the French ministry of health is "Rennaisance-party-controlled". (Yes, 2006 is a really long time ago and there should have been elections; the split between Gaza and the West Bank, and Israeli restrictions, have frustrated efforts to hold them again; and then came the last two years and now who knows what's going to happen.)
> have already been statistically dubious
No, they have not. You're citing an opinion piece in a pro-Israel publication, the author of which has never conducted any investigative work on the matter, and its arguments are rather frivolous.
For a discussion (and refutation) of that claim in the professional press, see:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
What _is_ certainy the case, though, is that the ministry is not counting deaths where the bodies do not reach its employees/representatives. And - it is not including deaths which may indirectly caused by the Israeli onslaught. For example, if you die of cancer and you might have gotten treatment had it not been for the destruction of the hospitals and the lack of water, electricity etc. - you are not included in the count.
The AP ran a story about how they count:
https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-gaza-health-mini...
which also includes their record from past Israeli military campaigns against Gaza, vis-a-vis the UN figures.
Additionally, it's crucial to recognize how Hamas's health ministry numbers never distinguish between combatant and civilian deaths
That is true. And Hamas has always had very a imaginative use of statistics.
However, if you look at the few times that IDF published casualty estimates, they were pretty close to the numbers published by Hamas.
That's perhaps one of the saddest things about this war: there are so many casualties that even Hamas doesn't need to inflate the number.
And The Lancet?
Chalk up one more to the very long list of why centralizing institutions is a horrible idea because it creates freedom-killing choke points that the flavor-of-the-day hegemon can use as it damn pleases.
In a decentralized world, the US could huff and puff as much as they please, no one would give two fucks.
But when the US have an actual say in every cent that moves from account A to account B in every country that still harbors the illusion of sovereignty ... well your sovereignty does not actually exist.
A markedly different tone in this thread to the ones discussing Ofcom's attempt to fine 4chan.
The death spasms of a dying empire.
I don't really have an opinion here, I just find it funny that depending on who is being sanctioned and why, these threads can have very different opinions on the morality and legitimacy of government intervention. For example when the EU imposes on American companies, it's often cheered on. But when the tables turn it's criticized. Regardless of the legitimacy of the complaints, perhaps people can recognize that when you give governments power, they won't always use it in a way that you agree with, and perhaps it's better that they don't have that power to begin with. Just a thought :)
> Online bookings, such as through Expedia, are immediately canceled, even if they concern hotels in France.
as bizarre as it this situation is, similar power was leveraged to deny american it services to a non-european company outside of the eu [1].
of course not involving the exact judge, but this just highlights the geographical concentration of major web services.
> Judge: EU should block sanctions
If you do that then the US would respond by doing things like attempting to block EU laws that affect US companies. They're American companies. You can't just block them. American companies won't refuse to follow American law. If you put them in a position where they are forced to either follow American law and European law that are in conflict then they'll be forced to withdraw from the European market.
I'm just wondering. It's only reported the experience of Nicolas Guillou. But they are 6 and most (+3 prosecutors) of them aren't French.
In France, there is the CB system, that can be used in France to pay by card. Outside of France, it's VISA/Mastercard only. So the others judges can't even pay anything by card, even in they own country. I'm not sure they can even get money from an ATM.
> he calls on the EU to activate an existing blocking regulation (Regulation (EC) No 2271/96) for the International Criminal Court, which prevents third countries like the USA from enforcing sanctions in the EU. EU companies would then no longer be allowed to comply with US sanctions if they violate EU interests.
A cosmic game of uno? i reversed your reverse!
What a terrible site.
Had to go into settings, manually reject each kind of cookie, and then there's no way to confirm, just a way to go back to the first page, and nothing to click but "accept", which seems to imply that you'll end up taking all the cookies anyway. In the end I just closed the tab without reading.
Might be interesting to know that this is one of the biggest news sites in germany and it's also illegal per https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/news/2024/edpb-consent-or-pa...
Basically any time you search for information in german, you get this "start an indefinite subscription to open this page" or "confirm that your consent to tracking is freely given" model, which I find highly ironic given that germany is one of the main forces in european lawmaking but then doesn't actually want to comply
This is infuriating. The EU should block US sanctions violating EU interests. I'm also definitely moving my personal stuff out of US and into EU, starting with Gmail.
Exactly! Same here. But man it's going to be a painful move, so much is coupled to that. I already have a GrapheneOS phone, which ironically has to be a Pixel to run it.
Almost every bank in FATF white and gray list countries use the dollar in some way, so although your actions will help, in the end if you're sanctioned and you depend on traditional finance systems you are fucked.
There is a guy on here, weev (username rabite) who was soft sanctioned by the US and can't use banks that transact in the dollar. Last I read of his comments, he was in Ukraine or Transnistria, surviving off of crypto and direct rents from crypto purchased real estate.
all of the above is true, but just to be clear about who we're discussing, weev is a genuine neo-nazi
Sure, but clearly that is not a requirement to be sanctioned nowadays, it just shows how f*d you are when you DO get sanctioned, and the bar for that is lowering by the day it seems.
not arguing with the primary issue at hand, I just don't think we should be using a neo-nazi as the example
The defense of the rights of alleged neo-nazis are a big reason why we have free-er speech in America. The ACLU defended them (see skokie nazis) and helped ensure more free speech in public forums. Dismissing the rights of alleged nazis is how rights get destroyed for everyone, although now in USA we use it for say allegedly "illegal" aliens or people that look foreign.
I assert, they are a perfect example.
He is nasty, but the problem is that the US can do it to anyone they please - as this case shows.
They have previously sanctioned other people within the ICC - the prosecutor and deputy prosecutor.
Weev might be a real neo-nazi, but to be clear, right now an entire country (Ukraine) has also been claimed of being neo-nazis and life-altering state action taken against them without some due process to determine they are. Weev hasn't been convicted of anything serious (nor I think anything at all) that has stuck.
I'm not editorializing here. here's one of many examples:
"Please, Donald Trump, kill the Jews, down to the last woman and child. Leave nothing left of the Jewish menace..."
re: ukraine, I'm not sure how that's remotely relevant here and frankly I think you're doing ukrainians a profound disservice by comparing the two
if you look at my background, you'll see I understand this better than most
Are you unaware that the exact same justification was used to attack the Ukrainian people? Your position here is weev is an actual neo-nazi while the Ukrainian people are not. I concede you are likely correct, and it is frankly obvious I'm not making the case they are compared as both being neo-nazis. It is still relevant because the failure mode is still paralleled, an accusation of neo-nazi and then serious state action taken without objective due process to ensure it is true.
By dismissing and frankly belittling my statement, you are falling for the same trap that justified so many dead Ukrainians.
I'm not and that's not my position. I thought I made it pretty clear in multiple previous comments that I think the way the US wields its power, especially considering the absolute lack of due process, is wrong. This French judge is a perfect example of some of the pitfalls and avenues for abuse.
I agree with your overall point (hence "all of the above is true") and am merely trying to make it clear that the guy you're talking about is a nazi and that I think it detracts from the argument. There are plenty of better examples.
I used weev because he's an actual commenter here on HN, one I've interacted with before. There's nothing more to it than that, no nefarious scheme to showcase Nazis or something.
If you know any other HN users that are 'soft' sanctioned or worse, feel free to speak up and let me know there are better HN users to showcase.
The difference is, when Russia and dumb US citizens say "Ukraine is a Nazis state" 1) they are outright lying and 2) Russians do not think of "Nazis" as meaning the same as what the rest of the world understands. Russians do not hate the Nazis for being genociding freaks, they hate them for being backstabbers.
Weev meanwhile is just a fucking Nazi. This exact thread is about a person who is not a Nazi facing persecution, and yet you go out of your way to use a literal and explicit Nazi as your example.
In fact, nearly every time I see people make this kind of "Oh it could happen to you, it happened to <X>" they seem to pick people who are damn Nazis.
Gee, I wonder why those are the cases they know about?
SPLC seems to be the main source for that Wikipedia section. I don't trust them at all. They are known liars.
Secondly, where are his (justified!) rantings about the unfairness of the Treaty of Versailles?
Being nasty (or even evil) is not the same as being a Nazi. Being virulently anti-Jewish is not the same as being a Nazi. Belonging either in a mental institution (without internet access) or belonging in a prison (still without internet access) is not the same as being a Nazi.
There are so many different kinds of evil in this world. Don't pretend they are all Nazis.
"It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not-very nice people."
weev is not some dude with "not-nice" views. He's a sociopath who, among other things, threatened Kathy Sierra with rape and murder and published her address to his online fans to do the same. He would put her address on Craigslist and claim she was a sex worker.
He definitely deserves what he got.
Weev absolutely deserved to be unbanked, and he put himself in that position. He's not some freedom fighter.
Eh it’s not like the EU is some moral paragon either. Trade one overlord for another. I’ll stick with the overlord that’s most convenient.
There are advantages to having your stuff within your own country's jurisdiction. Only one legal system, and one you already live with, controls this stuff. its easier to go to court. Citizens have more rights than non-citizens in most places.
Insane. Luckily he can use a family member to regain some use of these services or by using a trust company, but still.
That’s sanctions evasion and those companies will be very wary in providing services to any close family of a sanctioned person. My guess is that these people’s SOs, children and their SOs are similarly banned, and that siblings, parents and “close associates” have to provide way more documentation when opening bank accounts than you and I.
Pretty sure the news coverage would have mentioned that if that was the case.
I found the original source (the letter written by the judge) here
https://www.union-syndicale-magistrats.org/sanctions-america...
In it he specifically mentions that family cannot buy stuff for you because that is a crime if they are in the US or are US nationals, and that your direct family is banned from entering the US (p 4). He does not specifically state whether his family are sanctioned or not but he says that is a risk when he talks in general terms on page 7 about the impacts of the sanctions regime for other judges. Perhaps he is simply not married himself.
Either way, for some reason the news coverage didn’t include these parts of the letter, maybe they didn’t read the whole thing.
TLDR: he's a member of the ICC. Issues warrants against Israeli political leaders. Neither Israel nor the USA (nor China, Russia, India) are parties to the international conventions that formed the ICC.
He's being sanctioned as a result by the USA, which flowed down to US companies who must follow US law.
The article continues that he asks for the EU to activate an existing blocking regulation (Regulation (EC) No 2271/96), which prevents third countries like the USA from enforcing sanctions in the EU. Activating it would make American companies following US sanction in Europe liable for damages.
I think that is the most important point in the article.
Palestine is party to it and Gaza is part of Palestine
And yet Palestine didn't arrest Yahya Sinwar with accordance to ICC arrest warrant for “extermination, murder, taking of hostages, rape and sexual assault in detention”. De jure and De facto are very different things.
The ICC could be considered to have jurisdiction over Gaza though. Although obviously that is debatable.
It is not debatable. Palestine is a recognized member so according to the law they have jurisdiction. If these laws have any usefulness if no one will follow it is debatable though.
Since the territorial boundaries of the State of Palestine are, too say the least, disputed, the territorial boundaries of ICC jurisdiction derived from its jurisdiction over acts on the territory of a state party where the state party in question is the State of Palestine is actually a tricky question.
Being confident doesn't equal being right.
I'm aghast as to what people seem to think they have authority on simply because they're using the internet.
There is a real world out there and it is quite different from online echo chambers, to say the least.
If the sanctioned Israeli politicians and military commanders think those warrants are baseless, why don't they appear before the courts to defend themselves?
This isn't really about the ICC judges. It is about the failure of the major Western countries who are part of the ICC to come to the defence of the judges who they have appointed to make those decisions, and the control Israeli politicians exercise over the White House, ie the US President himself.
Americans don't seem to understand how the moral character of their politicians and their political system is relentlessly degraded by the so called Israel lobby, or they don't care, or have resigned themselves to it.
Sanctions of those kind or usually applied to corporate entities, state entitities or militant political groups aka "proscribed terrorist organizations". They are not intended to applied to individuals carrying out their legitimate duties in organizations approved or even created by America's own allies under principles America subscribes to, even if they are reluctant to submit themselves to those organizations.
And yet on account of Israel, the US applies these sanctions to judges carrying out the duties lawfully, and somehow they don't see how whimsical, capricious, petty and infantile such decisions are and the poor light they present the US in.
> If the sanctioned Israeli politicians and military commanders think those warrants are baseless, why don't they appear before the courts to defend themselves?
Because they aren't under their jurisdiction? Because they might believe the court is biased against them?
> Americans don't seem to understand how the moral character of their politicians and their political system is relentlessly degraded by the so called Israel lobby, or they don't care, or have resigned themselves to it.
> And yet on account of Israel, the US applies these sanctions to judges carrying out the duties lawfully, and somehow they don't see how whimsical, capricious, petty and infantile such decisions are and the poor light they present the US in.
You seems to be confused this is done not for Israel's sake but for USA - they don't want the precedent of non-ICC member's government being judged in ICC to protect themselves.
> Americans don't seem to understand how the moral character of their politicians and their political system is relentlessly degraded by the so called Israel lobby, or they don't care, or have resigned themselves to it.
I mean, it’s causing a small rift in the GOP. Time will tell if that escalates any though. I stand firm in my believe that nothing ever happens though.
It is also causing a rift between "Leftists" who distinguish themselves from "Liberals" i.e. Democrats. Apparently there are many who didn't vote for Harris because she did not sufficiently distance from Israel and condemn the genocide.
Interestingly in both cases, it seems to be an age divide at least somewhat.
> He's being sanctioned as a result by the USA
As a result of what ? What’s the trigger cause of the US sanctions ?
ICC can’t issue warrants against non ICC countries?
Retribution for acting out of line with those who have this sanction power.
As a result of Executive Order 14203, titled “Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court”
Of course they can. Good luck trying to serve and execute that warrant though.
And non ICC countries are squarely within their rights to retailiate. Most minor former colonies of the EU countries can't, but the US, China, Russia can.
Only the U.S. would actually sanction someone for trying to indict a war criminal.
> Only the U.S. would actually sanction someone for trying to indict a war criminal.
The problem is that only the US has the power to material harm people to such a degree by doing so.
The amount of control that Big Tech has consolidated into a handful of US megacorporations is a massive danger to the entire world. The US devolving into an overt kleptocracy is a huge threat to freedom everywhere. Who can push back? Obviously not China or Russia, where the problems are even worse.
Of all the wealthy world, the EU basically stands alone as the only entity that has strong enough democratic institutions, capital, and expertise to plausibly develop some kind of alternative.
> Who can push back? Obviously not China or Russia, where the problems are even worse.
Why not China or Russia or any other country with the capability? Competition is good even if some or all of the players are bad individually.
China, Russia are not members of the ICC for the same reason the US is not. They do not want extra territorial entities applying laws to their citizens and soldiers.
Trumpian fascists being given power in USA demands that anyone who supports democracy ceases trade with USA. It is no safer than feeding the Russian machine.
I don't think that's true. Lots of countries out there led by thugs. It used to be that the US stood out because it took the law seriously and believed in its ideals to do the right thing (not that it always succeeded, but it did its best). Looks like that time has passed.
> It used to be that the US stood out because it took the law seriously and believed in its ideals to do the right thing
I think it looked like that, because the US always been very effective at propaganda, and until the internet and the web made it very easy for people to communicate directly with each other without the arms of media conglomerates. It's now clearer than ever that US never really believed in its own ideals or took their own laws seriously, there are too many situations pointing at the opposite being true.
I’m an American and I can safely vouch that myself and most of the people I know deeply believe in the American ideals that have been presented as gospel for decades—fair play, hard work, rule of law, loving our neighbors (regardless of legal status), and to a one, believe that as soon as you swear your oath at the immigration court, you’re an American, regardless of the circumstances of your birth.
The situation we find ourselves in is that the American of today does not represent us well. I have hopes for the future, but time will tell.
> and I can safely vouch that myself and most of the people I know
That's great, too bad none of those people sit in positions of power or anywhere near your government, because from the outside for the last two decades or more, those ideals are not visible to us at all, neither when we look at the foreign policy nor internal.
I'm sure the tides will eventually turn, but we're talking decades more likely than years, since it's been turning this direction for decades already, and I don't see it tipping the balance in the other way even today or the near-future. GLHF at the very least, I do hope things get better for everyone.
Yeah, that is something I don't get. You can hear all around the Internet "we did not vote of this!" yet you don see any visible reaction to all these bad decisions lately - no protests in the streets, no real attempts to block these things, people resigning rather then implementing bad decisions.
I just don't get it - unless all those ideals were just a show from the start.
> no protests in the streets
The No Kings protest was estimated at 7 million people.
I'm not sure what the purpose is to go out on the streets for half a day, then everyone goes back inside and continue like nothing ever happen?
Go out, stay out until change is enacted. It's called striking, and if you had any sort of good unions, they'd be planning a general strike for a long time, and it should go on until you get change.
You know, like how other "modern" countries do it when the politicians forget who they actually work for.
General strikes weren't particularly common in the 60's in the US and those protests were considered widespread and effective.
The No Kings “general strikes” consist almost entirely of retired people. I’m sure I saw anyone under 60 in those protests.
I'm not sure if you're mixing things, or if I missed anything, but the "No Kings" things were protests, not a "strike" and very far from being a "general strike". Those practices are very different from just "protesting".
This is strictly false. Plenty of working age people went, and many brought their children.
Employers can fire you in the US for general strikes. You're only protected if you're striking for grievances against the company, not for solidarity actions. Indeed, unions can be dissolved for it.
Add in how large the US is, it's population size, distribution, how far most people live from Washington D.C. and a cultural knee-jerk response to anything remotely seen as bullying of digging their heels in or fight back means they're far, far more difficult to do effectively here than in "modern" countries.
> Employers can fire you in the US for general strikes. You're only protected if you're striking for grievances against the company, not for solidarity actions. Indeed, unions can be dissolved for it.
Yeah, but thankfully, solidarity kind of solves that, as people fired from their jobs because they're striking would be supported by the community. But, if the country doesn't have a history of having built such a community, often with big help from socialist and left-leaning groups, the options you have available today are kind of few.
But best day for it is today, even if yesterday wasn't very good.
The "No Kings" protest had absolutely no subject or issue other than repeating Trump's name. What would it have meant for it to have been successful? What I mean by that is what could "X" be in the sentence: "If X policy had changed, the No Kings rallies would have accomplished one of their goals"?
It was just an astroturfed Democratic party rally that drummed up participation by mass text spam from Indian call centers. The turnout was positively geriatric.
Incidentally, the Democratic Party has started running into a severe issue with text spammers and fake orgs asking for donations and raking in millions, and the people doing it are people who are actually involved with the party.
Those Constant Texts Asking You to Donate to Democrats Are Scams
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/mothership-strate...
The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine
https://data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-mothership-vortex-...
People in the US seems allergic to unions and any sort of solidarity movements, so now you have all these individuals believing them to be the strongest individual, not realizing you need friends and grass-root movements to actually have any sort of civil opposition.
There does seem to be some slight improvements of this situation as of late, video game companies and other obvious sectors getting more unions. But still, even on HN you see lots of FUD about unions, I'm guessing because of the shitty state of police unions and generally the history of unions in the US, but there really isn't any way out of the current situation without solidarity across the entire working class and middle class in the US, even if they're right, left, center or purple.
If only the US would apply those values to their foreign policy, unfortunately the US voters don't care enough about that.
> The situation we find ourselves in is that the American of today does not represent us well.
The thing the person you're replying to points out is that, while you may be earnest in your comment and representative of a majority of US citizen, that is not how the US as a country has worked for a very long time, and it was possible because you and your fellow citizen were either too ignorant or not involved enough.
I'll simply point to the history of Central and South America as evidence of my claim.
>the American of today does not represent us well
Why did good honest people of the US reelected Bush Jr. after the illegal invasion of Iraq when no WMD was found?
Look, we can all acknowledge that there were, and are, many Americans who wish for this to be true. But at no point in America's history did that "many" ever constitute a majority. Or even close to it.
Which is why, from its very inception, the US has employed mass genocide at home, invasions & regime changes in the America's, then post-slavery apartheid at home, with invasions & regime changes in the rest of the world.
That's not anti-American rhetoric. That's just historical fact.
So, commingled with those facts, where does "law, love & fair play" come in. If you're honest, THAT was the propaganda. And the above realities, that was the truth.
The America of today IS the America it has always been. Its just that the propaganda mask can't be reattached with more duct tape. America started by geniciding non-whites at home, and rounding up & dragging non-whites TO America, in chains.
Now it's genociding non-whites abroad (primarily the Middle East), and rounding up & dragging non-whites FROM America, in chains.
When you focus on the common threads throughout American history, and strip away the fluff, you realise ... that's the real America (which still has the largest slave labour force in the world, through indentured workforces via its prison system).
I'm not even sure it was never a majority. I'm not even sure it's not a majority now. It's more that the system is not set up to be good, even if the majority wants it to be.
I think both can be true. The problem is that there are many people who believe as you do, but the system is set up in such way that those people are dissuaded from gaining power and influence, while the most machiavellian and amoral find an easy path.
As a seventh generation American, war veteran who has been in public service for 22 of my 25 working years and mixed race person, America has literally never organizationally been any of the things you describe.
We are a nation of selfish, narcissists that have no concept of consistent long lasting care based communities.
What little care we give each other is mediated through transactions or cult based social alignment.
Any nation made up of human beings is going to be flawed. The way forward is via incremental change and compromise. Forcing societal change does not, and never has, worked.
>Forcing societal change does not, and never has
It looks like Musk was able to buy Twitter and, together with the other media magnates, force a massive societal change in USA. At least from the outside looking in, before this year USA seemed to be a democracy (with some factions doing their best to subvert that) and the Constitution seemed to be a widely supported basis for that democracy. But now, the Constitution has been torn to shreds and seemingly with massive support from people who will call sand wet and water dry if Trump tells them communists don't agree with it and that his clever uncle told him so.
All you’re seeing now is what’s been happening behind closed doors since the founding of this country.
The only thing that consistently “works” is the collective scientific process of hypothesis testing
Everything else is fantasy coping mechanisms to maintain in/out group distance so that people feel temporal “safety”
US Plans for China Blockade Continue Taking Shape
>rule of law, loving our neighbors (regardless of legal status)
>The situation we find ourselves in is that the American of today does not represent us well.
The system can't represent a contradictory set of ideals.
I'm skeptical things would have lasted this long if the "US never really believed in its own ideal or took their own laws seriously". I think you're letting your cynicism for this moment run away with you.
American involvement in the Nuremberg trials set the stage for the modern era of international law. It began with the United States, along with the allied nations, constructing a post-facto legal definition of crime against humanity that somehow included the Holocaust but excluded both the American campaign in Japan and various Russian war crimes on the Western Front. It’s not cynicism to point out the clear hypocrisy.
Not to mention Jim Crow was still in full effect in the US at the time, but somehow wasn't deemed "Crime against humanity". The winners truly do control the history.
Was Jim Crow a federally organized policy bent on extermination? It was state level discrimination that Nazi Germany copied in 1933-1938 to deal with their “Jewish problem”. By 1939 you had formal government-enforced ghettos with forced labor (no equivalent in America at the time) and by 1941 you had mass extinction.
Don’t get me wrong - Jim Crow was horrific. But it was state level after effects of the civil war and failure to establish absolute dominance over the southern states in reconstruction. Cultural problems we fought a civil war over and we’re still dealing with today. But one difference of the goal with slavery and Jim Crow is subjugation not extermination
Subjugation or extermination, if it wasn't for the addition of "as part of a war of aggression" to the "Crimes against Humanity", the US would have been considered as participating in crimes against humanity at the same time they were partcipating in the Nuremberg trials.
It's thanks to the US, that crimes against humanity is only considered when there is an active war of aggression, precisely because Jim Crow was a current thing at that time.
I was unaware that the US did anything similar to the Holocaust in Japan.
As are the Japanese.
I don't think there are many Japanese alive today not aware of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While it's true they didn't place Japanese in internment cam.. no wait, they did do that. While it's true they didn't straight up execute Japanese folks on the street, they did effectively erase two cities from the world map, how that isn't a "Crime against Humanity", I don't know why we even have the label.
So yeah, the US didn't spend years doing horrible stuff to humans like the Nazis did, the US wasn't exactly an angel in that conflict, by a long shot. But neither was pretty much any nation, I guess it kind comes with the whole "world war" thing.
> they did effectively erase two cities from the world map
They're still there last time I checked. Hiroshima has a population of ~1m. Nagasaki closer to 300k.
> how that isn't a "Crime against Humanity"
An invasion of Japan would have cost an order of magnitude more lives. It was the 4th year of an extremely bitter conflict that Japan started. There were no real good options on the table. Only "shit" and "extremely shit".
> They're still there last time I checked. Hiroshima has a population of ~1m. Nagasaki closer to 300k.
This is an argument by equivocation. There’s still a “World Trade Center” in NYC but it’s not the one that fell in 2001. Nor does saying it’s so restore the dead to life.
> An invasion of Japan would have cost an order of magnitude more lives. It was the 4th year of an extremely bitter conflict that Japan started. There were no real good options on the table. Only "shit" and "extremely shit".
This is a legal defense strategy that was never heard before an international tribunal because, notably, one was never held.
I don’t have the energy to skim through the Nuremberg transcripts right now, but I also believe “it was the best of bad options” was a legal defense attempted there, with mixed results.
EDIT: I’m being rate limited, so I can’t answer any more questions today. But suffice it to say that in Truman’s place I would have extended the relative protection that Kyoto received to every large Japanese city and contained the air force to bombing primarily military and industrial targets, with the understanding that precision bombing was not as advanced in 1940s as it is today.
Here is a more in depth analysis of options other than nuclear bombardment (though it only discusses nukes, which is not the primary locus of my criticism). https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2015/08/03/were-there-altern...
Also I did not say they were “erased from the map,” that was a different commenter.
> in Truman’s place I would have extended the relative protection that Kyoto received to every large Japanese city and contained the air force to bombing primarily military and industrial targets
Japan had dispersed industrial production widely by that point, including into workshops in people's homes. The Allies were already doing regular bombing.
Japan outright refused to surrender. They had a faction that tried a coup to prevent the surrender even after the nuclear bombings. Regular bombs would surely not have been enough. Strategic bombing doesn't work.[1]
What's your next idea?
I read the article you posted with alternatives. Delaying the second bomb - good idea, but it still means one was dropped. Allowing the Soviets to invade - it's hard to say having Japan divided for 40-odd years like Germany ended up would've been a better outcome, but idk perhaps.
1. https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower...
If you were Harry Truman in April 1945, what would you have done? Honest, direct answer, no hemming and hawing.
I mean, you are the one arguing that they were erased from the map when clearly they were not. And either way, to say that millions of Americans should have died to invade a country that sided with the Nazis and killed bajillions of Chinese and Koreans unjustly is simply incorrect.
The firebombing of Tokyo and civilian residential districts in many other cities was what I had in mind, actually.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo
100k dead, 1M homeless, mostly civilian.
All out war is hell and pretending like civilians get a pass from the wave of destruction is naive.
However, one main difference people in this thread seem to forget is that America’s civilian kills were about dealing damage to an enemy country within enemy territory. It’s horrific but the main difference was that Germany mass executed and actively tortured civilians within its own territory. America never did that and as horrific and regrettable Japanese internment camps were, and full of racism and prejudice, and failing to even uphold the Constitution and just being abject failures in treating people humanely, comparing them to Nazi concentration camps indicates a complete and utter failure in understanding how different the situation was; America was not trying to actively exterminate Japanese citizens within its borders as a matter of policy.
The closest American came to Nazi Germany was the persecution of black people within its borders but even while Nazi germany was inspired by Jim Crow in terms of how to treat Jews, it’s a failure to recognize that Nazi Germany ran off with the idea when they started setting up death camps. The closest American came to that was lynchings which never reached the scale or official government sanction that concentration camps did.
The closest American could be said to have done that was the Trail of Tears and their treatment of Native Americans; American has always struggled to contain the racist instincts of a significant part of their population but it is not unique in this challenge.
> All out war is hell and pretending like civilians get a pass from the wave of destruction is naive.
Collateral damage is one thing, the deliberate targeting civilians en masse is another. I understand the US Armed Forces and IDF currently justify their excesses by blurring the two concepts together, but they are legally distinct concepts.
"Fair enough, we've a long history of lynching black people and killing native americans, but we're not as bad as the Nazis"
That's some position to take.
In no way am I excusing the horrible treatment black people and indigenous people have received in the USA. It’s awful and definitely crimes that should have been prosecuted and the failure to do so is a stain on America and the ideals people want it to hold. But noting that it’s qualitatively and quantitatively different from a government organized industrial extermination machine doesn’t seem like something crazy. And pretending like power dynamics aren’t in play in terms of prosecuting Nazis is naive - it’s literally what Nazis said at the Nuremberg trials - it’s a sham trial because it’s just the victors killing the defeated. But it did manage to establish some kind of minimum legal framework even if it’s not as far as we’d have liked. Also important to remember that the US committed abhorrent legitimate war crimes in Vietnam even by Nuremberg standards - but the US is a super power and it’s an unsolved problem about who will hold a superpower (or even a nuclear power) to count for crimes against humanity.
>aware of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Of course this argument never uses the much more horrifying and abysmal firebombing of Tokyo, because it doesn't come from a place of historical knowledge, but rather trite lies.
Hell, the Allies told Japan (literally) "Surrender or face prompt and utter destruction", while Japan knew they were utterly cooked and already lost the war like a year ago, and they simply ignored it. Japan was not totally ignorant of the concept of a nuclear weapon either, as they had competent physicists and a low effort nuclear weapons program.
If you do not want your city turned to ash, do not START a war of aggression on your neighbors and the damn world because of imperial ambitions, and then do not continue such war long after it was clear you had already lost, including instructing and training your citizens to die en masse for the emperor.
The Japanese were actively trying to erase a billion people. Actions have consequences.
There was no end to Imperial Japan without just staggering death of japanese people. It doesn't matter whether that death came from Chinese soldiers or nuclear fire or Russian waves or American Marines.
If you don't want people to kill you, start by not becoming an absurd cartoon villain.
Imperial Japan was the exact horrific Fascism as the Nazis, and anything less than unconditional surrender was unacceptable.
Internment was fucking awful, and I think it's very telling we never interned German Americans even though we knew Germans DID sabotage US industries during WW1 but I guess Germans are too white for the racist Americans who thought Hitler was a cool guy to get uppity about.
> Of course this argument never uses the much more horrifying and abysmal firebombing of Tokyo,
For what it’s worth, I did try to limit my claims in this thread to the notion that maybe the firebombing of Tokyo was a crime against humanity, and avoid yet another pointless relitigation of the use nuclear weaponry.
I don’t know what to make of your whataboutism, however. Nobody here is arguing that the Tokyo tribunal should not have been held, as far as I can tell.
At the same quantitative scale, no. But qualitatively, large-scale violence against civilian populations with the stated intent of extermination? Yes.
I don't think it took the web to understand that. Trump just made it more obvious.
> used to be that the US stood out because it took the law seriously
The US looked like it stood out but it has its own internal and external legal problems such as slavery, Native American repressions, the legacy of slavery, anti-Asian policies, coup-ing foreign countries, etc etc etc
We are a country made up of apes, just like all the others. Nothing is perfect, and us constantly fucking it up doesn't mean we didn't care about it, as a nation.
You are conflating morality with legal jurisprudence.
The US obeyed its own (highly immoral) laws on slavery, genocide of Native Americans, etc.
I'll give you the point about promoting coups in foreign countries (couping is actually the verb).
When I mentioned Native American repression, I had the federal government breaking treaties in mind which falls under legal category but you’re right that the gov also did the genocide.
More generally, as a foreigner who now lives in the US, I held Americans to a higher standard than, say my own government or major other governments. Not anymore, I feel like there’s just different trade offs in living in different countries.
The US has always been led by Thugs. If you think they ever took international or humanitarian law seriously they would not be scared to join the ICC, and you've only been paying attention to propaganda, not what the US has actually been doing since the inception of those laws.
> It used to be that the US stood out because it took the law seriously
The US took everyone's gold under the bretton woods system, and then Nixon "temporarily" ended dollar gold convertibility when France asked for it's gold back.
> It used to be that the US stood out because it took the law seriously and believed in its ideals to do the right thing
The "The Hague Invasion Act", where the US authorizes itself to invade an ally (the Netherlands) to break war criminal suspects out of prison, was signed in 2002. The US has always been a "rules for thee but not for me" type of place and the digital sanction discussed here fits in a long line of behaviors by the US government. Trump has changed the scale and intensity of it all but the basic direction has always been the same.
The US never ratified any law claiming the ICC has jurisdiction over Americans.
And they basically put it into writing, they're not the only country that would do something if an active duty military officer was arrested.
Here's a map. [1]
[1] https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2024/05/ICC-Mem...
Well the fact that they made a law to enable this is a sign of at least some belief in the law. These days Trump would just do the invasion regardless of what the law says, and get away with it. Case example: ordering the navy to blow up Venezuela boats.
Good point! From that perspective the comment I replied to does indeed check out.
Not sure about that. Internally, maybe it was true at some point, cannot say, but if we look at the US as an international player, when exactly was it ready to sacrifice its own interests for any kind of justice or greater good? And if you are not ready to pay the price, then all this talk of a higher moral ground is just that, an empty talk.
I don't disagree, but I think there was a genuine perception by many people that the US were the good guys. The change is that its not even trying to pretend to be this anymore.
Remember all the thuggery and whatever we are seeing now was happening back then.
What has changed is we know about it.
I'm pretty sure no one outside of the US thought of the USA in that way, ever.
> believed in its ideals to do the right thing
Do the right thing to serve their own interests.
> It used to be that the US stood out because it took the law seriously and believed in its ideals to do the right thing
You're in a bubble.
The ICC somehow managed to create an institution even more useless than the UN. The very concept of an International Criminal Court, operating in some idealistic moral space above war and diplomacy, is completely divorced from the reality of realpolitik and total war. If everyone agreed to arbitrate world matters in the ICC, why even have militaries?
> The ICC somehow managed to create an institution even more useless than the UN.
Its been very useful at doing the same thing the ad hoc international war crimes tribunals that preceded it did but with greater regularity and without as much spinup/winddown costs for each conflict they address.
> The very concept of an International Criminal Court, operating in some idealistic moral space above war and diplomacy,
That's not its concept or where it operates, though.
> If everyone agreed to arbitrate world matters in the ICC, why even have militaries?
I think you’ve confused the ICC with the ICJ or the UN itself. The ICC does not exist to arbitrate disputes between nations in place of settling them by war.
If it's so useless, why bother to sanction it?
"If the ant is insignificant, why bother to squish it?"
A leader is difficult to arrest and prosecute while they are in power. But it does have a political cost for them (both being branded as wanted by the ICC, and how complicated international travel becomes, including your host country burning political capital by not arresting you). But of course the real cost comes if you ever fall from power. The ICC means we don't have to invent laws on the spot like we did in the Nuremberg trials for the Nazis, we can use established laws, courts and processes
> If everyone agreed to arbitrate world matters in the ICC, why even have militaries?
That's… kind of the point? To not have to kill and destroy each other to settle disputes.
Yeah sounds great. But it’s hopelessly naive. As soon as someone disagrees, if they have more real power than the ICC, then its enforcement becomes ineffective. You can’t solve disagreements by agreeing to disagree.
International law is inherently more of a social contract than an actual law. That doesn't make it useless because it does have a real effect on how countries behave, but it does mean that enforcement looks more like getting ostracized than it looks like law enforcement.
> International law is inherently more of a social contract than an actual law.
Isn't actual law a social contract aswell?
Why have municipal laws? Everyone can just carry around an AK-47 and decide what's right and wrong for them
"The ICC somehow managed to create an institution even more useless than the UN."
Yet two of the most powerful thugs: Putin and Netanyahu won't go near an ICC signatory state.
Netanyahu frequently visits various European states. Putin went to Mongolia and back. All of these are signatories.
Frequently is false. Netanyahu only visited one European country after the ICC arrest order - it was Hungary because Orban explicitly managed he wouldn't be arrested.
Also, if look at the exact plane movements of his visits, they specifically avoid the air space of countries that do take the ICC seriously.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_prime_mi...
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/netanyahus-jet-largely-avoid...
Hmm, I remembered various countries declaring Netanyahu was still welcome, and assumed that he was going to visit. I stand corrected, thanks!
Of course that's not true. Any country is capable of it, and any country would do it if it were in their interests. Generalizations generally degrade the conversation.
I hate to break it to you, but plenty of countries would do this.
One country's war criminal is another country's military hero. Same as it ever was.
Ultimately this sources back to Europe being dependent on the US for defense.
How is is defence relevant in this article? This is abusing of the private sector monopoly of alot of internet infrastructure. Nothing of this is military in nature.
> Nothing of this is military in nature.
Sure... Until Trump says it is.
If Europe weren't militarily dependent they'd be less subservient on this and other positions.
As the US becomes less ideologically predisposed to defend Europe, expect the US to take more advantage of the dependency, as the threat to walk away will become more real.
Why does the EU need the US military? China and Ukraine mostly?
The EU's nuclear deterrent is weak. Is France committed to defend the rest of Europe with its nukes? And the UK (while a NATO member) is not a member of the EU anymore.
Don't confuse the "EU" with "Europe". One is a trade and law union, the other is a continent of countries. Europe isn't a unanimous entity either, its a big pile of countries with independent politics.
The nuclear deterrent is just as strong as it needs to be. If nuke strikes come, we're all dead regardless if we have 5 or 500 bombs to drop on Moscow.
And again, this is irrelevant to abusive authority on technology. If "Europe" wasn't "dependent on US defence" would they send a destroyer fleet to the US cost as a retaliation?
The US is using its tech companies to pressure foreign democratic allied countries over political issues. This is undermining the free trade that allowed these companies to exist in the fireplace.
Continued moves in this direction will just push nationalistic ideas in European nations to cut out US influence entirely.
The US is becoming an oligarchy run by people who style themselves a modern day Caligula.
Which is all fine and dandy- not my country. But there is a golden rule that had been established between Europe and America.
Do not interfere with internal affairs.
The US is now openly engaged in destroying liberal democracy.
yucky yuck yuck
Why is the president of the United States protecting a blood soaked war criminal? It’s weird. I mean what even does he get in return for this extraordinary service for someone so undeserving? I can’t even see how it’s valuable for him. Can someone explain it?
> Why is the president of the United States protecting a blood soaked war criminal?
A blood soaked FOREIGN war criminal. Why jeopardize american relations with france or the EU over a foreign war criminal? It is amazing the stranglehold one tiny country has over the political, media and financial elites of this country.
Zionist Jews wield a lot of political power in the US. It’s difficult/impossible to get elected at the federal level if you don’t support Israel.
Supporting Israel is valuable to Trump because many of his donors are these Zionist Jews.
I think that it's actually the opposite.
I haven't followed in the recent past, but a few years ago, if my memory serves, Netanyahu was largely funded by a group of US Evangelists.
It's not Israel or Zionism controlling the US. It's some subset of US Evangelists using Israel as a puppet for whatever eschatological purpose they have in mind.
My understanding is that Christian extremists, who are voting for Trump, have some belief that some territories needs to be occupied by Jews so that something happens (I don't remember what, but I guess something good to them), so they are happy with the genocide and Trump is happy to collaborate with Israeli government to make his electors happy.
Yeah, some Christian evangelicals want Jewish people to go to Israel, build the new temple, and then get wiped out in the apocalypse.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/30/us-evangelical...
> One main strand of evangelical theology holds that the return of Jews to the region starts the clock ticking on a seven-year armageddon, after which Jesus Christ will return.
> Hagee, despite having a long history of antisemitism – he has suggested Jews brought persecution upon themselves by upsetting God and called Hitler a “half-breed Jew” – founded Christians United for Israel in 2006.
They think that Jews must be in Israel to enable the return of Jesus and eventually the rapture. I'd love a rapture. Think of the improvement to traffic!
Because that president is also soaked in some of that blood. Just in terms of ordnance alone - Israel would have run out of bombs to drop on Gaza a long time ago in the US were not supplying it with them.
On the personal/political level - Trump's largest political backers in the 2024 campaign have been: Elon Musk, Timothy Mellon, and Miriam Adelson. Musk is an avowed Zionist, Mellon I don't know about, but it is Adelson's $108 Million that come attached with the string of staunch support for Israel and its policies of death destruction and oppression.
Same is happening to Francesca Albanese, UN rapporteur on Palestinian Territories, Italian citizen.
The US is pure mafia.
> Same is happening to Francesca Albanese
And nothing of value was lost.
This reminds me of the old gangster trick of having their "ho hold the strap" because they're a prohibited person who can't have guns.
It doesn't stop him, merely means anything requiring an actual identity is likely done by proxy of his wife/mistress/cousin.
It doesn't stop him from what? Living his private life? As the article explains, being digitally cut off from the US is pretty inconvenient in daily life.
I'm going to take the kindest interpretation and deduce you've read basically nothing of what I've said beyond those four words.