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How does NATO benefit?
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I'm sure without being in NATO or the EU, Estonia and Latvia would be left completely alone and unharmed by Russia, just like Ukraine! They certainly wouldn't have been a smaller and easier target.
This is great news and NATO benefits hugely from this. I have to hand it to putin for bringing further solidarity across Europe and NATO.
Yeah. We should thank people that put him there. Checks notes - The United States. Huh?! Wait. Putin got voted person of the year 2007?
There's nothing inherently wrong with an administration exercising soft power to help a favoured politician in another country – even if they sometimes turn out to be dictators – but in this instance I think it's disingenuous to suggest that the United States "put [Putin into power]", assuming you're referring to the United States' inaction after the FSB apartment bombings?
> Wait. Putin got voted person of the year 2007?
Time's Person of the Year Award is specifically scoped to not be an endorsement or celebration of the winner. Think of it more as a measure of outsized impact on the world in a given year.
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Or they might calculate WWIII isn't worth it? Imagine Russia attacks Latvia. Would the US really risk getting into direct conflict with Russia over it?
If the US didn't then NATO is effectively toothless, if the US did then Russia would be destroyed. I'm sure lots of officials in Moscow have spent a lot of time thinking about it.
So would a lot of the US. I'm not sure Americans would want to die over this.
This is actually very significant, this time NATO expands to the west, and who knows where next. I wonder what was the debate in Sweden all this time (beyond the waiting for some dictators to give them the final approval)
There was practically no debate this time. Not because everyone was on board, but because any debate was basically suppressed. There was some debate in the past couple of decades however.
But the anti-Nato people are butthurt and feel the need to rewrite history to foreigners.
Din jävla fjant.
Objectively, is this good, bad or no-impact?
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Military it's inter-dependency, that' why we're allies. The whole point of an ally is to be inter-dependency of one another. I, for one, as a citizen of a NATO country, I am very happy with this arrangement.
The principle is interdependency, but in practice many European militaries don't have a ton to give. Since the cold war ended, many just sort of coasted on military spending. Of course, since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, that's changed for a lot of them. There's renewed interest in taking the defense budget seriously.
So did the US until the 2001 (and, actually, the free fall in US military spending relative to GDP started well before the end of the cold war), and by the 2010s it was back falling in the US, too.
> Of course, since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, that's changed for a lot of them.
It actually changed since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 for the non-US members of NATO (which was also the trigger for the NATO defense spending target.) It changed for the US after the 2022 escalation (US defense spending as a share of GDP declined between 2014 and the 2022 escalation.)
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In most ways yes, but militarily there's definitely some dependence on the US. A lot of European militaries were found to have relatively bare cupboards when the time to donate things to Ukraine came. Germany's Army Chief straight up said the army wasn't capable of fulfilling its mission. (And yeah the US struggled with artillery shells too, the difference is that the US has so much airpower it had a legit reason to…
Militarily the USA has always had the need to keep stockpiles: it's been in many, many wars or performing larger military maneuvers for the past 70+ years. European militaries didn't have to consider a large production capacity, neither stockpiling weapons since mostly weren't involved in large military actions (exceptions probably are France and the UK). In terms of efficiency that is what is expected, why waste tax…
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Do you think UK or France would use nuclear weapons in response to a non-nuclear Russian attack on other NATO members (e.g. Germany)? Are they obligated to do so?
>> Article 5 >> The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking…
I don’t see how it helps Germany (or Finland, Poland etc etc) that France and UK have nuclear weapons, apart from deterrence against specifically nuclear Russian attacks. A conventional land invasion against a non nuclear NATO power would likely be very difficult to stop without US support, at current defense levels, or without UK or France threatening a universal nuclear defense of other nato members.
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Sweden has a pretty advanced and self-sufficient defense industry for its size. Examples: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_JAS_39_Gripen https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stridsvagn_103 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_Launched_Small_Diamet... PS: Not sure why parent is getting down voted for asking a neutral question. Curiosity!
> PS: Not sure why parent is getting down voted for asking a neutral question. Curiosity! Phrasing of that question is a classic bait for flame wars.
At some point {subject} {verb} is just {subject} {verb}.
And given the abnormally terse formulation, I'd expect GP was explicitly trying to decolor their interrogative.
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I don't necessarily disagree as IMHO a diverse world that more accurately reflects the desires of local populations is a good thing, but I'd be curious to know why you would like the EU to seek independency from the US. What do you mean by that? Economic or more? Do you mean more home-grown tech companies for example?
Not the person you responded to, but I agree that the EU needs a bit more independence from the US. To me, it's mostly about being able to stand up for ourselves on a world stage - ideally through a common EU military that is strong enough to deter adversaries even without US support. My main reason is the instability of the American political climate and the way every four years there's an election between a centris…