Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

European Nations Decide Against Acquiring Boeing E-7 Awacs Aircraft

defensemirror.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 227 posts

Re: European Nations Decide Against Acquiring Boeing E-7 Awacs Aircraft

#61

Post by itopaloglu83 »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #45
itopaloglu83 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Foreign Military Sales (FMS) programs allows the participating countries to share most of the setup cost, except some high end technology that is country specific, it’s mainly divided by per airframe basis. When you have the US Air Force in a program and they purchase a bazillion aircraft, things get relatively affordable. Well, the US left and nobody want to spend billions of dollars into the development of this air…

It kind of sounds like the USAF did the EU countries a favor then. If they're not interested in the technology anymore then it prevented all those countries from investing billions in a fleet of lemons.

It’s only a bad news for Boeing and by association the US defense industry, though everyone knew the program was cooked when the US decided to leave.

Boing stock didn’t even fall down as much as the S&P500 so one can assume that this was already taken into account.

Re: European Nations Decide Against Acquiring Boeing E-7 Awacs Aircraft

#62

Post by jshier »

petcat wrote: post #56
saghm wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe isn't unified in the same sense as the US though, so this feels like a bit of an apples and oranges situation. Even though the US is varied geographically and culturally from an internal perspective, it's very much not in the sense of how the government conducts foreign policy and international trade. From the perspective of a European government pondering a trade deal, the differences between North Dakota and…

> there's no "president of Europe" who can unilaterally decide to put a bunch of tariffs on anything imported from the US into Europe without regard to how it affects the individual member states. And it's not even clear if it's legal in the US. The Supreme Court is in the process of deciding that after a dozen US states sued about it.

It's clear that it's not legal, the Supreme Court is simply in the process of deciding whether it can happen anyway.

Re: European Nations Decide Against Acquiring Boeing E-7 Awacs Aircraft

#64

Post by eCa »

fxtentacle wrote: post #4

The EU is worried about Trump being unpredictable, so they are pushing hard for sovereignty. See their initiatives to leave US clouds. This decision is completely in line with that strategy and, probably, also what the US military expected to happen.

> leave US clouds

The pressure to leave US controlled cloud providers actually started way back with the US Cloud Act. I’ve been surprised that that process has been as slow as it has been, especially for the public sector and adjacent services.

Re: European Nations Decide Against Acquiring Boeing E-7 Awacs Aircraft

#65

Post by myrmidon »

anamax wrote: post #26
saubeidl wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US doesn't really see Russia as an adversary under Trump. Which begs the question, why should the EU see China as an adversary? That's mostly an American thing, the Pacific doesn't really concern us. Maybe alliances will reshuffle in the future?

> The US doesn't really see Russia as an adversary under Trump. From the fall of the Berlin wall until the Ukraine invasion, the US saw Russia as more of an adversary than Europe saw Russia. Yes, even after Russia annexed Crimea. In fact, it's only this year that Europe has started to significantly increase defense spending, three years after Russia invaded Ukraine. And, even then the most aggressive increase plans e…

I 100% agree that Europe regarded Russia as a potential trade partner (and possibly more positively than the US) even after the 2014 annexation.

But I don't think that this makes EU policy necessarily incorrect: Would German military spending of 5% GDP have prevented the Crimea annexation?

We won't know, but I don't think so, and European militarism in the 2000s might have led to significantly worse outcomes than we actually got.

I also think that painting this as a clear "US stance proven right in hindsight" is an outsized claim; EU military spending only really came up under Trump, and was a very minor topic before. You could make a similar argument that "the cowboys" were all wrong with the whole middle-east interventionism thing (in Afghanistan and Iraq), but the military side of that was at least competently executed (unlike Russia in Ukraine), collateral damage lower and war crimes somewhat minimized/prosecuted.

I sadly agree that Costa-Rica-style pacifism appears a non-viable approach for the EU now despite looking somewhat workable 15 years ago.

Re: European Nations Decide Against Acquiring Boeing E-7 Awacs Aircraft

#66

Post by Yokolos »

barbazoo wrote: post #41
usrnm wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The damage to our future world order I don't think "damage" is the right word, especially outside of the US. Changes aren't necessarily bad, and, as someone living in the EU, I actually like the current trend.

Same here. I’m not scared of China either and am excited for them to take more responsibility on the international stage. Hopefully US warmongering will come to an end too.

Yes, I'm sure all the countries around China are really excited and looking forward to this. Oh, wait ...

It's the same shit with the Baltic states and other former Soviet satellite states. They're terrified of Russia, but people in Germany or further West think it's all overblown propaganda and there's nothing to fear from Russia.

You being ignorant doesn't mean there aren't real issues and real, justified fears.

Re: European Nations Decide Against Acquiring Boeing E-7 Awacs Aircraft

#67

Post by saghm »

jshier wrote: post #62
petcat wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's no "president of Europe" who can unilaterally decide to put a bunch of tariffs on anything imported from the US into Europe without regard to how it affects the individual member states. And it's not even clear if it's legal in the US. The Supreme Court is in the process of deciding that after a dozen US states sued about it.

It's clear that it's not legal, the Supreme Court is simply in the process of deciding whether it can happen anyway.

One of the larger lessons here is that betting on something happening because the law says it should is not necessarily going to work out every time

Re: European Nations Decide Against Acquiring Boeing E-7 Awacs Aircraft

#68

Post by drooopy »

It requires some level of skill and talent to be able to cause this amount of damage to the soft power and influence that the US projected around the world in less than a year. Throughout my 40 years on this planet, Pax Americana was a constant that seemed to hold the world together (+/-). It's scary to see it vanish and with such speed and efficiency.

Re: European Nations Decide Against Acquiring Boeing E-7 Awacs Aircraft

#69

Post by robtherobber »

nxor wrote: post #30
jacquesm wrote: post #2

There will be a lot more decisions like this one. For the war in Ukraine and anything immediate they will buy American stuff if there is no EU alternative (and for many things there just isn't right now, there are too many dependencies). But the tide has changed, for 'in' it is now to 'out'. It is abundantly clear the USA is no longer a dependable ally, and that it will use all kinds of strings attached to hobble wha…

[flagged]

News aside, surely you can see how the game is currently being dominated by the US and how Europe understands the current status - where the US is objectively a political antagoniser - as huge liability with potentially extreme consequences?

> those who have never been here or taken the time to interact with an American

I think there's a misunderstanding at play here; in the vast majority of cases Europeans see Americans as reliable, cool-headed, friendly people. What they take issue with is the US' imperialist, heavy-handed, ombelico-del-mondo approach.

Re: European Nations Decide Against Acquiring Boeing E-7 Awacs Aircraft

#70

Post by Yoric »

bix6 wrote: post #31
jacquesm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say it was weakness rather than a sense of disgust about anything war related. Europe is tired of it, and precisely because of that may well end up in another major war.

That has more to do with their geography than their disgust no?

I think GP means that Europe didn't intervene when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and, more generally, has done its best to limit rearmament until now. And we're going to pay for it by having a war against Russia that we might have avoided had we projected more strength.

The precedent being France and UK that were so disgusted by war after WWI (and recall that France was the historical biggest warmonger among Western nations at least since the second half of the Hundred Years War) that they didn't react to Nazi Germany annexing Austria, then invading Sudetenland, and in fact not even when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Had they reacted earlier, WWII might have been avoided.

Post reply on HN