The people who put Trump in office, at great expense, are the people who make money of selling arms. If arms sales go down, they will be unhappy and the president will be advised, his support will be reduced unless arms sales resume.
If a country stopped buying arms, and also stopped by American oil and gas, pressure on the US government increases : no more donations if the big corporations are locked out of certain markets.
Historically, those actions - or their equivalents - have been more enough to get the US sniffing around for other leaders for that country, who more amenable to US interests, and covertly supporting them.
So this country is no longer buying US arms, nor US oil. It might then decide that it no longer needs to work in the US dollar, switch the Euro or Yuan, weakening the standing of the USD as the world global reserve currency.
This would be enough to get them a delivery of Freedom & Democracy by the US Military, or at least coup or assassination.
If it sounds far fetched, the US did this to Chile, Cuba, Argentina, Venezuela, Iraq and Ukraine where they have been interfering with elections for a decade or more
sxan@midwest.social 6 days ago
I think the EU’s best leverage on the US is to agitate that they’re going to stop buying US arms.
The US MIC has enormous influence over our government. Sales to Russia wouldn’t make up the difference; Trump would suddenly start singing a different tune.
EU countries spend something like $36Bn per year on US arms. This includes one-off sales of things like fighter jets to individual member countries, so it’s not a reliable stream (recurring contracts are only about $5.5Bn of that), but they’re purchases that happen fairly regularly - someone is always making a big purchase, every year.
Russia’s entire military budget was $65Bn in 2020. Even if they stopped spending all money on their own, native developed systems and shut all of that development down, putting all of those companies and people out of work; and even if they stopped buying from countries like N Korea and China; and even if they were able and willing to afford to make the switch to NATO standards in the middle of a conflict; and somehow came up with enough money to retool their entire military with NATO-standard weaponry… they still wouldn’t be able to make up for the losses US arms dealers - and the US government - would take in losing EU sales.
Honestly, the EU couldn’t afford it either. They’d have their own military industrial complex, but it’d have to be massively ramped up to make up for the shortfall. It’d be good for their economies, probably; lots of new domestic jobs, and new industry. But they couldn’t do it fast enough. They could build enough Typhoons, Mirages, and all of the other capability-specific planes they have demand for. And that’s just the planes.
Still, if I were the EU, I’d ignore the White House and start backroom talks with Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics executives, and threaten to ramp up domestic production and ramp down purchases, if US policy doesn’t change.
freagle@lemmygrad.ml 6 days ago
The economics don’t work out. You are correct on the size of Russia’s military budget. But we need more perspective. The USA’s domestic police force, when aggregated, has a budget twice as large as Russia’s entire military including nukes. And that does not include the US spend on the FBI nor onn prisons.
There is nothing Europen can do to come close to the wealth transfer that is the USA military budget. More context is needed there too. Besides the fact the US military budget is larger than the next 10 largest military budgets combined, it’s important to note that the US military budget is almost dollar-for-dollar equivalent to the amount of bonds the US sells. This means that the MIC doesn’t actually make most of its money from foreign sales, it makes it from domestic sales and the money for those sales comes from foreign debt.
If Europe wants to hurt the USA, all it has to do is divest from the US bonds. But doing that would have massive implications for its strongly coupled economy. In short, EU essentially cannot break the military bond without breaking the economic bond. It’s trapped. It has to go through a period of austerity while it realigns its economy to be Eurasian instead of transatlantic. If it doesn’t do that, it will be forced into slower austerity by the USA as the US extracts wealth from Europe to shore ip the American financial system against the collapse caused by China’s unstoppable economics.