Comment on Tusk: 500 million Europeans ask 300 million Americans to protect them from 140 million Russians

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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.

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