US Ends Support For Ukrainian F-16s

> if you're a government official in the UK, Poland or Germany, would you be recommending AWS as your cloud provider?

They don't. Sovereign cloud in EU has been progressing for a few years now.

Such that some of your mentioned "unbeatable" hyperscalers have already been positioning (e.g. ceasable infrastructure), and some interesting new players on the block. As well as old benefiting from the related market positions: https://www.oracle.com/cloud/eu-sovereign-cloud/

It isn't fantastic on net, although it could be a net benefit for those industries that compete directly with (former?) American strengths. The other industries will no longer benefit from the highly competitive offerings of US cloud providers, which are for now, better and cheaper than the alternatives.

One would guess. But at least German's cyber security agency.. Well, if you read German: https://www.heise.de/news/Google-und-BSI-arbeiten-an-sichere...

Even I, the founder of a small startup outside the US, caught myself considering things I never would have before.

Just last month, I had to change my dedicated server provider and was genuinely concerned about hosting my websites on US-based entities. Would Trump impose a tariff to antagonize my country and president? I don't have the resources to keep changing providers and migrating my services.

I ended up hosting locally.

This has been slowly coming so now they are offering the entire data center stack to be operated by European companies in European owned datacenters

AWS and Azure have regional data centers in each one of the countries. Data in EU stays in EU. The CAPEX risk is entirely borne by US companies while being operated by locals following local laws. These states can easily nationalize these data centers if, say, US does something really bad to them. So the geopolitical risk for using AWS or Azure seems low to me.

As an observation, when the US originally licensed out the AR-15 to other countries they often also had to license aluminum foundry tech at the same time. We take it for granted now because that tech is old.

The ability to scale advanced or exotic materials science at will was a cornerstone of why US weaponry is difficult to copy. People always underestimate this aspect but it is a major reason why manufacturing of state-of-the-art hardware is not fungible.

Europe's weaponry is already somewhat "open source". Many big things like aircraft and missile systems are designed and built with pan-European consortia. As a result, every country knows how to build these things.

Heck, even Italian Agusta sold some of their platforms to a NATO ally with build/iterate/export permissions...

Same here, it's a massive risk to trust any important data or services to be handled by American companies now. Thankfully I was already fairly decoupled from US big tech, so the transition took just a couple of days.

It’s really bizarre that we are looking at a near future where our best ally is Russia and West Europe/Canada and everyone else who was our friend is now our enemy. You literally couldn’t write this up as fiction and be taken seriously a decade ago.

Leaving NATO is not a one way street. If the US leaves NATO, then the NATO countries can also stop supporting the US. How many components of US weapon systems are made in the EU?

He does not rule out recession. Why do you think the US economy will be doing very well because of his policies?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

So far we’ve only traded our long term dominance. I’m yet to see any short term gains or even prospects of those.

Unbelievable amount of damage done in just a month.

Assuming that does happen, it won’t be “in a few months”. At best, this is a timeline measured in years if not decades.

I don't even see the short term gain.

No one is going to invest in building the US industrial base unless there's stability.

In fairness, he's getting kind of old.

US economy definitely won't be doing well.

> Totally agree that Trump is trading long-term dominance for short-term gains.

I'd say the other way round - rebuilding everything that was outsourced will take a long time, so hard times are ahead. In the long term, I hope the USA will be less dependent on China.

But at the same time the way it was done completely destroyed the credibility of the USA as a reliable partner, both in trade as well as military relations. Countries will organize new treaties, and the USA will be a powerful player but with far less influence than before.

> The myth of how much harm "leftists" can do/are doing in the US

Every single bit of the right is projection. "The left hates America" = we (the right) will dismantle and destroy this 250 year experiment

The funniest part is how MAGA are literally rabid against anyone left of Bret Baier while embracing the overtly obvious Russian propaganda to the point where you start feeling sorry for them when the outright repeat Russian talking points e.g. deep MAGA don’t care a single iota for about anything more than 20ft from the US shores (because America first!) and yet they will have the strongest and most deeply detailed opinions on Crimea lol

The US is so far right, that being against segregation, is now considered a far left 'woke' idea.

That’s the most frustrating part. What America calls leftists is considered pretty centrist everywhere else. They’re so afraid of empathic policies it’s no wonder the country is falling apart.

This is such a wild con, especially looking at the whole thing from Europe. The Us has no significant political left, how on earth are they "behind everything" if they can't even manifest some influence within the Democratic party?

If the left was strong in the US there would have been a contest between Hillary Clinton and an actual left wing contender like Bernie Sanders. Even people like AOC would make a decent centrist candidate in Europe.

Nonsense, you have no idea how many conservatives are still mad the “leftists” forced the baker to make a custom cake endorsing gay marriage against his beliefs. (Not sell an off the shelf one, he was okay with that, a customized cake.)

That’s the kind of persecution they are talking, and angry, about. If that incident had not happened, Trump may never have been elected.

[flagged]

I completely distrust and generally regard leftists with contempt due to my personal interactions with them alone. I regard them as societal cancer and would prefer any other group to be in charge over them. No McCarthyist propaganda needed. I'll take a fascist's boot on my neck any day over a lefty who pretends to do it for my own good.

In Spain one of the deciding factors was the prime canditate for succeeding Franco as a dictator being blown up by Basque terrorists. Also, you should consider the Carnation Revolution in Portugal as another example.

Poland is still in the midst of a constitutional crisis caused by the Law and Justice party's attempts to subvert the country's constitutional court. It's only with the formation of Donald Tusk's government in 2023 that Poland has come back from the brink.

Pinochet is an example, albeit not a particularly hopeful one.

Polen corrected course slightly in resent time.

I find it mostly with younger people steeped in ideology and dogmatism, that reparations need to be made for a long history of imperialism.

> Why do some American leftists follow this 3rd worldist neo-Maoist thinking that Western civilization needs to burn down before you can get free healthcare and free college?

Let's be fair, you said "some". We also have some of those in Europe.

But to answer, with a guess: perhaps the difference is that in European countries there are way more political parties. But I'm not an expert on American politics so feel free to say this is BS.

3rd wolrdism also exists in Europe. I'm pretty sure it's far more popular.

The reason why they feel overrepresented in the US is simply because a real, progressive leftist political project is essentially impossible, so the most extreme of the extremes are proportional more audible.

Probably because 2/3 of the population can't be reached. They either want to do whatever they can to be anti-left, even if it hurts themselves, or they don't care at all. So voting harder isn't going to work. All while education is being gutted. I honestly don't know what other options are left. Maybe turning states into their own countries and let them raw dog the world without any help from the federal govt. Idk, it's bleak.

It's quite frustrating, but it's clear propaganda spread. There's a complete vacuum of media for leftists in the US, and a tiny amount of money goes a long ways to cementing desired propaganda. Seeing the entire left in the US turn on Ukraine calling them Nazis, when in fact they were occupied by Nazis, with all the terrors that entails, and were planned to have half their population killed and the other half enslaved to Nazis, well, it's red pilling. The left in the US is so weak and leaderless that it is easily co-opted to any sort of end.

That's what the "would be" indicates directly in front of the part you quoted. And in reference to your comment below, I am definitely not referencing Obama, that doesn't even make sense because he did not dismantle American Empire in his two terms, in addition to not really being a leftist at all.

Probably some of the leftist dictators of South America would qualify. Chavez, Morales et. al.

Obama is responsible for advancing the power of the presidency pushing further the limits with executive orders to make law. When met with the uselessness and obstructionism of Congress, both parties elected officials choose authoritarianism. When faced with disagreement, both party's voters advocate for authoritarianism. If the opposition doesn't agree, we'll use the government to force them.

Oft quoted on HN in these contexts: "The purpose of a system is what it does." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

Not even a zero-sum game, just straight up "everyone has to lose, but I have to lose less", a negative sum game I guess.

Take a step back and consider how hardened the divide is between “the two sides”. It should have never come that far, how are you gonna keep national unity in a situation like that!? Are there other first world countries that are that divided?

That data is outdated. That support has eroded since then, and will continue to erode now that Trump has stopped equivocating (lying) about his position on Ukraine.

Hate to break it to you, but people in the GOP will support anything Trump tells them to. The right wing political ecosystem is a closed system and it’s driven from the top down, and they’ll believe anything they’re told, so long as the entire ecosystem is reinforcing it. They spent 60 years building this system; it works really well now. And it’s the reason the country is now being dismantled, and the reason there’s nothing anyone can do about it. This system was the cracks in the foundation and Trump was the nitroglycerin.

There is nothing like this on the Democratic side of the fence. There’s no centralization of opinion, and there’s no media ecosystem whatsoever. The so-called “mainstream media” is now all owned by right-wing or at best center-right billionaires, so Democrats can’t actually push a message even if they could get it together, because they don’t have any microphones.

There were attempts at a Democratic media ecosystem, all of them sabotaged by centrists who didn’t want progressives to gain power. Because “better things aren’t possible” wasn’t a winning message and people on both sides of the political fence generally prefer progressive policies (until you associated them with the Democrats, then GOP support plunges.) But it would threaten people like Nancy Pelosi whose power and personal fortune derive from doing massive favors for defense contractors.

Most of politic seems to be about negotiating to keep a third of the population away from power. Because once they get in power they will trash almost anything in their path

Saw an interesting article on zero-sum thinking as contingent on the idea that the pie stays fixed, thus ruling out the possibility of "lose a little now, but the pie grows overall so your share grows more to compensate" (the basis for friendly trade relations, basically).

What I realized was that, for people who've been "left out of the benefits of the global economy", that picture makes total sense--the pie didn't grow, and in fact probably shrank for them. Thus, zero-sum thinking makes perfect rational sense. It's an accurate worldview, and anyone trumpeting "the pie will grow, you just need to give up a little more (in increased taxes or jobs shipped elsewhere)" in spite of the evidence that IT HASN'T, must be either a fool or outright lying to them.

Anyways, for the first time I felt myself understanding a little bit how these voters may feel.

> Cheaper goods don't make up for dying towns.

And so… they vote for the cheaper goods and killing their towns more?

> the voices that could be used to shape a better platform for the Democrats next time.

The Democratic platform has been around providing succour and training to rural areas for several election cycles, Clinton’s campaign included 30 billions in infrastructure, training, and redevelopment, as well as healthcare and pension safeguard for coal counties.

I know I responded to you once already, but the other thing I wonder is if globalization is really the issue here. There's also an inherent productivity gap between densely and sparsely populated areas. Had industrial jobs not moved to China, they would have moved to the cities.

When people do build factories, which they still do, they build them in or around the cities, not in the country, despite having to pay more for land, labor, and regulatory compliance. If they do locate in the country, they choose a town that has a university and a hospital.

This is supported by the research:

There are committed bigots in the Republican voter base. They’re suburban and rural-rich.

The rural poor Republican voters largely are, at least hypothetically (if you can get through their media bubbles) reachable by the right economic message. They’re not in it for the racism or what have you. That’s the suburban republicans.

That's a very very partial picture of it. There's a lot of hate about social change, people are terrified of trans people and that has been effectively turned into a culture war issue.

Also your economic story doesn't hold water. The Biden administration successfully placed tons of factories all over the country with tax incentives for clean energy, but those factories could never trumpet what they were doing because hate for Democrats and for Biden and for clean energy is stronger than any desire for jobs. Similarly the destruction of the CHIPS act and its unpopularity in rural areas also shows that the economic opportunity aspect is just an excuse for the cultural hate that has been worked up.

The best way to understand a Trump supporter that I have come to is a person that hates Democrats more than anything, and will do anything possible to bully them, including the economic destruction of the country. I have a lot of family like this, and for years I thought they were just joking or exaggerating about their hate, but the past year has shown me that they were earnest. It's not the 1990s anymore, this is a visceral culture war above all else.

>No, that's not it. I'm writing this from rural America in deep Trump territory, and people here are already struggling and have been for years. From their perspective they've been left out of the benefits of the global economy—the big cities and the coasts might be better off, but the middle of the country wants to go back to when they had opportunities and jobs for working class Americans.

But they haven't, they're just completely uninformed about what they're getting. If you think ANY of the rural farming communities could continue to exist without significant federal subsidies, you're crazy.

Ask a farmer whether globalization has helped him or not the next time China retaliates to a tarriff by refusing to import any US soybeans and you'll quickly discover that it has absolutely helped them.

Globalization is less the cause of their issue, it's deregulation. Consolidation of manufacturing has killed plants in those small towns. Consolidation of groceries[1] has made it impossible for small-town grocery stores to survive on their own. Both can be traced back to Reaganomics.

Are the Democrats at fault for not attempting to reverse any of that? Absolutely, but the answer isn't: we need someone who wants even more consolidation and to kill all international relations.

[1]https://ilsr.org/articles/policy-shift-local-grocery/

How big a role did race and religion play? I'm genuinely curious because the mainstream media won't talk about it, perhaps out of a sense of political correctness. But it seems odd that they're framing the election as a referendum on economics, when the Trump campaign didn't even float a coherent economic agenda.

As I mentioned in another thread, the Republicans switched from "the immigrants are stealing your jobs" to "the immigrants are stealing your cats."

Grew up in the midwest and still have a lot of ties there. You left out the absolutely gargantuan amount of right wing crazy propaganda that has all of them hating democrats and "The Left" and "socialists" to death. The most religious literally believe the Democrats are evil and want to destroy America. They've been harping on that for 40 years.

Seems like they were able to change their position when faced with enough evidence. Does not seem like the other side can.

Also, you know, literally "what about"-ism.

Practically speaking I think it requires a lot of will, momentum, and process to change this. The decision even if made soon would probably take a few years to complete.

Supplementing it may be faster (eg. adding Euro and/or Yuan) than outright replacing it, but it’s not my area of expertise. The timeframe was based on some light research.

And this will inflate away the debts tokenized in CCP-held US Treasuries. 4D chess! Russia did something similar in 1998 that sank the US hedge fund Long Term Capital Management.

This stuff moves slowly, until it doesn't. I'd honestly say at least ten years for large changes.

Dollar for dollar is the f35 or a drone superior?

NGAD was already being scaled back due to cost. But yeah this is probably going to get it canceled.

I’d say you lack perspective, this war started in 2014 not when Russia crossed the border. Russia’s agency isn’t going to extend to ignoring existential threats.

None at present to my knowledge. The French Rafale is the only western jet fighter without any US components.

Yes I think you are misunderstanding. The leaner forces in all of the cases above are not the US, but the opposition.

I have Israeli friends across the spectrum (except maybe ultra-orthodox, but including Ukrainian/Russian olim). I also have friends from Lebanon (not even Arabs). They all share different stories, many of them very ugly ones, — and not just about Palestinians. And many of them are Jewish and critical of Jewish policies.

I know plenty of Israelis who are genuinely trying, and there are many of liberal-minded people with their conscience absolutely in the right place. I don't want to badmouth any of them.

My point is — if the same level of "trying" happened elsewhere (like in Xinjiang), Americans and Europeans would instantly brand it the worst kind of totalitarianism.

It's astonishing how the same first-rank predators who've been devouring the world for 500 years now posture as moral messiahs. And that's coming from me — one of them.

Much like how Americans can be good people under asinine leadership, Israel ends up criticized for the actions taken by their government.

If Israel wanted a goody-two-shoes relationship with their neighbors then they should have considered that when they annexed the Golan Heights.

I brought both so you wouldn’t have to stress over which one to deflect with.

No, it is a variation of exposing hypocrites.

Whataboutism is a legitimate rhetorical tactic. Without it we would just be exploring hegemonic (and hypocritical) talking points, forever.

It almost looks like China doesn't want but US somehow is dragging it towards that point.

China has been mostly concerned about economic links with other countries and it has few oversea bases comparing to any of the other 4 big dogs.

It doesn't have the mindset to be a region police, let alone a world one.

They say they're appalled so as to be able to take up opportunities left by the fleeing Americans in Europe.

> The statement of the named Chinese official is either a psyop

Or more likley China wants to sell to people, and thats hard if they are in a trade war, and spending money on a crash re-militarisation drive.

It also serves China well to be on the side of the EU as they can mop up some of the trade thats being destroyed by the USA.

please read this page:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/

Huge part of F35 (like the engine) is made in EU/UK. We could "kill switch" USA as well.

https://www.ft.com/content/1503a69e-13e4-4ee8-9d05-b9ce1f7cc...

Exactly. There probably is a kill switch (the temptation to add one is just impossible to resist), but it's not even needed. Stop maintenance, and in a matter of days these things can't fly.

Iran is still flying F14s.

> I don't see the strategic benefit.

Selling expensive weapons that can never be used against oneself sounds like a pretty significant strategic benefit to me. Are there risks? Sure, but the US could just shrug if exposed. A kill switch seems likely.

I don't think anyone is dumb enough to restart atmospheric testing. If you want a subsurface test to be public knowledge, there's a pretty good track record of how to do that: invite the press. Pakistan, North Korea, India & others can serve as a good example.

In fact, while most nuclear powers have dabbled in the idea of 'how could we conceal a nuclear test', it seems that only Israel is capable of doing it. That is an argument from the absence of evidence unfortunately.

We would love to see Europe develop a military spine for once, I’m excited to see how long it takes before they come crawling back under the wing of the US.

[flagged]

What are you implying? We had an election. People voted. What am I missing?

I view it as US got strong by being late to WWII. Then every country in Europe, Russia was in shambles from the war. Japan got its expansionist hopes crushed by two atomic bombs, US’ new “don’t fuck we me I’ve got a delete everything button”.

Every other country was either recovering from being a colony, or not as far along industrially as US

> Personally I think the reason the US got strong, especially economically, is because of stability, rule of law, global trade and economy of scale due to large enough population. Not because of specific incidents of screwing someone.

(WWII^W) The US has had free reign to screw with dozens of countries since the end of WWII. And they did. But it wasn’t your[1] country so then it doesn’t count. Which is high school clique logic.

[1] Except if you were a politically active left-wing organizer post-WWII. Then the US and government-backed groups in Europe could have screwed with you through Operation Gladio, for example in Italy.[2]

[2] This is just an example. And I’m not terribly educated on the matter. I can’t learn about this by watching the tellie. So it takes more effort than the stupor that a slogan like 100 years of building trust hints at.

... and nearly all European corporations run US-made operating systems on some of their machines, many of which are critically important.

A real untangling of the US and European economies seem both impractical and really inefficient.

US has Eli Lilly with a competing product (Tirzepatide)

Not going to happen. It would kill Novo Nordisk, which would be extremely bad for the Danish economy.

Russia wouldn't know what to do with them, given that they effectively do not develop weapon systems after the collapse of the Soviet Union. China probably has decent enough espionage they don't really need them, although it might make a nice political overture.

Extremely good is getting a bit over the top. The Gripen was designed in the 80's and it shows. It cannot really compare with something like the F-22 or 35 on anything substantial except cost. And if you're optimizing for cost, it becomes a question of how many pilots you're willing to lose to make it fulfill realistic roles.

Gripen has an American engine and uses American licensed missiles.

LOL? The EU against the US? At sea?

Economic sanctions alone would be enough - notice how Trump pauses shooting at our collective feet every time Wall Street reacts negatively? – but also note that our adventures in the Middle East failed after trillions of dollars because it’s much easier to blow things up than it is to build stable countries. A far less competent crew is not going to sway civilians more effectively and I doubt that they’re going to convince many Americans to personally help colonize Greenland.

Some congressmen have, apparently

[dead]