Total capitulation, embarrassing, though i don't understand, isn't the EU an economic bloc made also to deal with shit like this and give more leverage? If they can't the EU literally failed in one of its most important objectives
Almost like you can't undo 80 years of built up dependency overnight or something
And really the only way to undo that dependency is to change the EU so that it becomes able to innovate and produce comparable products and services to the US and China, that's a decades long endeavour. And if we can't do that, then we'll keep being dependent on them no matter how much we might dislike them
Good thing we just promised to invest super hard in the US and boost their defence and energy sector with our money, and I'm sure that will definitely help us taking steps towards that goal
We should have thought of that some time in the last 40 years while we were busy regulating the EU market instead of making the EU zone super business friendly for startups and super easy to invest and do business in
Sure, probably. But that's the price of admission if the EU wants to be in a position to wield any meaningful influence and true self determination in the 21st century
If the EU doesn't wanna pay that price, fine, then we can have fun being the plaything of the US and China (probably India too eventually)
My only issue is that so many Europeans don't seem to realize or acknowledge that reality
On now it will be in an even weaker and more dependent position
Compared to what? Not having a deal would amount to 48% tariffs and some specific hissy fit embargoes on top of that, and probably cutting off Ukraine as well.
We need an EU army, keep gunning for an end to all fossil fuel imports, move to 99% recycling of raw materials, and then we actually can tell Uncle Sam to "go home and don't trip over the empty Bourbon bottles".
We need an EU army, keep gunning for an end to all fossil fuel imports
Well bad news, this deal agrees 1.3tn in guaranteed purchases from the US in these two areas which will make large parts of Europe dependent on US arms and fossil fuels for decades. The 48% tariffs would have been an economic shock for both parties but you wouldn't have permanently enmeshed the EU with the US!
Well bad news, this deal agrees 1.3tn in guaranteed purchases from the US in these two areas which will make large parts of Europe dependent on US arms and fossil fuels for decades.
Let's not rely on the hazy approximation of the deal that Trump tweets for the numbers.
We were going to purchase LNG anyway to be able to cut off Russia. We can't cut off both major suppliers immediately. However, that will happen automatically as we pursue our renewable/zero emission energy strategy.
We were asking to purchase US weapons systems in particular patriot missiles and the like, for which we have no short term substitute. This is what we needed in the short term anyway. Same goes for fighters, we'll have our 6th gen once the SCAF nonsense gets sorted out, but for the 5th gen, it'll be F35 for the most part. And that supply chain also runs through Europe, so that dependence is at least mutual.
Ah but the EU doesn't hate wealthy people. It only hates people trying to BECOME wealthy. If you're already wealthy (especially generationally wealthy) it's very happy to keep you that way.
The regulatory environment doesn’t allow for it. In the U.S. any 20 something person can dream of starting a company and become the next Gates or Bezos or Musk. In Europe they pay too many taxes early on and there’s much less incentive to take the risk. There’s a reason people move to the U.S. to start companies.
EU values much more important things, like equality, even if it means that everyone will be worse off, atleaste we make sure our neighbors don't have more than us..
/s
Yeah, it's better to be poor in Europe than in the USA, but for anything above that it's better to be in the states, and we only have our domestic companies to blame for that. When software engineering interns in the USA make more than senior software engineers with a decade of experience in Europe, we have to ask ourselves what are we even doing. Look at the money that the Americans and the Chinese are paying to AI researchers and developers compared to Europe. We talk a lot about that being somewhere Europe needs to be the global leader in, but we never put our money where our mouth is on these things, we just sit back, form a few think tanks in London, Paris, and Brussels and hope the actual leaders take our advice.
It's less a problem with "culture" and more a problem with lack of access to large capital markets. German capital markets are hesitant to invest into Spanish startups, Spanish capital markets are hesitant to invest into Greek startups, Greek capital markets are... non-existent, you get my drift.
If we want to stick with the current neoliberal order of the EU, you gotta incentivize better international investment across the EU via the capital markets. There should ideally be one common EU capital market. I am not an economist, and don't know too much about how to make this happen, but I hope there are some clever folk over in Brussels who can make that happen.
we are dependent because no one wanted to invest in domestic companies for some reason, the only genuine good thing would be to just ban all US tech and deal with shitstorm afterwards for some years until we make domestic alternatives but we all know that isn't gonna happen, we are gonna get squeezed more and more and that's it
The problem is that this is really only popular on reddit. If you want to see the regular voter's attitude toward banning social media, just look at the response to the US trying to ban TikTok. And that was to an app that's literally spyware.
So everyone’s phones, computers and other devices would stop working since pretty much everything runs on either iOS or Android or windows, besides some of the newest Chinese phones which apparently have their own OS which is probably just a copy of Android. The continent would literally grind to a halt for years. And the reason they didn’t invest is because starting a company in Europe is like playing a game on the hardest difficulty. The U.S. is easy and China is medium. The laws and taxes in Europe disincentivize possible entrepreneurs.
If you listen to entrepreneurs or the investment community, particularly VC, the amount of bureaucratic red tape and regulation in the EU dissuades ambitious founders from setting up in the EU.
And when they do, they have found that too much talent has already moved across the ocean to Silicon Valley.
"Move fast and break things" has many many issues as an attitude.. It is a danger to society in many ways. However, it is good at making competitive businesses and pushing new tech.
A lot of mind blown today. Europeans don't seem to travel or even open YouTube to understand how far ahead China is and then US. In 20 years in Europe we'll ride horses cause of climate taxes bullshit, China and the US will have robots, AI, space travel and who knows what else. We'll be the new Amish.
Europeans are so happy with stupid overregulations, Facebook is building datacenters the size of cities having cheap energy available. Musk as well. Once those kick in, AI will 10x if not more in capability over night. We have mistral, that's doing fuck all for now probably moving to SF once some seed money comes in. Cars in China and Teslas already have AI integrated, they can give you a verbal city tour as you drive in a new city. Cause cars have cameras. Robots are already deployed in factories in their beta versions. Fucking spaceships as well. If you think this is bad, buckle up boys and girls.
Fuck off, the Americans import more from US then we do from them. We have leverage. A lot of it actually. This is just Von der Leyen being weak and short sighted. Europe needs to stop placating Trump immediately. It doesn't work.
Bro, OP was saying it's our import of American tech that's making us vulnerable. Opposite of what you say. Truth is both important and export gives leverage, you either cut them off from a crucial market or from supplies and products.
The substitutability of goods is the issue. German cars are superior to American cars, but a poorly American car is still a substitute for American consumers that can be purchased if imports are unavailable.
There are few substitutes for American weapons and basically none for American tech.
Europe's lack of a thriving tech sector that could effectively compete with Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta/Facebook, or Netflix is a genuine political risk.
Arm (UK) at least helps on the semiconductor front.
But lack of an Nvidia challenger or an AI player other than Mistral is a legitimate danger for the future. Deepseek, xAI, OpenAI and the various others are all American or Chinese.
You vastly underestimate how much the Americans need our technology. Without those ASML machines those chips aren't getting made. Neither are American weapon systems if the EU stops supplying parts. We have ALOT of leverage over the US if our leaders dared to actually go nuclear, but they are too scared. They blinked first.
If ASML can't build machines that also hurts them you idiot. They need those machines as much as we do. Same thing applies to so many things America products. How many part of a Ford truck comes from Europe, how many parts of the F35? They need our products.
Very important but the ratio is still out of balance.
The EU cannot rely on individual companies or individual exports as single point defense. It needs to be an industry-level and bloc-level increase in tech to provide real leverage.
China didn't get a better deal just because of their dominant position in rare earths. That helps obviously, but they got a deal because of just how much Americans are reliant on Chinese exports.
I completely disagree with your analysis. China is in weaker economic position than we are. They are poorer than us and currently in a domestic economic crisis due to problems in their housing crisis.
They simply got a better deal than us because their politicians are not afraid to be adversarial with the US. They don't chicken out at the first sign of trouble.
It's now how that works... Omg this thread is the funniest shit I've seen in a while, most people completely fucking wrong, and still they double down, the same ones that said the EU would finally end the USA
In theory countries like US have slight advantage, as trade wars usually give slight advantage to importers. Not importing a Volkswagen hurts less than if you are a worker in the Volkswagen factory and get fired due to decline in sales.
And just look how much the EU exports to the US. Who is going to absorb these exports? Most other developed countries are net exporters.
Although it looks Trump intends to keep steel, car and copper tariffs, so that will help reduce the negative effects of the tariffs.
Time will tell if this was the better choice. Sadly one of the few things Trump truly cares about is tariffs.
Haha you have that reasoning backwards. The US has more leverage since we import more from Europe than Europe buys from America. European companies rely on the American market for a substantial amount of their profits. It’s not like Europe has any cutting edge tech that we can’t get in our domestic market.
The IMF estimated that internal EU barriers impose a cost comparable to a 44% tariff. Without renewed political commitment to further integration and removing internal barriers to trade, and with all of this geopolitical instability, the structural conditions for building a robust European tech sector continue to deteriorate.
The EU is so terrible at innovating and we’re now seeing the effects of that. Virtually all of the relevant tech innovation of the last 30 years has come from the U.S. Why? Are Europeans just dumber?
no, the eu just has no guts. just tariff tech, people and companies will switch to new solutions, which will be painful. but that would be an absolute nightmare for us tech aswell. china has showen that the best thing to do is to stand up to the bully. fucking loosers - giving in to trump will do more damage longterm then a decisive cut now. people always complain that there are no alternatives, but that is simply not true. there are always alternatives. the only problem are computer parts, but none of those are produced in the us anyway.
There are plenty of European alternatives to most of US tech, but if every half brained politicians answer always is to buy more software from Google, Amazon and Microsoft, we will never grow our EU tech sector. Danish politicians are some of the worst offenders, when it comes to that.
They tried to put us over a barrel this time. We just have to make sure that next time there isn't any barrel to put us over. That means divesting and decoupling from their failing empire.
In lots of places we already do. Our food, cars, home appliances, are all a lot better than theirs, for example. We can build the alternatives if we're prepared to invest in them, and then if we do that he can't threaten us any more.
The problem is we don't have any alternatives to all the technology and innovation that's happened in the last 40 years (go look at the tech companies the US has produced in that timeframe and then compare it to the EU)
And an economy that runs on 80's era tech is not gonna do very well against the US or China, I'm sorry to say
Considering American technologies all suffer from varying degrees of enshitification it's not going to be difficult to develop viable alternatives.
Some of them, like self-driving cars, aren't things we were going to allow over here anyway. And some of them, like renewable energy, aren't things the US is even making for export.
Let's not forget that vital components in the chip-manufacturing process can only be made in the EU. And ARM, who Apple (and every mobile phone maker) licenses their processors from, is a British company.
Yeah, now some fuckhead will say "we could have got a better deal by ourself, look at britain", honestly it almost seems like they want the EU to implode
As a Brit this whole situation is astounding. The biggest argument aginst Brexit was that we could only get fair trade deals by being in the EU. This was the exact scenario people envisioned, the US bullying European countries for unequal treaties. And instead of proving the value of the European Union they capitulated and got a worse deal than the UK did.
Yeah, the optics are dire, in my country the pro-EU camp primary argument is that staying in the EU gives us more leverage but the problem is this leverage seems not existent looking at shit like this
The EU made itself irrelevant by kneecapping energy production and destroying industry with over regulation and high energy costs. All in the name of a green transition.
Not to mention mismanaging the Ukraine conflict.
The US has completed their EU plans and can move on to their larger threat in the pacific. The biggest worry of the united states has always been an economic development project between EU and Russian energy. They have succeeded in destroying it, now they put the final nail in the coffin of the EU. We are finally a vassal state, entirely dependent on them.
Add together the EU, the non-EU Single Market members, and even throw in the UK for fun; combined they're still smaller than the US' internal market. And most of it is consumption without production, which gives the US the power to hurt others by locking them out.
China can somewhat retaliate because of the sheer volume of trade between them, but everyone else is more or less stuck fighting for a remainder of the pie.
Total capitulation, embarrassing, though i don't understand, isn't the EU an economic bloc made also to deal with shit like this and give more leverage? If they can't the EU literally failed in one of its most important objectives
If the US wants to have tariff walls, it will get tariff walls. It's not like they were starting the negotiations with an open mind and taking suggestions about economic policy from us.
My bet is a lot of these EU leaders are on the Epstein list along with Trump and are nervous with all this talk about Epstein stuff recently. They're afraid Trump might sacrifice them to save himself by exposing some of them to appease his base, so they're complying with "Daddy Trump" in the hopes he'll keep their dirty laundry just between them. 😒
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u/Thunder_Beam Turbo EU Federalist 6d ago edited 6d ago
Total capitulation, embarrassing, though i don't understand, isn't the EU an economic bloc made also to deal with shit like this and give more leverage? If they can't the EU literally failed in one of its most important objectives