This article makes it seem like the Swiss have been somehow singled out, but the same restriction applies to a number of countries, many of which are firmly US allies.
It applies to everyone except 18 countries. Gonna post them here as many articles mention "18 key alies" without naming all of them:
Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Republic of Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom.
I'm stunned they put Korea on the list, given this is dressed up as an anti-China measure, and Korean leaderships flipflops between anti-China and pro-China every ~4 years when the opposition replaces the government. There's also lots of cases of e.g. Korean Samsung employees happily moving to Chinese companies to leak IP for a boatload of cash.
TW semi employees also happily move to PRC. Korea got clipped too hard by CHIPs, Samsung needs AI unless you want PRC phones proliferate even more globally.
I'm just one Swiss guy but here's my two cents... Are you asking in a war-related scenario or about regular non-wartime trade? I think the "we trade with allies only"-rhetoric makes the discussion sound much more martial than the trade-related language Switzerland would have expected (notice how the Swiss response only uses economic and commercial terms). Totally understandable if either country was at war or the products in question were directly arms-related. But as it stands, moving the discussion from CH buying AI-chips to military neutrality feels a bit besides the point from a Swiss perspective.
So to your question, I think Switzerland wants to be considered as: someone's trade partner, generally yes (or maybe we call it "trade allies" now?), but not someone's potential ally in war. Military neutrality has always been the number one principle in the Swiss Confederation's foreign relations. If this now is supposed to be an unspoken economic sanction against Switzerland then is the message behind it: "Hey everyone, be our military ally or have nothing to do with us"..?
Being from Denmark I have always been puzzled by how US/UK media portray us as neo-Hitlers for being slightly more critical of MENA immigration than our neighbors. Meanwhile Switzerland has been doing what almost amounts to white-only immigration to the point that their "troublesome" immigrants are Europeans from Albanaia and Serbia.
> to the point that their "troublesome" immigrants are Europeans from France and Italy
Depending on the canton, it is virtually impossible to become a Swiss citizen, even if you are married to a Swiss national and have been resident for ten years.
IME the Swiss national football team has more Albanian and Serbian last names than Italian, and that's usually a pretty good proxy. They clearly managed to get residency. Easier for the kids of the foreign parents?
The US media doesn't portray Denmark this way. The only European countries whose immigration policies I've even heard of are Italy, Greece, Sweden, Germany, and the UK, and even those were only a couple of times (e.g. I vaguely remember something about Brexit).
> In 2023, 30,223 people applied for asylum in Switzerland, an increase of over 20% compared to 2022. The main countries of origin were Afghanistan, Türkiye, Eritrea, Algeria and Morocco.
In this sense I meant hodl as in “hold”, “refuse to sell”. Completely unrelated to the lost Atlantean technology hidden under the ice, which can compute hashes 100x faster.
Sorry but I'll respectfully disagree. I've lived in Copenhagen, Zurich and the US anf traveled allt hose countries extensively. Danes are not portrayed as hitlers nor is CH doing "almost white-only immigration." Check out at least the french parts of Switzerland as a counter example.
But I am sorry for any country that doesn't enforce their laws. Immigration only works if the rule of law works and when that's the case, it doesn't matter where people come from.
Half of the US media portrays half of the country as neo-Hitlers for being slightly more critical of immigration than their neighbors. We generally have one of the most open borders, relatively straightforward legal immigration paths and more than twice as many Green Card holders than Denmark has people. We also, at least for the moment, still have unrestricted birthright citizenship, a policy pretty much no countries in Europe have.
Sure. Racism never died. The problem is when you lump a bunch of people who don’t deserve it in with the actual Neo-Nazis and paint them with an extremely broad brush as all of the same kind. If you look for Nazis, you can find them, but if you simply see Nazis everywhere, you don’t even have to look.
All of them at the same time, they want to eat their cake, have their cake, sell their cake and rent their cake. Neutral means you get to profit from doing business with all sides at the same time while spinning some virtuous BS PR how you don't take any sides while you deal under the table with bloody war lords. That's how Switzerland and later Austria got rich in the cold war, by being the middle men between the NATO and USSR deals. Today it's being a middle man between NATO, China, Russia.
There's always gonna be demand for middle men to wash dirty laundry of various countries' deals that they prefer to keep secret so they can pretend to stay clean on the public scene.
European countries would do well to stop being so complacent and relying on US for high-tech and defense since the US never hesitates to flip the switch from "you're a valuable ally" to "you're our bitch, whaddaya gonna do about it?" whenever it needs to strong-arm you into complacency, and so the EU should invest heavily on having a competitive local defense and high-tech industry, but who am I kidding, this is always falling on deaf ears and nothing's gonna change.
I don't think it's too much wrong with using the exploits you've got since every country would do that if they could, just don't piss on peoples' heads and tell them it's raining.
Pretending you're neutral while you're dealing with all sides is a very hypocritical definition of neutrality that people aren't buying.
Switzerland is not that neutral anymore. For example, they have been adopting the same EU's sanctions against Russia, so they do not have the same role of middleman.
> European countries would do well to stop being so complacent and relying on US for high-tech and defense, and invest heavily on having a competitive local defense and high-tech industry,
Yes, I like this speech better with the von der Lyon accent, when I heard it a couple days ago.
Got a source to that? Knowing VDL I don't doubt it, just would like to hear it for myself to have a laugh, since she's the most hypocritical, useless, corrupt, champagne socialist in Europe.