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by overstay8930 339 days ago
The US was never a trusted partner, Europeans just didn’t have a choice. No one company was able to spend the amount of money required to compete with American technology, so nobody did.

Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower, the “friendship” is nothing more than economic interdependency. French aircraft carriers are not using Windows because they trust the US government, their diagnostic software just doesn’t work on anything else.
1 comments
wkat4242 339 days ago
Maybe not fully trusted but they were certainly fairly well aligned to our interests. Until trump obviously.
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scarface_74 339 days ago
Again no Trump fan. But I’m glad that Trump policies have made at least the EU not to be so dependent on the US military itself and US military contractors. There is no private company monopoly including BigTech that I can’t extricate myself away from quite easily.

It’s much harder to extricate yourself from the US influence on the world stage.

Not that I’m not seriously looking at a Plan B outside of the US after I retire. We are already planning to spend a few months a year between Costa Rica snd Panama City next year - warm, safe countries in US time zones.

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wkat4242 336 days ago
That dependence on the US was by design of the US however. With all the military assistance they provided they also bought influence (which they will lose now of course). This paid itself back in many ways, like the dollar being the world reserve currency, having bases all over the world, being free to invade countries like Iraq etc.

Personally I hope the EU works more on the nuclear umbrella. It was the US that didn't really want us to have much of our own to establish dependency on them, but now that the US has become an unreliable partner we'll have to. France and perhaps the UK will have to scale theirs up. It's the only thing where we really need the US militarily, as any regular military is not sufficient to deter enemies like Russia and China, no matter how much we have.

But Big Tech is very hard to cut until the EU clouds step up a lot more. Maybe not for you yourself personally but for industry.

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