Both are a good thing? Even from folks in America who strongly dislike the fascist leadership, you'd be hard pressed to find folks who think "Europe should underfund their military and rely on the American tax payer for defense" or "Europe should be uncompetitive in technology and just buy American and Chinese solutions"
I don't understand why Europeans have to blame Trump for "spending a fair minimum on their own defense in the face of existential threats" or "investing domestically in technology".
These are things you always should have been doing.
For us Europeans it's a good thing. There have been sane people here in Europe who never wanted to be reliant on US subscription software etc., but who had no chance of getting their view through.
For the US though, this European reliance on what is in effect rubbish is great. Rubbish in return for cars and all sorts of sophisticated technology.
I don't like calling ad firms etc. 'tech'. Technology for me is things like new chemical processes, whatever TSMC is doing, etc. and the US does have that, but firms like Meta are not a big player outside of machine learning research.
Not sure how much that's true. EU spends billions buying US military hardware such as the Reaper. It's unclear how the story will end up for US taxpayers here.
> Not sure how much that's true. EU spends billions buying US military hardware such as the Reaper.
The thing is, West Germany alone had about 3000 tanks at the end of the Cold War, and reunified Germany nowadays has 300. Navies and air forces have been run to the ground across Europe, even the nuclear forces of UK/FR are nowhere near what they had once been.
The expectation over the last decades, especially after the pacification of the Balkans, was that open war would not return to Europe any time soon - on the one side because almost all European countries were either members of the EU, EEA or Schengen and thus were likely to more integrate instead of going back to 19th century fiefdom wars, and on the other side because the only realistic opponent was Russia... which we thought we could handle by "peace by trade".
I don't understand why Europeans have to blame Trump for "spending a fair minimum on their own defense in the face of existential threats" or "investing domestically in technology".
These are things you always should have been doing.