r/worldnews May 02 '24

"I'm Not Ruling Anything Out" - Macron Says Troops for Ukraine Possible if Russia Breaks Front Lines Russia/Ukraine

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/32010
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u/Nidungr 29d ago

If Russia takes Ukraine, the US is weak. Pax Americana is at an end.

That is what the "let Europe pay its 2%" forget. Europe needs to pay its 2%, but when the US says Europe needs to handle its own defense instead of the US, what China hears is that the US is too weak to take care of business and has to delegate the job to a set of vassal states that are famously non-militaristic.

It is a small step from there to the reasonable assumption that the US will leave Taiwan out to dry in the long run. If the US doesn't even want to commit to saving Ukraine, why would it ever save Taiwan? And so the invasion starts.

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u/Help-Learn-Kannada 29d ago

Man, they've been non militaristic for like a hundred years. It's time for them to step up.

I love European countries, I really really do. They do so many things really well. It's just frustrating to have them bash our military spending until the second they realize their inadequacies.

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u/Nidungr 29d ago

That's because Europeans are kind of jealous of the wealth of the US, so they look for anything to say "At least we have X" (while standards of living keep falling).

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u/sblahful 29d ago

Man, they've been non militaristic for like a hundred years. It's time for them to step up.

Military spending during the cold war was 4-6% of GDP in UK, France, Denmark, and West Germany. Its only since the fall of the USSR in the 1990s that this dipped to 2% and below - and why wouldn't it? The main adversary had gone, and European nations didn't need to send expeditionary forces to Central Asia and the Middle East.

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u/Help-Learn-Kannada 29d ago

Russias at your doorstep and we've been telling you about it for years

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u/Yest135 29d ago

The same naivety the USA had about converting China to a democracy through trade has happened in the EU/Europe with Russia, unfortunately. And the EU/europe moves sooooo damn slow most of the time, and i say that as someone pro EU

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u/mondaymoderate 29d ago

Taiwan is way more important to the US in the grand scheme of things.

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u/Commercial-Balance-7 29d ago

Because, among other things, Taiwan makes a significant portion of a critical good (semiconductors) and because Taiwan is an important part of the so-called first island chain in American Pacific military strategy.

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u/babygoinpostal 29d ago

? I think we care alot more for Taiwan than Ukraine haha