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Has Trump ensured the UK rejoins the EU? – politicalbetting.com
Has Trump ensured the UK rejoins the EU? – politicalbetting.com
Biden condemns Trump’s NATO comments: ‘it's dumb, it's shameful, it's dangerous, it's un-American’ pic.twitter.com/UbT03R95xP
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Hurrah for a European army.
From a betting POV, I'm struggling to see how this pushes the result much at all. I suppose a slim chance Rishi goes earlier.
The more likely outcome is that the UK abases itself to Trump in order to keep a favoured relationship with the US itself.
Unification behind one critical control point is a recipe for failure, whether that critical control point is Washington or Brussels there is no solitary control point that is a good idea.
You are safer with redundancy, where multiple elements can fail but you still succeed.
A post-American NATO-style arrangement if it comes about should not be a unified Europe, it should be a diversified Europe [and others] coalition of the willing.
Someone in Ukraine has a unique sense of humour.
It is entirely possible, however, that the UK and the EU have enhanced cooperation in future.
"Just pay the tax" says one - £7k a year? Or "separate business and non-business use". How do you do that when your business is where you live? And separating business and non business use means driving scores of additional miles to swap vehicles which means less work done at more cost.
I assume the HMRC / Treasury people have never been to the countryside.
Even in WW2 the British, US and Canada did not have a formal alliance.
https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1757662883029127310
Besides I think most of this is performative bluster. Trump wants to put the willies into underspending NATO countries. He will likely succeed because you never know - it’s Trump! - so the laggards will largely up their spending, then Trump can turn around and boast that he got a much better deal for America
He’s the deal maker. That’s his thing
Trump 2.0 would be pretty shit for Kyiv, tho
BAe Systems would, I suspect, suddenly remember it was a UK company again.
Isn't that the kind of thing that got people interned in 1940?
Easiest solution is to replace it with a single cab track when you come to replace it and buy a car for personal use -
Roses are red,
£28bn could have taken its toll,
But please don’t read too much,
Into just one poll
https://x.com/EmmaLevin_/status/1757709076564168934
The Poles and other Eastern Europeans have been ramping up their own defences, to have defences they control. Quite rightly so. Why would they piss that away to have a unified European army that they can't rely upon?
Had there been a unified army in 2022 under the control of someone like Merkel then it may have refused to agree to aid to Ukraine. Thank goodness it did not exist then, and instead diverse armies like the UK and the Poles and Americans and others could step up.
We should not rely upon the Americans, but nor should we rely upon "Europe". Diversity is a strength not a weakness, it means that we can act more flexibly without relying upon the lowest common denominator.
But if we were to disagree with him on something, or if someone else was even more obsequious, he'd drop us like third period French.
Having a solitary critical control point is a weakness. A critical one.
You can’t have it run by 28 countries all with a veto. That’s impossible, it would never be deployed. So who would decide? A majority? The unelected EU president? Who?
What if Paris and Berlin decided to “do a war”
of which we disapprove? Would we seriously allow them to put our soldiers in harm’s way, and lose their lives, in a conflict we do not want, which does not benefit us? No
And each country would have the same attitude. This is the whole problem of the EU turned up to 11 because it’s life and death
It cannot work
Its great for fans of EVs as so far they are exempt - BIK is 2%. Maxus have just done a firesale on their first attempt (rear wheel drive only lol) to import a proper one. Ford are to launch an EV Ranger. Bye bye diesel in the medium term.
But in the short term? Less work gets done at a higher cost. Well done Tories, well done...
The EU excludes 2 other big militaries alongside the UK for starters, Turkey and Canada, both of which will be needed to contain Putin with or without US support
Do you genuinely think it makes a shiny shit of difference to Trump whether European countries spend 2% of GDP on defence? Do you truly believe that, because all the Baltic States have been spending more than 2% of their GDP on defence for many years that Trump would order US forces to fight in their defence?
Are you really that naive?
The 2% thing is just an excuse for Trump. He doesn't understand or believe in collective self-defence, and he is overawed by dictators.
There might very well be some increased cooperation and training and joint exercises and the like. But you're simply not going to have units that are full of people from different nationalities as part of some single unified EU army.
What if a future Ukraine is threatened by a future Russia, and a future Merkel says "no we aren't getting involved" even though we want to send missiles over?
Its remarkable how some people who champion diversity in theory suddenly demand uniformity and unity on everything else. Diversity across Europe is a strength, it means that independent UK and Polish militaries can act even if Germany isn't behind it, or vice-versa.
If he can get Europe to do a ton of spending and take some burden off the USA he’d sell that as a win because he’s so clever; NATO would survive
We won’t know until and unless he wins in November. How exciting
It seems quite likely he wants to leave NATO.
The"deal maker" think is largely bollocks too. Unless you mean with the Russians ?
It only takes the Russians being a bit rude about him, or a good Ukrainian info ops campaign, and there’s every chance he’d be just as likely to start WW3. See his change of mind on Syria once he saw the photos of the kids.
And that's 'thanks' to Putin, not Trump.
The emphasis would have to be on capability, rather than on bureaucracy.
That was sunk in the battle of Oslofjord by a retired officer using a Victorian vintage Whitehead torpedo in 1940.
But even then I wonder. If Putin invaded Romania would Britain or France send troops to defend Bucharest (without US help)? Hmm
It ignores the fact that 3 other key members of NATO apart from the UK - who would be very important in any new replacement organisation - are also not in the EU. Canada, Iceland and Norway are even less likely to be interested in joining the EU than the UK and without them there is a very big gap in the Northern defence.
And that is before we start considering Turkey, who might want to join the EU but who would not even be considered by many current EU members.
Moreover the rest of NATO would want to do nothing that shut the door on the US rejoining under a different future president.
Like I say, this is TSE's pipe dream.
No European army is going to 'do' an war of aggression. It wouldn't have the capacity or the motivation.
Rather a lot of smoke and mirrors.
If Trump quits NATO I suspect we’d loyally support America in whatever new alliance it wanted. We will remain, militarily, a vassal state of DC
NO !
Next?
Or its not a unified army and supplementary to existing diverse national armies, in which case what's the point?
Once you have an army, it has the possibility to do a war of aggression. The line gets blurred. Do we get involved in "peacekeeping" missions? If so, do we get involved preemptively? See the line from debating why we didn't get involved with Srebenica through to getting involved with Kosovo through to invading Iraq.
If a unified European army ever exists, its only a matter of time until its involved in an offensive action. Just as its only a matter of time until the British army next is. It'll be called defensive, for political purposes though - we called invading Iraq a defensive action afterall.
Russia could have become a very different - and from our perspective, better, country, had Putin and the oligarchs made different decisions.
Its the Russians fault they turned away from us, not ours.
My guess is it'd be a specific European coalition/alliance governance structure - with lots of vetos - for anything big and important; anything "European" would be entirely tokenistic and so small it didn't matter, like a few support troops tidying up or training a few civvies in logistics in the Balkans or similar.
We spent much of the 90s laughing at Russia, how far they'd fallen and how drunk Yeltsin was.
All the Baltics are well above 2%. As are Greece and Turkey.
France was at 1.9%, but announced some pretty massive increases in spending last year, so they'll be up at 2.2-2.3% (the same level we'll be at) fairly soon.
The real laggards are Italy (1.7%, but no real movement to close the gap) and Germany (1.4%, which is closing the gap, but it will inevitably take some time when you're so far behind the curve.)
NATO collects defence expenditure data from Allies and publishes it on a regular basis. Each Ally’s Ministry of Defence reports current and estimated future defence expenditure according to an agreed definition of defence expenditure.... Personnel expenditure includes pensions paid to retirees...
Pension payments made directly by the government to retired military and civilian employees of military departments is included regardless of whether these payments are made from the budget of the MoD or other ministries.
But if you're concerned that the UK is padding its defence spending, then you must presumably be relieved to learn that the UK spends a lower proportion of our defence budget on personnel (31.8%) than every other NATO power except Hungary (29.4%), and that we are one of only eight countries in NATO to meet both the guidelines for defence expenditure as proportion of GDP (2%) and equipment expenditure as percentage of defence expenditure (20%).
Bookies must be laughing all the way to the Leeds.
I think you are ok, but if you cross anyone here they might shop you to the plod. Your own fault by declaring your criminal activities on a public forum.
Defence has got much more expensive and high-tech, and we've also sold off a lot of land and infrastructure that'd need to be restored.
It's an arbitrary target, which you're right many aren't even meeting as it is, but it's already out of date.
They are becoming as rare as TOS-1 Heavy Flamethrowers ie thermobaric.
Slightly blows the "keep it moving to keep it safe" theory.