If the money is not spend on meat or planes, then it would be spend on other things instead. There are alternatives for that. Say planes and high speed rail for example. Warsaw to Lisbon is a 2800km directly. High speed trains can go 300km/h and faster, so a sleeper train with that sort of speed can make the trip pretty easily, without even having to go at top speed and around some natural barriers.

Something similar would happen with meat. As in workable alternatives would be developed or adopted.

Sounds like Berlin wants to pressure Paris concerning FCAS.

There is a Reuters article quoting a UN representative with the 40% number from 2022. So this is really old news.

Merz is an idiot, but at the same time it is completly dumb to spend a lot of German money to let the French develop a fighter jet designed for the French military. It does not create jobs in Germany at all and comes with the risk of the entire thing failing, which would not even give Germany a proper fighter.

Germany is a large enough customer to be able to set up a local production line or even develop its own jet using a bunch of parts available from France or GCAP.

Latin America got the drugs covered and Kennedy is working on smallpox.

The EU can’t use their engineers to create cars and AWACS. Things would have to change massively to compete and develop everything twice, like North Korean levels of modesty in compensation for workers.

Yes it can. There already is Swedens GlobalEye and if you not spend the money on American systems, you can built a decent European alternative. Something similar holds true for all sort of other weapon systems.

Of course, if the EU keeps silent, like with Venezuela, Kuba or Iran, countries will have to give in to the threats and actions.

There are 25,000 Cubans fighting for Russia against Ukraine. Iran is also openly supporting Russia in the war having send soldiers to Crimea and selling a lot of weapons to Russia. The response pro Venezuela should have been stronger, but they are also friends of Russia.

How could the EU become impenetrable? That’s an impossible goal. The US tries, with their golden dome. But in this world, security lies in MAD, mutual assured destruction.

MAD is how you do it in a practical way and the EU lacks that ability besides France. It is certainly not assured enough to be a proper deterrent. Other then that a conventional force is needed to be able to deal with lower level threats. For that a bunch of military systems need to be set up, which do not use US tech(AWACS, anti submarine planes, spy satellites, communication satellites and a bunch more).

The sum of all small countries is bigger than the US or China. Small countries want as much independence as the EU. That’s a goal that can be achieved together.

If the US or China can bully an ally you rely on into giving you up, then you are not properly independent.

Becoming impenetrable is defensive and not offensive. It is also needed, if you do not want to be bullied by the US or China. If you can be, then why would smaller countries want the EU as a partner.

Muslim refugees from the wars in the Middle East. A good bunch of them caused by US interventions. The American far right is convinced that it needs to protect the superior European civilization from Muslims, because the European civilization is not superior enough to convince those Muslims to integrate.

German car brands are handling the transition relatively well. Volkswagen Group was 5th in global BEV sales in 2025 up from 7th in 2024. BMW was 7th last year. Germany is the second largest producer of BEVs in the world.

The estimates for job losses due to EVs in Germany were about 200k or so, if the transition is going okay. It currently looks pretty decent for Germany to be completely honest.

They got invited. It is polite to say that you are not coming in that case.