Was not this week

Good summary and imo correctly nuanced views of where Europe has landed geopolitically this week.

Europe's west, after 4 years, is finally waking up to the fact that Russia is not just waging war against Ukraine but in fact preparing another war on the rest of Europe. The digital attacks have moved on to outright sabotage via arson and bombing as well as drones in major EU cities. Only now are they beginning to understand the extent of the problems they face because they didn't prepare for Trump either.

If Western Europe doesn't switch to a war economy to start producing weapons, artillery, and drones en masse, training soldiers and preparing civilians for war (both mental, physical and digital), they will be caught nearly unprepared for a Russian invasion and a capitulation of Ukraine.

If Ukraine wins the war with the dismal contributions of Europe, we will be very very lucky to have bet on Ukraine's ferocity and Russia's inability to keep a war economy alive long enough.

As an outside observer: the problem seems to be footgunning-by-vote?

Take the recent, supposedly uncontroversial measure to use seized Russian assets for stuff: the whole thing was torpedoed by some technicality from Belgium. And that’s constantly what I hear from Euro news; Hungary vetoes this, France torches buildings over taxes hikes for military, Germany is up to stuff, some transient right wing prime minister rejects that, no one wants to stick their necks out to save some industry. Things like that.

Y’all need a federal system, bad. Obviously learn from the mistakes of the US, Russia and such, but still.

Europe should have weaned ourselves off America decades ago.

Again/still/it really took you this long??