In the grand scheme of things I agree, the US wouldn’t have respected European sovereignty either way.

European leaders, if they can even be called that, abandoned even the pretense of a rules based world in their eagerness to serve as obedient vassals. By supporting the blatant violation of international law in Gaza, they shattered the very principles that could have shielded them from the same fate.

Europe has actively dismantled the very institutions that could protected it from the predatory ambitions of stronger powers. By embracing “might makes right,” Europe has forfeited its moral authority when the same logic is turned against it. The US will exploit the current state of European weakness mercilessly, reducing it to a dependent appendage, stripped of autonomy and dignity.

Europe stands on the precipice of its own century of humiliation that it’s marching into with eyes wide open. It’s is no longer a player at the table of global power, and now finds itself on the menu.

😆

likely

All article 5 says is that members have to consider what level of support they’re going to provide. It does not stipulate that member countries have to be involved militarily.

That’s absolutely not the case. Here’s an article explaining that Chinese system actually encourages decentralized governance and grassroots organization from bottom up. https://www.noemamag.com/what-the-west-misunderstands-about-power-in-china/

Similarly, the government is also organized based on using grassroots structures as its foundation https://news.cgtn.com/event/2021/who-runs-the-cpc/index.html

You’re making claims out of ignorance here.

The funny part here is that 90k is far below 500k+ they were claiming this whole time.

Unfortunately, people living in the west seem to be incapable of internalizing this simple fact.

We can easily answer this question by looking at how the standard of living has been improving for the workers in China. This can be contrasted against capitalist path of development seen in countries like India.

By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html

Over the past 40 years, the number of people in China with incomes below $1.90 per day – the International Poverty Line as defined by the World Bank to track global extreme poverty– has fallen by close to 800 million. With this, China has contributed close to three-quarters of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience

The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf

From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China’s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4

From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&amp%3Blocations=CN&amp%3Bstart=2008

Chinese households had stashed away in savings by the end of 2023, hitting yet another record high, data from the People’s Bank of China shows https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jones-bank-earnings-01-12-2024/card/chinese-household-savings-hit-another-record-high-xqyky00IsIe357rtJb4j

Full year results of household survey for 2024 in China just posted. Real household income and consumption rose faster than overall GDP growth. Gains to rural households are higher than urban ones.

also worth noting that you can just run DeepSeek locally https://dev.to/shayy/run-deepseek-locally-on-your-laptop-37hl

not sure if you can sign up for it outside China https://team.doubao.com/en/special/doubao_1_5_pro

The leader of divided and failing colonizer nations seems more accurate.

As the article above explains, Russia alone is massively outproducing all of the west because Russia kept the state owned industry from USSR in tact. Meanwhile, the fact that DPRK can outproduce Europe should be another cause for concern for y’all.

The west has been pouring billions into the military industry over the past three years and still isn’t able to meaningfully ramp up production right now. Simply pouring money into this isn’t the solution, it would take a lot of structural changes to create a functional military industry. Meanwhile, Europe is now in deep economic trouble, and diverting large parts of the budget towards military will only make domestic unrest grow as it will result in further austerity. Political stability is by far the biggest near term problem for the EU.

Nah, scale of military industry is measured in industrial capacity which is largely non existent in Europe. Also, a fun fact is that activities such as steel production are very energy intensive. The fact that Russia produces 3x as many shells as all of NATO combined shows just how far ahead Russia is industrially.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/10/politics/russia-artillery-shell-production-us-europe-ukraine/index.html

Nobody is moving goal posts. The scale of military industry in Europe is nowhere near what would be needed to replace the US. Expanding the industry to that scale would require an incredible amount of funding which can’t happen given the state of European economies, not to mention energy prices in Europe. The fact that you don’t understand such basic things really says volumes.

The whole free world was a bullshit narrative to begin with.

And they produce things on artisanal scale. Go look up what percentage of NATO military production the US accounts for.

Go look at the production numbers of these companies and compare them to the US, China, or Russia.

NATO members can’t buy stuff from imaginary suppliers that don’t exist in the real world.