My Dear Friend of Democracy,
Suppose Europe were to fulfil Donald Trump's demands and invest five per cent of its economic power (based on gross domestic product, short GDP) in military security.
The European Union, for example, has a GDP of 17 trillion euros a year.
Five per cent of that is 850 billion euros.
The US's military spending is similarly high, equivalent to 880 billion euros annually.
Suppose Europe invested this money in building its own European defence army. Then, over time, Europe would become a military power similar to the USA today. Which means pretty strong, right?
✊ I find the idea of ​​a strong, democratic, European defence army reassuring in times like these. And with such a strategy, Donald Trump would have miscalculated massively. The leverage of being able to demand almost anything from Europe would be taken away from him.
See you in Democracy,
Johannes
📸 Image by Defence-Imagery from Pixabay
Wikipedia tells me that Russia has, depending on assuming a nominal or purchasing power parity GNP, a GNP of 2 or 6.5 trln $ which currently is about the same in €.
Wikipedia tells me also the respective EU numbers are 19 and 28 trn $.
With EU countries spending 5% of these numbers, to achieve parity in defense spending Russia would have to spend 47% of nom GNP or 21,5% of ppp GNP. These are unsustainable numbers.
Therefore: While comforting, a bit less than the 5% would do.
And that would be sufficient also to shrink US leverage on the EU.
Yet these are number games: The real question is which number EU national politicians dare to ask from their citizens and which value and urgency EU citizens place on fending off a Russia threat.
For me that value and urgency is high. Yet I'm afraid I'm not the typical EU average citizen.
But we should and must spend 5% of GDP on arms, and that is not because Trump says, but because we are at war eventhough we don’t want to know this. Like I said in my article, it is Europe, not Ukraine which is Russia’s target. Europe, due to false political correctness, cowardice of politicians and unfavourable public opinion, pretends not to be at war with Russia. The consequences will be dramatic. https://open.substack.com/pub/nomadicmind/p/the-war-we-pretend-not-to-see?r=31fxoh&utm_medium=ios