this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
906 points (97.1% liked)
Political Memes
9449 readers
3070 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
No AI generated content.
Content posted must not be created by AI with the intent to mimic the style of existing images
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I have been thinking US probably requires a hard reset. But then I realised, this will only benefit Russia and China. Well, more for China. Russia's expensive war in Ukraine won't make the country last long in the future. No one worth their salt could replace Putin. If US breaks up or goes on civil war, China will be the ultimate winner.
It would (probably? I wanna say certainly) benefit the rest of the world too, Western Europe included (to the dissatisfaction of our current American bought, obscenely corrupt and greedy leaders, ofc).
It wouldn't benefit the rest of the world. If your country has a business that makes anything, the US buys it. Europe and the US did half a trillion in business in 2024. A destabilized US hurts just about everyone. Makes you think it's worth a hard look at who it doesn't hurt, and I don't just mean nations, but I diciduals and corporations.
Europe is still too dependent on the US military to decouple and be more independent own, unfortunately. The EU agreed to a trade deal/not-trade deal (according Von der Leyen) with Trump in European investment in the US military. I know Europeans were angry at that, but in the near term the EU doesn't have the capability to arm itself sufficiently, while simultaneously arming Ukraine. IMO that deal was buying time for the EU to remilitarise independently (I'm not a fan of remilitarisation as a Euro but what can we do).
I often read "Europe needs the US military to defend itself" online, but is it actually true? Or just the US themselves saying that?
For now at least. Europe doesn't have the same size of military industrial complex that US has at the moment. Europe needs more time to gear up.
I think it's for the best. The US military industrial complex is not something that I would like to see replicated in Europe. Of course if the American standard is "police departments should have armored vehicles" then we are not on the same "level", but do we really need that in order to have an effective military?
Your choices are to not decouple from the US or have a comparable MIC as a collective. You don't have a comparable MIC because the US does it for you. But if you're against the Trump administration, you have to support getting one.
I won't go as far to say Europe "can't survive" without the US, but Europeans seem to think the transition away won't significantly change things and that's not realistic.
Again, says who? I do not believe we need to have a comparable spending, when that spending is >20% of the GDP during times of "peace".
I guess I'll backpedal on "comparable," but still bigger than you have.
My instinct is to be in favor of increased European military spending because in a saner world this would reduce US military spending, but I doubt it.