US Ends Support For Ukrainian F-16s

https://ukrainetoday.org/us-ends-support-for-ukrainian-f-16s-but-french-mirages-will-be-salvation-forbes/

by ctack • 1 year ago

1184 1926 1 year ago

rich_sasha7• 1 year ago

Right now every buyer of American kit is feverishly evaluating non-US alternatives.

Seriously, America, this is like Brexit but 1000x. A voluntary decision, taken with gusto, to chop off arms and legs and ears and fingers and whatnot, cut off the deadwood, be light and free, a lone vessel on the ocean of prosperity, free of the burden of the stupid foreigners who are the sole reason why everything was going wrong.

eunos9• 1 year ago

Especially F-35 where lack of American support means total brick.

Hey, at least Ukraine can use their S-300 systems and Sukhois against their maker.

bborud4• 1 year ago

This is top of mind for all European countries that bought the F-35. They are painfully aware of this. So is the US defense industry which will notice softening sales kicking in a few years down the line as European countries are less inclined to buy US arms.

This was predictable though. The markets have already rewarded those who saw this coming.

mrweasel4• 1 year ago

While I doubt that it solves all the issue, subcontractors, imported parts and so on, but the Italian F-35s are build be Leonardo in Cameri in Italy. How long would it take BAE, SAAB or Leonardo to un-brick an F-35?

Again, not ideal, but the first F-35 have been delivered an need to be serviced and maintained until they can be replaced,... or maybe just until the next US election.

Eupolemos3• 1 year ago

UK and Israel have a deal where they can replace the software or some such.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKNPCk-fd8I

casenmgreen11• 1 year ago

F-35 going off the menu means the two Brit aircraft carriers have no aircraft.

metalman• 1 year ago

"their S-300 systems and Sukhois against their maker" by "thier" you of course mean every single last operational legacy system from the former soviet block and customers.....so all of those ,ummmm, suppliers, are now realising the worth of the promesary "upgrades" they got for thier systems, plus knowing that even glancing east, is not going to go well, and that central europe now has them....."(insert unpleasant imagery here)" Trump been at this?, what 50 days? whole classes of sinecures getting shut down, no end in site

Someone2• 1 year ago

I don’t know how much it’s worth but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...:

“On 27 May 2006, President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that "Both governments agree that the UK will have the ability to successfully operate, upgrade, employ, and maintain the Joint Strike Fighter such that the UK retains operational sovereignty over the aircraft." In December 2006, an agreement was signed which met the UK's demands for further participation, i.e., access to software source code and operational sovereignty. The agreement allows "an unbroken British chain of command" for operation of the aircraft.”

bboygravity2• 1 year ago

Since when was the US in the European Union or even near Europe? How is it like Brexit in the slightest? Why is it the US's responsibility to finance and organize the majority of EU's defense?

PS: I'm from and in Europe. I don't get why it is a good or logical thing that the US should be responsible for the majority of "Western" defense on our territory.

goosedragons• 1 year ago

Brexit damaged the UK's economy and partnerships. The actions the US keep taking are like that but worse. They are pissing off allies in Europe by doing things like this, they are damaging their own economy and partnerships by threatening and placing tariffs on allies for no real reason.

apeescape4• 1 year ago

Because it's been a really good deal for the US. 1. European countries have (for the most part) not had an incentive to build military might, which means they won't be adversaries to the US. 2. This dependency on the US has given the US a lot of soft power in terms of diplomatic pull. In the past, the US could just ask Europe to jump, and Europeans would ask how high. 3. In addition to Europe, it's also kept Russia in check, because it has prevented them from expanding to the west.

mijamo• 1 year ago

It was a win win arrangement of sorts. Europe got to spend less on defense. US won a reliable ally that would not challenge them much, and help enforce worldwide US dominance. Basically a near vassal situation.

Sharlin2• 1 year ago

They’re responsible for honoring their agreements and contracts. How can any European state now trust the F-35s that they’ve purchased or going to purchase? All the trans-Atlantic trust built since 1945. Flushed down the toilet in a few weeks. Trust is difficult to build but easy to destroy.

actionfromafar5• 1 year ago

The US administration agrees with you. It also decided it doesn't want to sell weapons to the Western world anymore, and that it wants to carry the cost of weapons development all itself without relying on exports.

It also wants to forcibly grow competing defense contractors in Europe.

AngryData• 1 year ago

The US is the largest arms dealer in the world and sells ass tons of equipment to the EU. Ain't nobody going to be buying US arms if they think they could be cut off on a whim. Large parts of the US economy are based on arms production and sales, and a large part of the US's non-arms trade is thanks to the US protecting its trade routes and partners. If the US stops protecting its trade, people will stop preferring trade with the US because it will now be vulnerable and near impossible to secure as a smaller nation because it has to cross the largest oceans in the world.

Cyan488• 1 year ago

Without much background in the politics, the parallel I see is this:

Group A and Group B build an economic partnership under consensual terms generally favourable to both over a long period of time.

At one point, Group A decides to withdraw due to real or perceived inequality. The timeframe of withdrawal is faster than entering, and is insufficient to unearth the complex network of roots that took generations to plant.

When the trunk is pulled, the pain is felt in vast numbers of small ways that add up. These roots are what contain the vast majority of the surface area after all.

rich_sasha7• 1 year ago

Brexit was about repealing long-term commitments for short-term gain, and a healthy does of FU to closest partners for domestic publicity. Oh and the short term gains never materialised, it was all costs in the end.

I see this as analogous. US is maybe reaping some short term benefits from flipping on its allies, but burning the bridges it very much relies on.

danmaz742• 1 year ago

The US was never in the European Union, but has always been the leader of NATO and, since WWII, the "Western world". Trump bringing the US out of those positions is a bigger deal than Brexit, because the UK was never a leader in the EU (because of all the internal opposition to it).

oezi8• 1 year ago

Why is it the US's responsibility to finance and organize the majority of EU's defense?

This is a common talking point, but I think it is totally wrong. The US didn't finance and organize Europe's defense.

They did spend money on their own defense forces which happen to be best positioned in Europe near the best interest as a superpower.

America spent money against their Russian adversary. This money was always well spent as far as I can see it.

lyu07282• 1 year ago

I don't get why it is a good or logical thing that the US should be responsible for the majority of "Western" defense on our territory.

Read some history (everything geopolitics after the second world war), you should ask yourself why for 76 years that's exactly what the US did (and perhaps why this is the first time that question occurred to you).

It's because the relationship between Europe and the US is not a mutually beneficial one, the US benefited the most from its power and influence over western Europe, and that doesn't just apply to Europe. NATO and the roughly 128 military bases in 58 different countries don't exist because the US somehow likes to subsidize the military spending of these countries for some altruistic purpose, it exists because it strengthens US influence across the world.

That's soft power, and if it fails, it means war (in total 123 military conflicts since WW2). It's a less bloody alternative to make sure the US gets what it wants because its the stronger party in any geopolitical relationship.

That's the logic behind it. The same logic applies to military aid it gives to Egypt and Israel (that Trump continues to give).

nonrandomstring• 1 year ago

There is actually a psychiatric disorder (from an Oliver Sacks book) where the patient wakes up one day with a terrible conviction that their own healthy limbs are not theirs, and with an overwhelming urge to amputate them. Sometimes it's so distressing that amputation is actually done.

This kind of happened to the US.

xnx5• 1 year ago

Great analogy!

"Body integrity identity disorder (BIID), or body integrity dysphoria, is a mental health condition where you feel that a limb or healthy body part shouldn’t be part of your body."

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/body-integrit...

labster2• 1 year ago

While I agree with you, I think the problem goes beyond military equipment. There’s a lot of risk now in doing business with America in every field, because it’s so unpredictable. Why get cloud or SaaS from the US if they’re one executive order away from being forced to break the GDPR — or shut off service completely, like Maxar in Ukraine. Why build supply chains through America if the price of raw materials can arbitrarily change with tariffs? Sure, it’s a huge market to sell to, but all of those risks have real costs.

rich_sasha7• 1 year ago

Yes, I agree. There was a view that Trump is at least transactional - that so long as you pay (NATO defense spending target, US weapons etc) he'll have your back,.in a subscription basis. Likewise outside defense I guess.

But that's going up in smoke rather quickly.

mmcnl2• 1 year ago

I was thinking the same thing. Europe should build its own cloud. All purchased US goods and services are now a potential target for a match of arm wrestling.

Juliate9• 1 year ago

It's not a matter of risk, it's done.

I work in IT. We already have several customers projects (various profiles) that paused all their ongoing projects to _start_ migrating their servers and hosted services away from US-based/owned ones towards EU-based ones.

drysine3• 1 year ago

There’s a lot of risk now in doing business with America in every field, because it’s so unpredictable.

That's how the rest of the world has been doing business with America, Europe will get used to this too.

dopidopHN• 1 year ago

I have friends working on the French Rafale. Really expensive plane, mildly successful so far.

They are really busy right now.

noisy_boy2• 1 year ago

Ironically India's decision to go with Rafale looks great in the current circumstances.

phlakaton• 1 year ago

And you know who we call that lone vessel on the ocean of prosperity?

Bob.

pokstad3• 1 year ago

Ukraine wasn’t a buyer. They were given those F16s. Be careful when something is given for “free”.

adamors2• 1 year ago

The Netherlands for instance, who gave Ukraine a batch of F16s _was_ a buyer. Logic still stands, US made anything is worthless if it includes a kill switch that can be toggled any time post-purchase.

tokai4• 1 year ago

Wasn't US' F16s.

alpaca128• 1 year ago

Sounds like the statement that if an online service is free, you are the product, when in reality the same applies to paying customers as well. You are only exempt if you have full control over it.

It doesn’t matter who owns these planes, the US have shown that they have the power to make them useless and that they cannot be trusted, and that is a dealbreaker when it comes to expensive & important equipment.

RobotToaster2• 1 year ago

"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

2OEH8eoCRo05• 1 year ago

Post the rest of the quote. If I recall he was warning against alienating an ally. He didn't want the quote to become true.

wyldfire• 1 year ago

The agenda that Trump advanced during campaigns was not "cut ourselves off from the rest of the world". Do his supporters really want this? What's the rationale he advances for this stance and the tarrifs?

What would a president who was beholden to Russians do once elected? I mean -- what's the point of provoking Canada, of all countries? Canada as the 51st US state would be the new most populous state and would cause a huge change in US politics. Not to mention it could only arrive through conquest. So why even propose it if not merely to cause a rift?

jisnsm• 1 year ago

The agenda was to leave Ukraine and to have Europe pay for its own defence which is what’s happening here. Nothing more, nothing less. Don’t let yourself get manipulated by Reddit-tier arguments.

epistasis17• 1 year ago

Do his supporters really want this?

After many long discussions, I can only conclude it less about the values of the supporters and more about their psychology.

His supporters want whatever he wants, as long as it means that the right people get bullied. There's not much deeper thought than that.

It's very sad to see people that I respected debase their own principles so that they can remain proud Trump supporters. Their identity appears tied to the decision, and I know only one person who had the principles to to respond to any of Trump's actions with "OK these people actually have no clue what they are doing." (Which was in response to their treatment of Zelensky in the Oval Office).

jcgrillo5• 1 year ago

Do his supporters really want this?

That's like asking whether a child wants the sugar crash that will come after eating the candy bar. They're not able to see that far ahead. They'll only "get it" when their lives have been made significantly harder, and even then it's not likely they'll be able to attribute their misery to the administration's policies--they could very easily be convinced to blame some minority group or foreign nation.

TylerLives• 1 year ago

Not sure about Canada, but Trump's actions will make a lot more sense if you consider that to American rightists, American leftists are a much bigger enemy than Russians. I think the same is true in the opposite direction. These 2 groups can't stand each other and often sabotage the other's efforts. We can put that aside and ask what's best for the world or America, but as long as there is this hatred between the parties in the US, both sides will act primarily against the other.

Spooky234• 1 year ago

The supporters are just a rabble bought into a cult of personality. If they know what they think, it doesn’t matter.

The point of all of this is the chaos and destruction of trust in the system. A concept in the early stages of the Russian revolution was that the stage had to be set for a “spark” to light the tinder of the proletariat. Here the Russians had RT, probably fed talking points and material to talk radio and podcast people. Had honeypots seducing strategic politicans and special interests (See Maria Butina and the NRA). Obviously wields influence over Trump.

Once that tinder has been set, the sparks some in the chaos. You have the religious weirdos who think dinosaurs are fake, Elon who believes he’s the protagonist in a sci-fi fantasy, some war-hawks pushing the Artic Dominance thing, and whatever fuckery the gang of oligarchs like Theil, etc have in mind.

apwell23• 1 year ago

Right now every buyer of American kit is feverishly evaluating non-US alternatives.

they are doing what they should've been doing this whole time?

ajmurmann2• 1 year ago

It's a big advantage if allies use compatible or identical kit.

stouset2• 1 year ago

Does Europe lessening their desire to buy US-designed and US-made military hardware benefit or harm the US?

Extend this to other areas of commerce. If the US is no longer a reliable trade partner and its allies lessen their economic ties, is that a positive outcome for the US?

ascorbic9• 1 year ago

A week ago Trump killed the western alliance when he made it clear that allies could not rely on the US. This week he has killed the US weapons export business. Not a single country will trust them now. It would be quite an interesting thing to watch if we didn't have to live here.

jcgrillo5• 1 year ago

He also may have killed US agriculture, we'll find out in the next few months.

nxm5• 1 year ago

*They can’t rely on USA and the American tax payer for the defense of their country. Finally some defense spending will have to take place

jmye• 1 year ago

It’s “great” in the sense that this will decimate the US military industry (great or “great” depending on your view of American hegemony). China and Europe will be stronger, and America is absolutely finished as a world power.

So much winning, eh?

nxm5• 1 year ago

Europe has had 20 summits and talks about what they plan to plan to plan to do… eventually. USA will be fine.

maxlin• 1 year ago

Remember those Iranian F-14s?

Yeah. What you said has zero relevance. It's not like US is taking away the jets. They are just reducing proactive support because it's a democracy and the people don't want the country to be on the leash of anyone.

It's time for Europe to do its own work on this. As a Finnish guy I know plenty of that, and don't view other European nations as acting very responsible having had their self defense capabilities and believability wither.

anonzzzies• 1 year ago

Right now every buyer of American kit is feverishly evaluating non-US alternatives.

I don't know anything about fighter jets but for a lot of other things, Trump could not have done a nicer thing for China. Whatever issues many countries had with China, they are not actively beating most of them in the face. Probably the best years for Xi these are going to be.

elevaet2• 1 year ago

this is like Brexit but 1000x

This sums up what I've been thinking too - it looks like the USA is sick of being the center of the world and is stepping down from the position right now.

I guess this means it's China's moment. :/

chgs8• 1 year ago

Warehouse 14 time

outer_web8• 1 year ago

On the heels of 40-year old American kit demonstrating its capability against their biggest arms export competitor. What a reversal.

gonzo413• 1 year ago

The best era ever to be selling French of German arms.

hkyu123• 1 year ago

That is good. Don't know why you are saying in mocking way. We should move away from unipolar world. There should be stronger US, Europe, Asia, Africa like everyone. Monopoly is bad.

bagels• 1 year ago

I cant wait for the inevitable EU sanctions against the US.

brianbest101• 1 year ago

Beyond sanity. The US breaking trust with the world will have repercussions for generations. This is a stupid decision

k1kingy2• 1 year ago

Donald Trump really should leave his fragile ego at the door and continue to support the USA's allies at this time. People forget that it was Zelensky refusing to lie which led to Trumps first impeachment.

At the very least this entire 180 and the attempt to humiliate Zelensky in the White House is Trump wanting to enact some kind of revenge.

At the very worst him praising Putin, threatening to leave Nato, threatening other allies, moving troops out of Germany and into Hungary, et all just reeks of something more.. conspiracy theory or not it's pretty disgusting as someone looking in from the outside.

michelb2• 1 year ago

I do not for a second believe Trump thinks this all up himself. I'm not one for conspiracies, but I'm wondering how large the group using him as a mouthpiece really is.

apeescape4• 1 year ago

That's the thing. Trump's actions make no sense unless you view them through the lens that he's driving the agenda of Putin.

Then again, even if a global nuclear war broke out, some of his loyalists would still be convinced that Trump is playing some sort of 3D chess and that it's all going according to his masterful plan.

jameskilton• 1 year ago

Trump doesn't care about anyone but himself. The only reason he ran for president again (a job he absolutely hated the first time around) was so he would stay out of jail for the myriad of crimes he committed. Now that he actually got reelected (us Americans can be incredibly dumb) he's doing everything he can to punish everyone he deems was "out to get him".

Also he adores Putin and Xi and is doing what he can to become like them. There's no conspiracy, Trump really is that much of a child.

tim33320• 1 year ago

There's no conspiracy, Trump really is that much of a child.

[citation needed]

smdyc1• 1 year ago

Playing right into Putin's hands.

chii2• 1 year ago

trump is _in_ putin's hands.

meindnoch• 1 year ago

Time for us in Europe to man up.

k1kingy2• 1 year ago

Thankfully it seems to be uniting the EU rather than dividing. Remains to be seen if they can get their act together though.

throwaway_203574• 1 year ago

I'm sceptical. Recent movements in Germany point into the opposite direction or rather a continuation of wishful thinking. Yes, a lot of debt-funded defence investment is coming. They also promised some investment in "infrastructure". At the same time the debt increase will delay reforms that are overdue for 20 years and longer. There were already calls that, now, with all brakes off, we can increase rather than curb spending on the welfare state. As it currently looks, the productivity gap with the US and Asia will widen rather than shrink. A very disappointing development to say the least.

bootsmann• 1 year ago

European manufacturing is more productive than US manufacturing. The US productivity advantage comes almost entirely from the US' strong tech (as in software) sector.

eagleislandsong• 1 year ago

There were already calls that, now, with all brakes off, we can increase rather than curb spending on the welfare state.

I'm curious: Where can I read more about this? Which parties (and how many) are saying this? Is there any pushback from Merz?

foldr2• 1 year ago

Germany has slightly higher productivity per hour worked than the US. There's a productivity gap between the US and European economies as a whole (which is a relatively recent phenomenon dating back to around 2005), but Germany is quite productive.

throwaind29k2• 1 year ago

Is no one in Europe not skeptical of the increase in defense spending? Things have costs, that money is having to come from somewhere.

Is increasing traditional military spending the way to go in the 21st century? If the decision is left to military leaders,they might spend massive amounts of money preparing to fight yesterday's war.

If you set aside alarmist positions, it may very well possible that Russia has no interests in military conflict with rest of Europe beyond Ukraine.

In that case what is the best thing Europeans could do?

There is danger and risk in military over spending at this juncture, and Europe needs to be level headed about it.

guerrilla5• 1 year ago

It sounds like you're not keeping up on things. We know where the money is coming from. It's headline news daily in the financial press. What are you talking about? And yes, of course we need to defend ourselves.

deadbabe• 1 year ago

Europe has benefited a lot from not having to pour tons of money into defense spending. Europeans will be hurting if their countries suddenly have to shift finances for this.

I think it’s much easier to just hunker down and appease the United States for four years and hope the next administrations are more merciful.

Eupolemos3• 1 year ago

We have opened for €800 billions in investments through the EU.

So, no.

Calling anything "alarmist positions" now is just uninformed; Putin has said Russia wants the USSR territory back, their entire industry is now turned to produce weapons, their schools are "Putin-Jugend", they are currently invested in the first "great war" since WW2.

And the US isn't just getting out of Europe - they have gone full turncoat.

This is an unmitigated disaster for both US (citizens) and EU, and the EU is trying to manage what they can.

rocqua5• 1 year ago

Are you arguing against spending money on armies at all, or do you want Europe to spend money on more effective weapons?

011000113• 1 year ago

I hate to be the guy, but I find myself having to point this out to all of my doom-minded American friends. Yes, Trump is a criminal idiot, but one positive, probably unintended effect is that the world becomes more, in the words of Taleb, anti-fragile. As an American I am thrilled that Europe is becoming more united, more pragmatic, and more self-reliant. Our relationship is not over, it is just changing, and Europe is experiencing a long-needed renaissance.

Of course Europe always had some ability to defend itself, but I think it's clear that some of that ability was outsourced to the US(with reciprocal benefits for the US, but still). Yes, this introduces some redundancy into the Western sphere, but that's a good thing.

energy123• 1 year ago

Multi-polarity isn't anti-fragility. Multi-polarity is bad with no redeeming qualities, you get more war and more nuclear proliferation.

darkhorn3• 1 year ago

More self-reliant like North Korea?

jjk16611• 1 year ago

The American order that stood for decades was anti-fragile. Everyone outsourced their defense to some reasonable degree, so no one was strong enough to pose an existential threat to anyone else, so we could all afford to be off guard.

Now every actor needs to have the strength to deter all others, which means everyone gets stronger, which means everyone needs even more strength to deter others, or deterrence simply breaks down. We had a multi-polar world in the past, it went terribly and led to massive wars. Now we are returning to that system but with nukes.

finnjohnsen2• 1 year ago

Trump just destroyed US advanced arms export. He is efficient at tearing things down, gotta give him that.

actionfromafar5• 1 year ago

It makes the US oligarchs comparatively stronger within the US though, with foreign backing diminished, which is probably the main objective of this circus.

thewinnie2• 1 year ago

How so? Isn't is way better when other countries heavily investing in your economy?

stevenwoo• 1 year ago

A guy who can bankrupt his own casinos is the opposite of whatever a good chief executive officer is.

ChrisRR2• 1 year ago

That always fascinates me. I genuinely don't see how anyone could lose money running a business where people just turn up expecting to lose thousands of dollars for very little in return

Escornabois• 1 year ago

Hello,

Complete ignorant of strategy, international relations and power dynamics here.

Is it nagging anyone else that the "Forbes Analyst" gets called Aks, Aske and Ax in just 10 lines or it is just me?

franky47• 1 year ago

I found it weird too. Was the author using voice dictation to write the article?

mopsi8• 1 year ago

That's most likely an artifact of automated translation.

azalemeth• 1 year ago

Trump is really a disgusting human being. I'm not a US citizen but this looks an awful lot like treason -- he is actively helping an enemy of the state.

10xDev• 1 year ago

He is saving American money for American people as was promised. You just don't like the fact that the world is heading towards de-globalisation because of whatever other political belief you have that you aren't sharing like most people here.

sovietmudkipz3• 1 year ago

I genuinely wish there was an understandable endgame for the USA. The USA seems to be throwing its weight around but I’m not entirely sure to what end. This headline/article is just one area where the US is behaving perplexingly.

I understand that Trump wants Zelenskyy to sign the minerals deal and that implicitly there’s security guarantees. Fine there’s at least a through line. However; by demonstrating that the US is willing to revoke access to this war material during an active shooting war over some ego thing they’re showing allies who’ve invested in the US military equipment that they’re vulnerable to suffer this same fate. Now Europe is turning hard away from US tech.

To some degree this is a good thing, I think, from USA’s POV. Trump has said it’s unfair USA spends the most on NATO and that member states should pay more (how many don’t hit the 2% target). However; the point was to spend their 2% GDP on American armaments. Now Europe is taking their demand and money and investing in domestic military equipment. Which will inevitably beg the question in the coming years if NATO, a US establishment, is to be made redundant?

This US administration can’t seem to have their cake and eat it too. They want money, demand for their goods, but every time they act out they drive away their business partners.

actionfromafar5• 1 year ago

What would you do if you were a team of US oligarchs with connections to the administration and wanted to increase your share of, and power over, the domestic cake?

Tell me it doesn't fit.

Edit: this story just dropped off the main page. Currently sitting at 85 points and 77 comments. It had position 2 or so, now it has position 79.

ncruces2• 1 year ago

If Europe collectively decides they must only buy French and German weapons, there's less US cake.

ctack3• 1 year ago

Suspicious that it’s not on the front page.

postingawayonhn2• 1 year ago

NATO as has existed is already over. Nobody has any faith that the US will follow through on its Article 5 obligations.

ozim• 1 year ago

The fun part - US is the only country that called Article 5.

sovietmudkipz3• 1 year ago

If that’s the case that “NATO as has existed is already over” then maybe it is wise for the USA to pull out. Maybe that’s the endgame for Europe? Europe defends Europe (or gets taken over by Russia I guess), and USA isn’t on the hook for its defense anymore.

tim33320• 1 year ago

I'd say it's on hold for four years till they get a new president. In the meanwhile I guess the other members will have to try to manage.

hackinthebochs• 1 year ago

Does anyone think a country not already involved in a nuclear war would willingly expose itself to being annihilated? NATO works best when all member states are stable, ideologically aligned, and its Article 5 resolve is untested. Here the uncertainty works in its favor. But when NATO expands past deep ideological alignment towards a maximal expansionist strategy, and openly courts states its rival signals as core security interests, NATO becomes something else entirely. When it became a tool for maximally isolating Russia, it undermined its own credibility as a unified security entity. There is a genuine question whether the US would go "all in" to defend eastern european states. The fact that we can credibly ask this question about a NATO member just shows how far it's gone from its initial ideals.

outer_web8• 1 year ago

Ukraine is already quietly divisive in Congress. If Russia were to roll into Poland I could see a legislative declaration of war.

In any event, maybe NATO just needs go squeak by four years without an Article 5 invocation to be back to normal.

ratatoskrt• 1 year ago

I think it boils down to the fact that Trump does not understand soft power. Slashing the most powerful and influential aid programme in the world shows that very clearly. The US is as rich as it is because they created an environment of stability (at least on their own territory) and ensuring that there are markets American companies can sell into.

outer_web8• 1 year ago

Maybe not so much that as he sees everything as a bargaining chip and any unused chips as a waste. After all, bribery and favors are more or less what soft power is.

throwaway_203574• 1 year ago

I understand that Trump wants Zelenskyy to sign the minerals deal and that implicitly there’s security guarantees.

I don't think there are any "security guarantees". What could they be?

The "endgame" as far as I understand it: The US wants access to the minerals as a compensation for the money already spent and, perhaps, to restore some of the support currently put on hold (satellite data access). Once the Ukranian resistance is broken, the US and Russia will jointly dictate a peace, gradually install a Russia-friendly regime and split the profit between them. They will happily invite the EU to finance some of the rebuilding of Ukraine that is then mainly performed by US and Russian companies. The US furthermore hopes that by spearheading the lifting of sanctions it will get priority access to some beneficial deals with and within Russia itself.

anotherhue• 1 year ago

Truer words...

sovietmudkipz3• 1 year ago

I think the implicit guarantee is if American business and workers are harvesting minerals then if Russia attacked the USA would have even more incentive to intervene militarily.

That said, I don’t know what more Ukraine would want given the Budapest Memorandum already ties the USA, UK, and Russia to Ukraine’s defense. That’s proven to be a mixed success, as both USA, UK, and other countries have indeed stepped up for Ukraine’s defense.

bananapub2• 1 year ago

I understand that Trump wants Zelenskyy to sign the minerals deal and that implicitly there’s security guarantees.

I don't think this is true at all, I think Trump wants Ukraine to be conquered and for Russia to win and for people to stop bothering him about any of it.

Trump blew up whatever nonsense minerals deal there was, and is actively sabotaging the Ukrainian defence efforts via this, and ending intelligence sharing, and apparently leaning on random American companies to stop them selling services to Ukraine, and by providing diplomatic cover and support to Russia.

people haven't seem to have caught on yet - the US has switched sides, it is now part of the Russia bloc.

tesch1• 1 year ago

point was to spend their 2% GDP on American armaments

Do the NATO agreements specify American armaments? Europe could have spent on European armaments and armies too, just chose not too because they didn't see a reason to.

Europe not buying F35 or whatever hurts US arms industry, but probably not the general strategic position of the US. There's even a credible argument (dont know how credible?) that these arms programs actually undermine security by investing crazy money in outdated / ineffective technology. The dumb part would be not learning from the Ukrainians how to fight a modern war.

US participation in NATO may be made redundant, but Europe's need for a credible collective defense agreement is not going away.

bloopernova2• 1 year ago

What would trump do differently if he had been told explicitly by putin to destroy the usa?

justin667• 1 year ago

He would have been asked to be a little less obvious about it?

nxm5• 1 year ago

Where was it requested/required to spend 2% on solely American armaments?

perlgeek4• 1 year ago

The endgame isn't for the USA, it's for Trump. I don't really know what it is, but I'm pretty certain that to understand his actions, you have to rid yourself of the idea that he's doing it for anybody or anything else than for himself.

rad_gruchalski12• 1 year ago

But Zelensky came to the white house to sign the deal. If Trump wanted the deal to be signed, it would have been signed. But he chose to gang up on Zelensky.

dividedbyzero• 1 year ago

Today it's Ukraine and F35s, who and what will it be in a year? I suppose European governments are taking a long hard look at strategic dependencies on the US right now, like the whole economy running on top of Microsoft and Google and other US-made SaaS. If all of that went dark at once, I honestly don't know how some of the larger companies I know could keep operating. They all have fallbacks for critical infrastructure obviously but those are US-made, too...

jopsen4• 1 year ago

In practice it goes both ways...

Lots of critical things for the US is made exclusively in Europe.

Lots of medicin that people rely on daily would be unavailable if EU/US trade broke down completely.

generic920347• 1 year ago

Adding to this:

About half of the US companies over a certain size run on ERP software from an European vendor. And it is not trivial at all to change that, even if they wanted to.

touisteur2• 1 year ago

Aside from life-saving medicine, I was thinking that the un-availability (not 'available with tariffs' but 'we're not selling it to the US anymore') of Ozempic in the US might become a political problem, maybe more so than many other trade-war hits. Maybe it's easy to manufacture it locally but the time-gap until it's up and running might be too much to swallow...

tim33320• 1 year ago

I think so far F16s not F35s. Though you wonder if say the UK could use F35s in Ukraine without Trump trying to turn something off.

pacifika• 1 year ago

What’s the motivation, if the Russians have the strong cards in this upcoming peace negotiation the current administration feels the need to weaken the Ukrainian side equipment? Slice of the minerals?

dashundchen• 1 year ago

Trump/Musk/Republicans have taken the side of a fascist dictator Putin. Every recent move wrt Ukraine has benefitted Russia. Even if it means betraying democratic allies and decades long alliances.

It is so shameful and disgusting.

davidmurdoch8• 1 year ago

Honestly curious what you, and proponents for continuing to arm Ukraine, think should be done about Russia's encroachment into Western Europe?

ascorbic9• 1 year ago

Trump just wants the war to end. Ukraine doesn't want to surrender a chunk of its territory under bad terms, so they won't make a deal. Putin is more than happy to take a deal that means they win. Trump thinks that if he weakens Ukraine then they'll be more willing to take a bad deal. He also doesn't like Ukraine or Zelenskyy, so has no particular desire to do them a favour.

hkpack2• 1 year ago

doesn't want to surrender a chunk of its territory

It is not about a chunk of the territory.

azan_6• 1 year ago

Ukraine already surrendered chunk of its territory few years ago. You think this time it will be different and Russia won't try to take Ukraine again once it rebuilds its military potential?

vanviegen5• 1 year ago

Putin is more than happy to take a deal that means they win.

That is not at all evident. Russia's economy is in a terrible spot, and might collapse entirely without the war ('special military operation') effort.

acdha10• 1 year ago

He forces Ukraine to take a bad deal by removing their ability to walk away. That deal involves more revenue for him and ensures that he gets to tell his voters that he kept his promise to end the war. His first impeachment was over trying to extort Ukraine’s assistance in election rigging so the humiliation is an extra bonus.

jopsen4• 1 year ago

I'm not sure Denmark is going to cancel our F35 orders. From a security perspective, it's certainly in our interest to pretend this isn't a big deal. And that everything is normal.

But I'm not surprised that our prime minister recently did not leave out the possiblity of hosting nukes on Danish territory.

Given the theatre in the US one could even say we'll need nukes to defend Greenland.

realo3• 1 year ago

The Donald wants Groenland ... After that, why not Denmark itself ?

jopsen4• 1 year ago

After that, why not Denmark itself ?

Hmm, the US welcome to liberate us from sour tax burden. I suspect the invading force will surrender when they see the liabilities :)

arkensaw2• 1 year ago

I wouldn't presume to understand the bananas ideas of Trump and his kindergarten kronies, but I imagine they're looking at an inaccurately large landmass on a mercator projection map and hearing about the oil underneath and seeing dollar signs.

On a map, it looks to be bigger than all of North America, although in reality its only about 1/5th of the size of the US.

(although granted that's still a very large area that they probably see as 'up for grabs' since Denmark is small and far away and the US already have airbases there)

tim33320• 1 year ago

I wonder if F35s will be like HP printers and refuse to start unless they phone home?

DFHippie2• 1 year ago

People commenting here keep speaking as though Americans all decided to do this. Trump didn't even win the majority of votes of those who voted. And those who voted for him had only the most nebulous idea of what doing this would mean. It meant something like "Those people who never treated us with respect will get what's coming. If they don't love us they will fear us."

This happens all the time. "Russia did X." "The UK just did stupid thing Y." "Why are Germans suddenly authoritarian again?"

There are always lots of people who disagree with the actions of their government. Some governments -- the US government increasingly so -- punish dissent. Russians, for one, have almost no say over what their government does. Americans in general are not making these terrible decisions. Some cabal is, but even the Republicans, who have all the power at the moment, are mostly just knuckling under to decisions they know are terrible.

I know it's tempting to blame and hate people as nations, but I don't think it helps. In fact, it's how we got here in the first place: firebrands telling nitwits that everyone in Europe or New York City or wherever hates them.

chii2• 1 year ago

Trump didn't even win the majority of votes of those who voted.

he did win the popular vote this time, unlike last.

eunos9• 1 year ago

Still below 50% (49% something) so technically not majority but plurality.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF• 1 year ago

"Russia did X." "The UK just did stupid thing Y." "Why are Germans suddenly authoritarian again?"

This is just the language that is used to refer to the governments as well as the people/culture. It may help to presume that, in most cases, they’re referring to just the governments.

Eupolemos3• 1 year ago

People commenting here keep speaking as though Americans all decided to do this. Trump didn't even win the majority of votes of those who voted.

True, but if Americans do not stop it, they own it.

Nobody cares much if you meant to make an accident, you should have been more careful - especially if you run away from the scene.

ctack3• 1 year ago

@dang - why flagged?

beveldropshadow• 1 year ago

Everything nominally related to Trump is getting flagged, even comments. Several unrelated comments of mine went from neutral/positive to flagged suddenly. Salty folks, or maybe coordinated, probably a little of both.

tastyfreeze2• 1 year ago

I've noticed the same. Wish I knew if it was real people or an army of bots flipping switches to influence visibility for someone's gain.

You're right, probably both. Unfortunately the question alone makes HN have much less utility.

saintamh• 1 year ago

Politics is explicitly marked as off-topic for HN in the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

acdha10• 1 year ago

The guidelines don’t completely rule out politics, and in this case the topic is of interest here since it dovetails with other political issues of long-running concern in the HN community: who owns devices with outside service dependencies, right to repair, etc. The question of whether someone who physically controls an ECM pod can configure it feels a lot like the question about whether John Deere can prevent a farmer from configuring their tractor’s software or an IoT vendor can shut down a service without providing an alternative.

One area where this is especially of interest is everyone considering their dependency on U.S. products. If you live in a country under military threat, questions like what happens if the first strike against Canada involved a malicious Chrome or Windows update or holding back a patch for a vulnerability the NSA wants to exploit is quite an interesting problem.

mcmcmc2• 1 year ago

The guidelines seem just vague enough to allow for suppression of topics that the oligarchs are touchy about while appearing reasonable. Tech is inherently political.

ludwik• 1 year ago

What's "politics"? Any policy enacted by the US government? That's not how it used to work here.

forgetfreeman6• 1 year ago

Given how pervasive politization has become this would suggest that strict adherence to any "politics is off-topic" rule would necessarily involve making the site permanently read-only.

silvestrov3• 1 year ago

From the rules:

Most stories about politics, [...] unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon

The US killing trust in its export of arms is definitely a new phenomenon. It breaks with +80 years of policy.

All startups in SV will now have to consider if they will have an export market at all.

Which non-US companies would now like to be dependent on whatever export restrictions that Trump might make up in the future?

dredmorbius2• 1 year ago

"Most" != "all": <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13531909>

layer83• 1 year ago

Flagging is done by HN members, not by dang.

dredmorbius2• 1 year ago

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42177590>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23873461>

ChrisRR2• 1 year ago

I suspect it's because this site is mainly targeted towards technology and engineering, but somehow world news keeps making its way in here and people are getting bored of it

tw23472882• 1 year ago

I'm glad that this discussion finally takes place, even though the discussion is of course flagged.

You can flag here, but the mainstream press has picked up the issue:

"Can the US switch off Europe’s weapons?"

https://www.ft.com/content/1503a69e-13e4-4ee8-9d05-b9ce1f7cc...

"Such is the concern that debate has turned to whether the US maintains secret so-called kill switches that would immobilise aircraft and weapons systems. While never proven, Richard Aboulafia, managing director at consultancy AeroDynamic Advisory, said: “If you postulate the existence of something that can be done with a little bit of software code, it exists.”

In practice, it may not even matter because of how already reliant advanced combat aircraft and other sophisticated weapons — such as anti-missile systems, advanced drones and early warning aircraft — are on US spare parts and software updates."

There you go, finally mainstream press and politicians are mentioning the kill switch.

jopsen4• 1 year ago

Yeah, not delivering additional aid for free is one thing.

But retracting support is the nuclear option.

Figuratively, because you can probably one do it once, so you better pick a good reason for doing it.

And literally, because small European countries do now have to consider nukes.

jcgrillo5• 1 year ago

small European countries do now have to consider nukes

It wouldn't be all that surprising to see Poland and Finland doing atmospheric tests in the next few months. Given that Ukraine gave up their weapons for a totally vacuous security guarantee it would make sense for them to build bombs too. 2025 could be the year of global nuclear proliferation.

layer83• 1 year ago

Not just small European countries, but all European countries that do not have their own nukes, which is all except France. The issue is, they’ll have to leave the Non-Proliferation Treaty for that (except for the UK, I think), and once an otherwise respected country does that, the floodgates would be open in the world. The other problem is that such a decision would be very divisive in the European country’s electorate, and therefore highly problematic on its domestic political front. This is simply not likely to happen.

A more realistic outcome is that French nukes will be stationed in other European countries. But France is also not willing to give up exclusive control over those nukes, and the next French government could very well be far-right, and thus become as unreliable as the current US government. It’s a difficult situation.

throwaway4847618• 1 year ago

Not just European countries. Non proliferation is dead.

mmcnl2• 1 year ago

Whether there is a kill switch or not is somewhat irrelevant. There is a larger than nonzero chance that there is a kill switch, and the US cannot be trusted anymore. So we have to assume there is a kill switch.

ascorbic9• 1 year ago

That's basically what the article says. And that even if there isn't a kill switch, these weapons rely on constant updates and cutting those off is effectively a kill switch, even if it wasn't designed as one.

silvestrov3• 1 year ago

Lack of maintenance parts is just a kill switch with a timer.

Jet Fighters need a lot of maintenance, they are not like cars.

So a kill switch in software is not needed. If the US stops shipping parts, then it is only a matter of time before the Jet Fighters is an expensive paper weight.

unethical_ban• 1 year ago

With absolutely no military experience, I find this thought process hard to believe. Namely that the existence of backdoors is hard to conceal forever, and that their discovery would do worse damage than what Trump is doing now. Given most administrations seemed interested in maintaining friendship with Europe, I don't see the strategic benefit.

rurban4• 1 year ago

One of the kill switches are the Intel ME, AMD PSP, Windows OS, Google. Apple? Who knows if they will participate in such national security measure.

Also core routers, interxions, sealines, Level 3 et al.

coldburst• 1 year ago

Having a kill switch "just in case" really is a strategically logical move. Consider the case of Iran: In the 1960s and 1970s, the US delivered several US-built aircraft to Iran, including F-4s, F-5s, and F-14s, some of the most advanced fighters of that era. After the 1979 revolution, US-Iran relations collapsed. Despite the US cutting off spare parts and maintenance, Iran has been able to keep the aircraft operational to this day (likely through effortful reverse engineering). So now there is an adversary that is armed with equipment you provided. The obvious way to avoid that is to install a kill switch.

nosianu• 1 year ago

I just read here a few days ago how very dependent on regular US maintenance the British nuclear weapons are.

"US support to maintain UK's nuclear arsenal is in doubt (theguardian.com)"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43299011

louthy5• 1 year ago

The Economist gives a more nuanced view [1]. Essentially saying the deterrent is independent and if support was pulled by the US that there wouldn’t be a ‘cliff edge’, which would potentially give time to replace.

The UK has produced its own nuclear weapons in the past and has weapons grade processing at Sellafield. There’s ~140 metric tons of separated plutonium stored there.

It is apparently enough material to build tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. Not every warhead has to be a billion megatons to be a deterrent.

[1] https://archive.is/Qz2lI

darthrupert2• 1 year ago

Will America ever be trusted again?

Also, stop flagging news articles simply because they are slightly anti-Trump.

jfengel4• 1 year ago

I don't know why anyone trusted us post 2016. Even with a sane President it was always clear that we were dangerously unreliable. And even if this insanity ends in four years it will always recur.

11235813213455• 1 year ago

Could recent wars just be a worldwide plot for just accelerating economy (selling weapons, buying food, etc..)?

mcmcmc2• 1 year ago

No. War is bad for economies. It’s good for firms that produce materiel but on the whole is a net negative. Classic broken window fallacy. Killing your workforce is a drain on economic growth.

tim33320• 1 year ago

I'm wondering if the deal with Trump and Russia is just favours like they find investors for his questionable businesses and he helps them or if they do have kompromat? Apparently in the days they were entertaining him in Moscow it was quite common to provide hookers and film things and given Trump's character it may not have been that hard to get him to go along. He always looks rather embarrassed with Putin.

Also it could explain this stuff which is hard otherwise.

icegreentea2• 1 year ago

I honestly think Trump is just impressed by Putin. Like he loves the power that Putin wields and likes and wants that. Trump has consistently expressed his admiration of unconstrained power in all forms. It's not just a Putin thing, though I think there is a little extra going on with Putin.

Otherwise, I think what Trump has said about Ukraine is more or less what he believes and wants. He wants there to be peace, quickly, so that he can be known as a peace maker. He wants to be known as the person who can do the undoable. His henchmen repeat it endlessly - "only Donald Trump could bring peace here". He does not care about the details for Ukraine, and he doesn't really care about the details for Europe - he's wanted to cut loose from Europe since the first term.

In addition, there's probably quite a lot of personal apathy towards Zelensky specifically.

Finally it's possible that his China hawks are also shaping his base tendencies to try to deliver a Russia-China split. But I don't think that Trump really believes in that, it's just the people in his admin trying to make something of this situation. And I don't really believe that even a peace favourable to Putin can deliver the type of split that the China hawks might dream of, at least within this term.

devsda2• 1 year ago

"Trump is an alien impersonator trying to destroy humanity from within to make it easier for the aliens to colonize earth"

That is also a probable explanation for what's happening, if you believe in UFOs and aliens.

Sorry, I mean no disrespect.

As a non-american and non-westerner, it's absolutely wild to see what people are willing to believe when it comes to Trump. Surely, there's a more rational and simple explanation for what's going on ?

kragen10• 1 year ago

Perhaps you have thought of one? If so, the rest of us are dying to hear it.

tim33320• 1 year ago

I don't really want to divert the thread to a lot of questionable Trump stuff but there is some evidence in that direction. See for example https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/19/trump-fir... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/29/trump-russia... https://www.kyivpost.com/post/47630

TrackerFF• 1 year ago

Who would have thought that the POTUS would be the person to kick foreign arms industries into sixth gear?

pokstad3• 1 year ago

Well he’s been very vocal about NATO countries increasing their defense contributions. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the US needs to sell all the weapons.

mrighele2• 1 year ago

"Trump Tells Europe to Buy American Arms to Keep NATO Strong". [1]

"U.S. President Donald Trump complained Thursday that his country's decades-old security treaty with Japan is nonreciprocal, as he steps up pressure on allies to increase defense spending and buy more American products." [2]

It's about buying more American weapons.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-13/trump-tel...

[2] https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2025/03/fd3521d51353-upda...

ncruces2• 1 year ago

And all everybody speaks of is expenditure, not capabilities. That alone should tell you what the goal is.

Except it might backfire if Europe understandably decides it must buy European.

bufferoverflow2• 1 year ago

He has been pretty vocal about exactly that. He said multiple times that European countries must increase defense budgets significantly.

preisschild2• 1 year ago

Yeah, but EU countries donated weapons like the F-16, which were bought from the US in the first place. So now we have to use another source for those weapon systems and the revenue/jobs won't end up in the US.

Is this really what the US wants?

acdha10• 1 year ago

Yes, but he said that in the context of buying American products. He wanted the American economy to benefit from arms sales, not a more independent Europe.

rad_gruchalski12• 1 year ago

Yes. To buy more American weapons.

peeters• 1 year ago

Sometimes I wonder if he's a secret genius that leverages his own stupidity.

E.g. he might be solely responsible for getting the Liberals reelected in Canada, something that a year ago you would have thought was absolutely impossible. But Trump is so deeply hated in Canada now that every time he mocks Trudeau it makes the Liberals more popular. Liberal support, which before Trump was elected was so low as to make a Conservative election win seem inevitable, has skyrocketed since Trump took office. It's now pretty much a dead heat, and that's before the Liberals have elected their new leader.

So I don't know, maybe he just really, really wanted the Liberals to get reelected and he pulled off the only way to make it happen. Maybe he felt sorry that Canadians seemed so internally divided, so he threatened to annex Canada to unite us.

Or maybe he's a moron that can't even understand cause and effect.

https://338canada.com/polls.htm

deepsun5• 1 year ago

I heard that a lot about pretty much every country politics that "there's something more going on, some conspiracy". But again and again I see that there's nothing hidden, it's all pretty simple and dumb. We just want to overcomplicate things to feel smarter.

rifty• 1 year ago

Trump reminds me of someone trying to finish the last side of a rubiks cube by undoing every other side in that pursuit by not paying attention to them.

I think he'll continue to be the main cause of constraints to realizing his visions maximally.

For this reason, once we can look back on this time in retrospect, there's a way this plays out where he may just be a horse that ran away. [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_old_man_lost_his_horse

kccoder2• 1 year ago

Just like everything else he’s done, I’m not remotely surprised. I wonder if people realize where this all ends, and are taking appropriate precautions.

regularization2• 1 year ago

I am tired of being taxed and having the money go to forever wars in other countries. Slaughtering Palestinians in Gaza, destabilizing Russia, and on and on. At least Trump is winding it down in one place. If Europeans think a hardline against Russia is important, then they can pay for it. We're on the other side of the ocean.

This is why the Democrats lost. All they care about is war in the Ukraine. Bernie Sanders supports the war too, but at least he says a few scraps from the table should go to US workers. But he is thrown aside. The Democrats were for the Ukraine war, Jill Stein and Trump were not, and Americans voted for this.

Americans voted for this, Trump is implementing it, and all the warmongers and war profiteers and neocons have left is some neocon press and downvotes here for the majority American opinion which screwy old Trump is implementing.

declan_roberts• 1 year ago

This was a democrat/liberal position until 2016, and now it is exceedingly right-coded.

otherme1232• 1 year ago

A lot of that is inherited from Germany not going fully armed again after II WW, and some capable countries not making nukes (Spain and Italy halted their advanced nuclear programs when the US pressured for it, offering them NATO coverage). How could the USA ask now European countries to not develop nukes?

It's in the interest of the USA to cooperate and be part of defensive alliances. When USA goes to their wars and they ask for help, Europeans, Canadians and Australians oblige. If USA goes full isolationist, the rest of the world must develop their own nukes and their own forces. Goodbye to the dollar hegemony and the industrial military complex. USA fought hard with the USSR to achieve hegemony, and now that they got it they throw it away?

If that's what US wants, it's OK, but I believe some people don't fully understand the reality or the consequences. The US citizen don't pay taxes for Europe protection; Europe citizens pay taxes to buy american weapons.

regularization2• 1 year ago

It's in the interest of the USA to cooperate and be part of defensive alliances.

Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania are in NATO. "Defensive alliance" means the US bankrolls and guarantees their security, there is no two way street with them, they can do nothing for us.

Finland is the most ridiculous case as Stalin could have easily swallowed it up in 1945 if it was in Russia's interest to do so, with little a peep from the West. Them joining NATO in 2023 is an absurdity. A military alliance which should have never existed in the first place - which both Taft and former VP Henry Wallace said in the 1940s.

Goodbye to the dollar hegemony and the industrial military complex. Goodbye military industrial complex? Hallelujah!
USA fought hard with the USSR to achieve hegemony

It's more absurd thinking. In 1917 Russia's economy was about Brazil's size. It was like an NFL team playing against a high school team for over a century. Russia barely even had influence over the communists in China.

iw2rmb2• 1 year ago

First, reps where for Ukraine and now you are flipping like a vane. Second, $100b in weapon aid for Ukraine is just small change and old stuff mostly; and Ukraine could be one of the solid buyers for decades. Third, if you're not a filthy rich you are paying and will pay a lot more for the upcoming years. This could be a real win for US, Ukraine and even probably could overthrow Putin. But with that course of actions the only option for you is to keep stacking eggs.

tim33320• 1 year ago

This particular story is interesting because it's not just about Trump stopping tax payer money, it's about deactivating US made weapons the Europeans have paid for.

guerrilla5• 1 year ago

I love the irony that it's the complete opposite of "America First" in practice.

sorokod2• 1 year ago

The Danish air force is likely experiencing a buyers remorse about their batch of F35s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Danish_Air_Force

Sammi3• 1 year ago

"27 in total ordered; 17 delivered as of January 2025; 11 in Denmark and 6 in Luke Air Force Base for training purposes as of January 2025"

Project is so far along that Denmark is probably stuck with them.

sorokod2• 1 year ago

If, and that is a big if, the US would allow Denmark or any other of their "allies" to suspend their commitments to the US arms industry.

"The weak are meat the strong do eat."

soramimo2• 1 year ago

They can probably sell them to Russia or China a few years down the road at the current trajectory.

knubie• 1 year ago

Yes I'm sure the Danes are wishing they had purchased their fifth generation fighters from China or Russia instead.

davikr2• 1 year ago

The Chinese and Russian would certainly have provided continued support if they were on the other end of a conflict, differently from the Evil Bad American Empire.

eitland8• 1 year ago

Alternatively they could have went with not 5 generation, but still extremely good Gripen.

It's electronic warfare capabilities have reportedly surprised Nato pilots in exercises before.

xdennis3• 1 year ago

That money could have been used on drones or other weapons rather than buying expensive paper weights.

bambax5• 1 year ago

There's zero chance the F35s will even be able to take off when the US attacks Greenland, while the chance of Chinese planes defending Denmark from the US is non-zero.

Also, they could have bought European planes (Rafale).

spixy3• 1 year ago

Czech people also discuss it (F35s ordered in 2024, delivery estimated in 2031-2035).

RandyOrion2• 1 year ago

When totalitarian governments all start applauding what you're doing, using what you're doing as a distraction from a bad domestic situation as well as a justification for their dictatorships, you should know that something is totally screwed up.

Yes, I'm talking about the totalitarian governments of China and Russia.

mistrial94• 1 year ago

you are talking about (edit almost) a third of the entire human population, as if you know better. Reality says - random armchair Western Educated Individual Rich and Democratic does not rule the day for a third of humanity by claiming some political imperative.

More reality - the Muslim world is organized and very wealthy in spots. By confrontational and arrogant (see above) posturing and actions by Westerns, it drives power alliances to the Muslim world. So then there is one third of the actual population of the entire world, embracing the Muslim world economically and politically.

Secondly and perhaps more importantly, the backdrop economically for all parties is substantially about Oil and Gas. In the USA, the Oil and Gas interests have gained the upper hand, and they know very well how to apply it. Oil and Gas industry has all the capital and all the ambition to expand, fortify and entrench for the next multiple decades. It is rarely mentioned in the provocative and divisive social "news" that fills the media in the West each day.

RandyOrion2• 1 year ago

The combined population of China and Russia is less than a fifth of the world (15-16 bn vs 80+ bn). Edit: should be 1.5-1.6 bn vs 8 bn.

I'm only discussing Trump's behaviour and its effect on totalitarian governments, I don't have enough knowledge to discuss the rest of what you wrote.

I think the recent series of Trump's actions against Ukraine have failed to send a message to totalitarian governments that matches his own words. This has nothing to do with how much of the population Trump rules.

epistasis17• 1 year ago

To be fair to China, even they are "appalled" by what Trump is doing to cause chaos with Europe and to abandon Ukraine by holding talks about Ukraine without Ukraine:

https://news.liga.net/en/politics/news/china-appalled-by-tru...

92834092325• 1 year ago

China isn't actually appalled but they are trying to slip into America's spot in the world and they will likely do so successfully.

xeckr2• 1 year ago

Ah yes, the only country in the world whose array of official foreign policies includes a "no limits partnership" with russia.

The statement of the named Chinese official is either a psyop, or he is, in the parlance of intelligence agencies, "going native". I'm leaning towards the former hypothesis.

genewitch20• 1 year ago

Ukraine was invited. Stop lying.

tananaev2• 1 year ago

Build trust for a hundred years. Then flush it down the drain in two months.

ascorbic9• 1 year ago

Not even two weeks

ukoki• 1 year ago

https://hotdogeatingsurrendermonkeys.com/

ferguess_k4• 1 year ago

That been said. Historically US got strong by screwing over its allies. For example to the UK during the second World War.

tananaev2• 1 year ago

What specifically are you referring to during the WW2? I'm sure it wasn't always black and white, but I think in general the US and western Europe were fairly good allies.

Personally I think the reason the US got strong, especially economically, is because of stability, rule of law, global trade and economy of scale due to large enough population. Not because of specific incidents of screwing someone.

KaiserPro4• 1 year ago

US got strong by screwing over its allies

The biggest empire in the world paid for the US to re-tool its economy to produce arms for them. Later on the USA provided loans to continue that expansion.

Then Japan entered the war and it got personal.

Sure bretton-woods was a humiliation, but the Marshall plan was there to stop those humiliated allies from going communist.

tenpies• 1 year ago

That's certainly one take, but I suspect historians will actually link the beginning of this trend to the European/Western reactions to Russia in February of 2022.

It could be framed as "cancel culture overruled the courts". The second Putin became the "literally Hitler" of the moment well anything could be done - even things they didn't do when actual Hitler was around.

This meant extra-judicial seizures including "preventive" seizures. No law was broken or sanction placed yet, but they're going to seize your assets now and figure out how to make it "legal" later on.

Even the Swiss - neutral during WW2 - abandoned over two centuries of neutrality and went along with the EU in this.

The message these countries sent was clear: if you ever oppose us, rule of law will not protect you.

Integrape• 1 year ago

The States will never financially recover from this.

devnullbrain• 1 year ago

Two months? You elected the same guy 8 years ago. Fool me once, etc.

Gollapalli• 1 year ago

There’s a good reason for people to flag these posts.

It seems like most folks in the comment section didn’t even read TFA.

Per TFA, this impacts F-16s NOT F-35s

Per TFA, the US is not actively “turning off” any piece of equipment, they are no longer providing updates (something with which we are all familiar.

Per TFA, this means that the US is no longer providing active support in a country-vs-country battle of electronic warfare. Which is what the title and article says, and very different from what most of you actually READ.

adamors2• 1 year ago

Per TFA, this impacts F-16s NOT F-35s

Title it about F16s

Per TFA, the US is not actively “turning off” any piece of equipment

From the article: "the Trump administration has cut off vital support for their [the F16s'] jamming capabilities"

What article are you reading?

ExoticPearTree16• 1 year ago

Exactly this: the US is not providing software updates anymore. The planes fly just fine. It is going to be tricky if they decide to stop hardware support - meaning spare parts.

legitster• 1 year ago

The article pretty clearly explains how important the missile jamming feature is, and that Ukraine has to switch to other planes and equipment.

ceejayoz• 1 year ago

Per TFA, this impacts F-16s NOT F-35s

But this should absolutely worry F-35 operators.

ryao• 1 year ago

What stops the Russians from reprogramming their radars to switch to a different frequency every 5 minutes as specified by a CSPRNG? It seems like it would make the manual reprogramming of jammers pointless.

gotts2• 1 year ago

These systems are much more advanced than how you perceive them.

mrweasel4• 1 year ago

So in the article, they talk about the AN/ALQ-131 jammer. It needs to be updated by the US, to keep up with the Russia counter measures, that's what's stopping. At least the F-16 donated by Denmark will most likely have pylons from Terma (ECIPS), which should work with the CJS from Leonardo (ECIPS/CJS).

Shouldn't be to hard for Europe to make the required pylons for the planes who don't have the ECIPS and for those that do, some of them might already have CJS installed.

It's a problem for sure, but it's a manageable one.

gonzobonzo• 1 year ago

And the article itself appears to be making some logical leaps. It says it's getting its information from a Forbes article, but the information in the Forbes article is simply this[1]:

But the Russian air force could sidestep the jamming by reprogramming their radars to operate at slightly different frequencies. Under Biden, the USAF team might’ve kept pace with Russian adaptation by constantly adjusting the AN/ALQ-131s own frequencies. Under Trump, Ukrainian airmen are stuck with pods whose programming may soon be out of date.

Some people were asked why this got flagged, by I think there's some justification for that given the fact that it's a misleading headline for an article editorializing another article, and that most people here used it as a jumping off point to talk about politics and not what was actually being discussed.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2025/03/07/france-to-t...

cutemonster3• 1 year ago

The Forbes article also says:

U.S. President Donald Trump has halted U.S. aid to Ukraine, including vital support for the F-16s’ radar jammers.
That could deprive the Ukrainian air force of its most important aerial countermeasures at a critical moment

That does sound really bad, I think.

Narretz• 1 year ago

Well it's always good to be specific, but I think it was the only thing that the US did for the F-16, wasn't it? They didn't exactly support sending planes in the first place. And it's not gonna be the last wrench the US will throw into Ukraine's (and Europe's) gears. It all piles up.

russfink• 1 year ago

Yes. The problem seemed to be the lack of continued updates that evolve with the Russian radar changes. This sounds like an anti-virus paradigm: base software plus signature files.

Can’t the Ukrainees (?) reverse engineer the update format and make their own on the down-low?

duxup• 1 year ago

Trump administration is weakening the US faster than any enemy could.

Waterluvian2• 1 year ago

I think this from French senator Claude Malhuret sums it up:

    This is a tragedy for the free world, but it’s first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. [President Donald] Trump’s message is that being his ally serves no purpose, because he will not defend you, he will impose more tariffs on you than on his enemies, and he will threaten to seize your territories, while supporting the dictators who invade you.

I’ve thought for a while now that the U.S. has spent a long time building up subjective resources in goodwill, trust, reliability, etc. (you can certainly bicker about the details here). But with Trump, they’re cashing in on all of that. They’re selling the laptops and office chairs (sometimes quite literally) as a business strategy.

I think there’s a fatal misconception among many Americans about where their prosperity comes from. They’re not special or exceptionally capable by any means. It comes from wielding tremendous economic and military power gently, preferring cooperation over conquest.

My concern is that the consequences of the current strategy are too far into the future to act as a sufficient deterrent. It’ll feel like it actually works for a time. But then eventually everyone hates you and adapts to exclude you.

glitchc2• 1 year ago

No, I'm afraid you're wrong. US prosperity is rooted in its overwhelming military might. People dare not take it on for fear of reprisal. Those who occasionally try are quickly reminded through reciprocal action. US companies benefit greatly from secure operations and relatively laissez-faire domestic economic policies to grow into world behemoths.

Don't kid yourself for one second into thinking that your safety and security are tied to some "Kumbaya good feeling" that random strangers have towards you. The stick may be silent most of the time, but everyone knows it's there.

rincebrain• 1 year ago

It's both.

The stick being silent only works if people believe you won't randomly start swinging it if they cooperate, and people trusting you not to swing wouldn't matter if you didn't have a stick.

tim33320• 1 year ago

Meh. I think that's backwards. The US has a strong military because of its economic success.

Same with China. Get rich first then buy guns.

keybored3• 1 year ago

Nothing like a bully POTUS to bring out all the rose-colored glasses praising the US for something that it never was. Set in the context of a representative of neocolonial France speaking about “the free world”.

I don’t understand the causality. Trump reaches a new low and the slogans about the benevolent past reaches a new, even more naive high.

I think there’s a fatal misconception among many Americans about where their prosperity comes from. They’re not special or exceptionally capable by any means. It comes from wielding tremendous economic and military power gently, preferring cooperation over conquest.

For how many years has the US been not-at-war?

Waterluvian2• 1 year ago

I think Trump actually demonstrates just how wrong this perspective is.

The U.S. cooperated with Canada to build cars together for generations. It’s a source of a lot of economic prosperity for both countries. And now the U.S. is threatening Canada with annexation while trying to destroy the current auto industry.

I know there would be bickering about the details because everyone has their own mood on how warmongering the U.S. is, and to whom. But whatever you want to qualify the past as, the present is considerably and undeniably different in contrast.

I guess maybe to Russians this would actually be backwards given the U.S. has always been aggressive towards them and now America and Russia are quickly becoming BFFs.

92834092325• 1 year ago

Trump has had it out for Ukraine since he tried to bribe them. Telling them to find dirt on Biden or he would withhold military assistance. They didn't go for it and it is what directly led to his impeachment. While Russia absolutely owns Trump, I believe Trump would do this even if they didn't.

MaxPock3• 1 year ago

Zelensky campaigning with democrats didn't help

92834092325• 1 year ago

Zelenskyy did not campaign with the Democrats. He met with both Dem and Republican senators throughout 2024.

ta9883• 1 year ago

And the story continues. This means that no country will want to buy F16s. If you don't get support they are useless. They are eroding really fast the US shine and trust in the world. This is going to have a massive effect on the US economy, internal consumption will not save it. This is the end of an empire while its rich kings are golfing every weekend on the taxpayer dime using federal and local resources.

I am really amazed there are still almost half of the people able to twist reality to defend what is a direct attack against their own personal interests (they have proven already that other's interests do not matter for them). This sounds like self-flagellation seen from the outside.

samcheng2• 1 year ago

The best explanation I've heard is that this (almost) half of the US population doesn't care if it hurts a bit, as long as it hurts the other half of the US population more.

onlyrealcuzzo2• 1 year ago

Not half - but probably around 30%

lolinder18• 1 year ago

No, that's not it. I'm writing this from rural America in deep Trump territory, and people here are already struggling and have been for years. From their perspective they've been left out of the benefits of the global economy—the big cities and the coasts might be better off, but the middle of the country wants to go back to when they had opportunities and jobs for working class Americans.

They're almost certainly wrong about the medicine, but their diagnosis isn't far off: globalization has not helped them as much as it's hurt them. Cheaper goods don't make up for dying towns.

Edit: Downvoting people who actually understand Trump voters and try to vocalize their needs and perspectives just silences the voices that could be used to shape a better platform for the Democrats next time. You won't win elections by fighting a straw man invented by your echo chamber.

rectang• 1 year ago

Playing only zero-sum games. A positive sum outcome, where both of us benefit, is inconceivable!

baby_souffle• 1 year ago

This is precisely correct.

Briefly, the parts of the map that voted for Trump are largely known as flyover country. To oversimplify things, the people in this area have been neglected and talked down to by some portion of the political apparatus as far back as they can remember.

In some cases, the vote for Trump wasn't meant to be anything more than punitive. To get a rise out of the politically aligned groups that can afford to fly over and - literally - look down on.

bennettnate5• 1 year ago

You mean (almost) a quarter of the population--only 47% of Republicans actually support funding Ukraine less [1]. There are plenty on both sides that disapprove of the foreign policy decisions of the current administration.

I've seen these "people in party x categorically do y" comments a whole lot more recently, and it really feels like a net negative to political discourse. Based on the source I pointed to earlier, there seems to be a plurality of support for at least continuing aid to Ukraine, with only 30% believing we're sending too much. Us vs them mentality won't help people recognize and voice disapproval of decisions within their own party that they don't agree with; we need to concede that people may vote a candidate for a narrow set of reasons (thanks to the two-party system) and have political discourse that encourages disagreeing with certain of your own party's views.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/14/americans...

2OEH8eoCRo05• 1 year ago

My mental model is that it will hurt the S&P500 but benefit the working class.

peder2• 1 year ago

Holy strawman, batman.

the_gastropod2• 1 year ago

There’s certainly no shortage of MAGA folk whose primary motivations are “owning the libs”. But I think there’s plenty of people who just truly believed in the nonsense Trump was selling.

bmitc4• 1 year ago

But that isn't what has happened or is happening.

yodsanklai2• 1 year ago

as long as it hurts the other half of the US population more.

if it was only half of the US population they want to hurt, it's also the rest of world, even the environment.

ohgr• 1 year ago

Don’t forget the F35s we all have.

epistasis17• 1 year ago

I always thought that the American Empire would be dismantled when it elected a leftist steeped in anti-imperialist ideology who wanted to better the world.

Nope, turns out that the American Empire is being dismantled by something else entirely. A subset of the populace that feels jealous of those with more and scared of social change, reacting to try to hurt their fellow country men? A megalomaniac leader who is somehow completely controlled by Russia? It's hard to get the full picture.

pydry15• 1 year ago

It's not being dismantled at all. It's engaged in a sudden retrenchment which has been brought on by years of slow decline.

They even say this - Rubio said that we do not live in a unipolar world any more - a comment which attracted weirdly little notice.

Biden's approach assumed a unipolar world which did not exist. That's why the Ukraine war, from the American imperialist perspective, backfired.

The achilles heel of the American empire was, ironically, always profit and greed. If there is one thing that could be used to persuade America to let its industry rot it is profit and its industrial malaise is largely responsible for the ever-more-obvious decline in hard military power.

sho_hn2• 1 year ago

I think the meta is studying history, and wondering if any slide toward facism has ever been successfully stopped in its tracks without being beaten down in wars.

The two sort-of examples in Western history I can think of are Spain after Franco, and the UK in the 1930s. In Spain a monarch's left-shift was perhaps the deciding and surprising variable, and in the UK it was a powerful civil rights movement.

The US has neither, so I don't know what to expect. The two-party system also makes it very hard to bootstrap meaningful change, since both parties tend to try and chase the Overton window, but only one is really pushing to move it right now.

randomNumber72• 1 year ago

If you wanne see trump as the messenger of bad news, this could still hold.

verandaguy• 1 year ago

The myth of how much harm "leftists" can do/are doing in the US is probably what got you all here. It's another McCarthyist boogeyman, and it's not even being sold well -- a lot of the marketing's just outright lies, and people are eating that up.

hobofan2• 1 year ago

when it elected a leftist steeped in anti-imperialist ideology who wanted to better the world

You are saying this as a hypothetical that never happened, right?

onlyrealcuzzo2• 1 year ago

There's some truth to this, but the bigger issue is that we've been paying A LOT in taxes for A LONG time and because larger and larger portions of that are going to pensions, people are starting to second guess every expense.

The good news - form my perspective - is that the GROWTH in the percentage of the workforce living off pensions is slowing dramatically and is now under REAL growth, which means working folks might feel like life is getting better again.

The reason people have complained that life hasn't gotten better for workers over the last 20 years is because nearly all growth has gone to more people being retired and the 0.1%.

If you keep the same growth, but the number of people retiring slows, there's a little more wiggle room with the pie.

colinprince• 1 year ago

I read recently that Patrimonialism is a good way of describing the current regime

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrimonialism

delusional2• 1 year ago

I really hope this realization makes you reconsider your distrust of "leftists steeped in anti-imperialist ideology", and whatever ideology you carry.

Footkerchief• 1 year ago

Horseshoe theory addresses this.

exe342• 1 year ago

I'm the most cynical person I know, and somehow I spent 38 years thinking the US would always be on top, and despite the smaller scale invasions and the odd assassination, would maintain world peace and fund prosperity for all in terms of fundamental research.

I knew that democracy was fragile and that losing it could happen to all of us - except the US. somehow I believed their separation of powers would always work, that the pretence of freedoms would always be in the interest of Western oligarchs.

it's been a tough 6 weeks for me.

pmarreck2• 1 year ago

somehow completely controlled by Russia

Yeah, about that... Analysis by Grok says "75-85% likelihood Trump is a Putin-compromised asset"

https://x.com/i/grok/share/WQepvCpIJl2EJ0F7tHNbLAhm6

Can you imagine if this were true?

api6• 1 year ago

The idea that the empire has a burden to civilize the world is a common theme in empires throughout history.

It's part honest desire to do something good with the position history has afforded the empire, and part self-serving rationalization, depending on who is doing the talking.

sudoshred2• 1 year ago

It is, in my own opinion, a common fallacy to attribute the outcome as a direct consequence of the associated ideology, when more often than not the ideology is at best a post-hoc rationalization. Material decisions and their natural consequences are far more consistently impactful than any abstract justification for them.

dse19822• 1 year ago

The system is eroded by the people who were brought into the position of being capable to destroy the system: by the system!. In so far: "The purpose of a system is what it does" (Stafford Beer). This should motivate us to ask what properties of the system lead to this and how we might change it.

To me it seems to be a bit like what the Böckenförde-Diktum points to, which is: "The liberal secularized state lives by prerequisites which it cannot guarantee itself."

Basically the modern capitalist secularized society is so void of deep human values and only emphasizing legality and profitability that it brings out a certain kind of elite. An elite which is decoupled from all real human connection and value leading to a thinking like this: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/05/politics/elon-musk-rogan-...

Well and now we have to cope with this. But until we understand that these elites are no accident but logical results of the system we foster, nothing will really change. Or better: until we accept that the reductionist approach to human society and value that this system is based on is flawed and act accordingly everything we do is basically just flex-taping it and waiting for the next escalation.

rchaud3• 1 year ago

leftist steeped in anti-imperialist ideology who wanted to better the world.

This is precisely how half of the US media characterized Barack Obama, who pioneered an even more impersonal style of American imperialism with drone warfare in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Syria.

colechristensen3• 1 year ago

Calling Republicans jealous and afraid is a good way to make yourself feel better but very much misses the character of what's happening. The "I'm a superior son of a bitch" attitude of leftists is gross. Saying "they're just jealous" is something you tell children.

What you're saying here is "we're better than everyone else and everyone else disagrees with my positions because they envy how awesome we are".

827a2• 1 year ago

It always ends up happening how you least expect it, though maybe that expectation is evidence that it was bound to happen via a different road anyway.

At the end of the day, the problem isn't really Trump. The American Empire isn't going to end because its only exporting $300B of military might to the world instead of $600B, when no one else on the planet is scratching $50B (I made these numbers up as an illustration).

It might end because it seems like the media landscape has entirely striated the US population into two groups: One group who genuinely and deeply believes that these actions are necessary for the continuity of the US way of life, and another group who genuinely and deeply believes that these actions will destroy the US way of life. No one makes any good faith effort to understand the other side; even my suggestion that this division is the real threat will get downvoted by HackerNews' overwhelmingly leftist bubble. American political discourse is now dominated by people who cannot allow even a single imperfection in their coat of armor, Trump cannot possibly be wrong about anything, his supporters cannot admit they might not have known the implications of what they voted for, the left cannot possibly be wrong about any of their criticism of him, we're screaming past each other.

Interrogate your inner thought process right now; were you thinking "What side is this person on?"

Its so difficult to get the full picture of understanding of the other side. Trump is rich, egotistical, and doesn't listen to the counsel of others; but Russia is controlling him? Trump wants to reduce the federal debt levels of the United States; but is hellbent on spending anything to deport economically productive illegal immigrants? Trump is silencing the media and kicking them out of the white house; while streaming more than Pokimane, direct from the Oval Office, just rambling for hours a day? Trump supporters were hoodwinked and lied to; yet more than any President america has had for decades, Trump is doing exactly, to the letter, what he said he'd do on the campaign trail; its just that the left didn't believe him back then, because we're so used to Presidents that do nothing. America's children have the worst test scores in the G20, and cost the most to educate; we should continue what we're currently doing? America's healthcare outcomes are among the worst in the G20, and most expensive; we should continue the path we're currently walking?

We're in a crisis of understanding right now. We need more moderates. We need people who understand both sides of the coin, and can have a reasonable conversation about why the past 20 years hasn't worked for most Americans, and also why Trump's policies also won't fix things. My fear, however, is that we won't get that in 2028; instead we're just going to move into our camps further, with a leftist version of Trump v JD Vance, and we'll dig further down the hole of two sides that need each other to solve the problems we face, but refuse to work with one-another.

dtquad• 1 year ago

I always thought that the American Empire would be dismantled when it elected a leftist steeped in anti-imperialist ideology who wanted to better the world.

Most leftist political parties in Scandinavia and the Baltics manages to be be both pro-Palestine, pro-NATO, and pro-Ukraine. They don't seen any contradiction because there aren't any.

Why do some American leftists follow this 3rd worldist neo-Maoist thinking that Western civilization needs to burn down before you can get free healthcare and free college?

belter6• 1 year ago

And the billionaires controlled by Russia: "Musk says he could 'collapse' Ukraine frontline with Starlink decision" - https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-war-trump-zelenskyy-putin...

throwaway4847618• 1 year ago

I don't see this driven so much by ideology as much as musks drug fueled conversations with putin.

rad_gruchalski12• 1 year ago

It’s being dismantled by an immigrant from South Africa with a dude who’s grandparents immigrated about 100 years ago from Germany who has an immigrant wife.

jnaina• 1 year ago

If the current situation continues to unfold logically, it is inevitable that we may witness the secession of several states within our lifetime, to form a Federation of States. Hopefully California + Oregon + Washington State can secede and form the Western Federated States of America (WFSA).

The combined nominal GDP of California, Oregon, and Washington is approximately $4.1 trillion. If these three states were considered a single entity, their combined GDP would rank as the world’s fifth-largest economy.

pyuser5832• 1 year ago

Trumpian foreign policy isn't new. It's an "America First" ideology that goes back to Andrew Jackson. Arguably it goes back to George Washington, and his famous resignation speech.

Playing nice with foreign empires, economic protectionism, domestic military action, an "all or nothing" attitude towards foreign wars, taking chunks of our neighbors back yards, etc.

This isn't new at all. It's exactly what FDR had to overcome to build the American Empire.

paulddraper2• 1 year ago

end of an empire

Imperialism is not good, so this is welcome.

brookst6• 1 year ago

A broken arm is not good, but that doesn’t mean cancer is welcome.

itishappy2• 1 year ago

I'm sure Greenland, Panama, and Gaza will be relieved to hear that.

casenmgreen11• 1 year ago

Taiwan is now going to be seriously worried.

brookst6• 1 year ago

If Taiwan didn’t give up on the US and start making alternative plans on Nov 7th, that was a huge mistake. The US has made it clear that not only is it abandoning traditional allies, it will likely side with any invading force that exercises the “might makes right” principle.

architango2• 1 year ago

Taiwan should be thrilled. Every indication is that this administration is letting Europe fend for itself so it can focus on the Pacific.

brandonmenc3• 1 year ago

Defending Taiwan is - unfortunately - a suicide mission.

I'd rather not engage a hot war with China over it.

We're going to have enough on our plate keeping China out of the Caribbean and our half of the Pacific.

Buckle up.

pphysch• 1 year ago

Certain political factions* in Taiwan should be worried.

The actual Taiwanese people are breathing a sigh of relief that they are increasingly avoiding the "primrose path" of Ukraine: Catastrophic death and destruction based on lies, marginally enriching foreign countries and a corrupt domestic elite.

meowfly• 1 year ago

They are not worried enough. Taiwan, despite the existential risk, spends less than the UK (perc gdp).

Juliate9• 1 year ago

That also means no country will want to buy US (military) equipment.

yimby20012• 1 year ago

No one is using fighter jets in this war. Why? And everyone (who knows) knows this: The anti-air technology is too good to field a jet. It will just get shot down. so the Jets are now useless. so there’s no point in supporting useless jets. And no country is going to buy useless jets. But go on and make this political and not about some physical reality of our world.

epistasis17• 1 year ago

These jets are being used to shoot down the drones that Russia uses to destroy residential homes and civilian infrastructure.

Their loss will be felt both in lives, and in the cold of winter when homes are unheated.

mlyle2• 1 year ago

Jets are massively used in this war-- to launch glide bombs and as roving defense against cruise missile threats. Ukraine is mostly doing the latter.

Yes, the amount of direct CAS and amount of direct air to air engagement is low.

Making an argument that "everyone knows" something without a basic effort to inform yourself is not great.

outer_web8• 1 year ago

They are absolutely using 'fighter jets' for standoff munitions delivery. You probably have heard of Storm Shadow and JDAM-ER.

Even if this wasn't the case, they would still not be useless in that the firearms in your house aren't useless if you aren't actively shooting a home invader.

hkpack2• 1 year ago

That is extremely misguided take.

Fighter jets are extremely valuable, they are not a magic weapon though, but just one of the very important tool for the military to have.

mopsi8• 1 year ago

Photos of a Mirage fighter jet shooting down a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile over Ukraine, published two days ago by the Ukrainian General Staff: https://x.com/GeneralStaffUA/status/1898105929364648055

wegfawefgawefg• 1 year ago

airplanes funded by tax money are not a business for selling product

amelius2• 1 year ago

I am really amazed there are still almost half of the people able to twist reality to defend what is a direct attack against their own personal interests

Sounds like another reality distortion field.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field

belter6• 1 year ago

"We Are Fighting Against a Dictator Backed by a Traitor" - https://youtu.be/j51HZncBvEI

https://www.independants-senat.fr/post/claude-malhuret-situa...

lucasyvas5• 1 year ago

It’s easy to prove that half is wrong as well because all the US’ (past) global friends are screaming at the US trying to save them from driving off the cliff. It’s one thing for the US to want to remake itself - gradual, cooperative plans to reduce engagement on the world stage over multiple years would have been something manageable.

Pulling the cord with such little respect will not be forgotten. The USD will be lucky to still be the reserve currency in 5-10 years time. The rest of the world is likely to sanction the US at this rate. It is violating all of its agreements in bad faith.

blibble6• 1 year ago

The USD will be lucky to still be the reserve currency in 5-10 years time.

if the US regime carries on at the rate it has over the last month I expect it will be gone considerably faster than this

moduspol14• 1 year ago

Actually we just want the war in Ukraine to end. Hope that helps.

There's a lot of bloviating from the chattering class about cozying up to Russia, but I've yet to hear a cogent alternative. And no, I don't think "endlessly funding Ukraine to a forever stalemate" qualifies.

Vilian2• 1 year ago

I don't want to see Ukrainian genocide by Russia, hope that help

ProcNetDev3• 1 year ago

You want the war to end so that Russians can do what they did to Bucha a thousand more times!

You want the war to end so that Poland, Japan, Taiwan and Australia no longer trust that the US will help them and develop their own nuclear weapons!

itishappy2• 1 year ago

Why just this war? What's Israel's cogent plan?

BrawnyBadger53• 1 year ago

Because conflict ended for good when crimea was annexed...

af784• 1 year ago

The Ukrainians want this war to end, too. The difference is that they want to survive as a nation, so how the war ends matters.

Plus if Russia wins, its appetite will only grow, and another war is just a matter of time.

gherkinnn• 1 year ago

If Ukraine stops the fight they cease to be a sovereign nation. If Russia stops they loose face. The former is existential, the latter is not. Why is this so hard to understand?

Any ceasefire or peace without security guarantees will be used by Russia to rearm and try again in a few years time. It will be a continuation of the conflict that started in 2014. That, too, isn't hard to understand.

kilotaras• 1 year ago

I believe a big crux is in definition of "war ended".

You (and Donald Trump) seem to be using "Ukraine and Russia stop shooting at each other right now", while Ukraine operates more under "Russia stops shooting at us for the foreseeable future, 20 years at least." Russia has previously broken a number of ceasefires and written agreements (including the infamous Budapest memorandum) and so Ukraine is not super trusting to agreements not backed by anything.

bambax5• 1 year ago

The alternative is to destroy Russia. Destroy its economy, kill their soldiers until there isn't one left standing, ravage its cities. Set fire to its oil fields. Sink its ships. It's a good alternative. A pleasant sight and a nice thing to look forward to.

davikr2• 1 year ago

If you don't get support they are useless.

Yes, but any country selling military hardware would do the same if it turned coats in a conflict.

Beijinger• 1 year ago

"If you don't get support they are useless"

Is this really the case or only a long term problem? The F-35 is a totally different story.

mrtksn2• 1 year ago

I fully expect that in some near future the civilian infrastructure also will be de-coupled from USA in the name of national security by other nations.

At this very moment, Apple and Google have the ability to disable communications for billions of people. They can make computers and phones totally unusable. Not just some features but everything.

EU was trying to legislate around this risk by forcing companies to bring data on EU soil and open their platform to alternative providers. They always tried to be gentle with it as companies will claim that they are taken advantage of but as the things unfold at this pace I'm pretty sure that it EU and probably the rest of the world will be very heavy handed the moment there's an instance of US president or US tech oligarch decides to shut down group of people from their devices to teach them a lesson or to compel them into something like they did with military systems in Ukraine. I was afraid for years that people will be insulated into groups and the global community will be destroyed and now I feel like its happening.

dachris• 1 year ago

I've thought about this for some time now, and am surprised I haven't seen this voiced more often.

The way almost all societies have allowed themselves to be completely dependent on a few providers is mind-boggling.

Someone else 10,000 miles away has the kill switch for your phone, your credit card, your brokerage account, your TV, likely your HVAC if you're into home automation, maybe your car.

austin-cheney• 1 year ago

I am really amazed there are still almost half of the people able to twist reality to defend…

Most people everywhere generally believe what their social reference group tells them to believe. Human nature, I guess.

rchaud3• 1 year ago

People believe what they want to believe. When reality turns out to not match their expectation, they quietly drop out of the conversation, without admitting they misjudged things.

Best example of that is to take a look at HN in 2022 when Musk announced the Twitter takeover. A good half of the comments were quoting Voltaire and Snowden and applauding Musk for 'protecting free speech'. The other half saw it for what it was. When Musk stories come up now, there is no one still pushing the free speech angle.

bmitc4• 1 year ago

It's the Internet.

CalRobert• 1 year ago

Russia might buy some

ericjmorey5• 1 year ago

A substantially sized loud minority in the US is fully committed to a death cult of personality. The rest of us are suffering and unprepared for this.

bmitc4• 1 year ago

What about all the "liberals", including many on this site, that not only bought into but actively promoted the cult of personality around Musk, Tesla, and SpaceX? Musk has always been a charlatan, and the majority of this very site bought into it.

addicted• 1 year ago

How can any reasonable national leader justify building their military on American systems anymore?

Especially now that the U.S. government is also talking about not living up to its NATO obligations.

This is not gonna hurt the rest of the world. Defense is where the U.S. exports a lot. So cutting back on U.S. weaponry will only help other nations.

The same is true of Tech. Currently the tech industry is global, but expect it to become increasingly national. Considering this is one of the biggest and fastest growing industries in the U.S. and one of its biggest exports, again, this is only gonna hurt thenUS economy.

And the US’s dominance in this space is so high the rest of the world will simply push for open source at no loss to their own economies, since it’s only the US’s profit making will be hurt.

rvnx2• 1 year ago

Even further, the US position is getting tougher.

Now there are new ideas getting pushed (through influencers like Musk): that Ukraine "should be sanctioned", that Ukraine "should give their minerals to the US", that Ukraine "should give up their lands", that Zelensky "should resign" and finally that "US should leave NATO".

With such allies, you don't really need enemies.

bayindirh3• 1 year ago

On tech side, personally I started to move my servers and personal infra to Europe, both physically and legally.

I'll not be able to leave some companies outright, but I'll be taking backups and reducing my reliance fast.

gip6• 1 year ago

Totally agree that Trump is trading long-term dominance for short-term gains.

I think that in a few months, we will see the U.S. economy doing very well and somehow rebuilding its industrial base. In the long term, U.S. influence and wealth will make up a much smaller share of the world’s wealth than it does today.

ty68532• 1 year ago

This is an inherent property of closed source proprietary weapons. Which is why gun owners like stuff like the gen3 glock and ar-15 as everyone knows how to make the parts and the open source blueprints are put into manufacture by a gazillion companies to the point PSA shitwagon can compete with a Colt and interchange most the parts.

Maybe Europe should open source a fighter jet and let the world compete on how they'll manufacture it.

blibble6• 1 year ago

risk of war going hot aside, the long term effect of this is fantastic for the rest of the world's industries

AWS, GCP and Azure looked unbeatable a month ago

but today, if you're a government official in the UK, Poland or Germany, would you be recommending AWS as your cloud provider?

absolutely not

they now have massive geopolitical risks associated with them due to being under the control of the increasingly unstable and authoritarian US regime that will sacrifice 80 years of foreign policy and soft power for a soundbite on fox news

riehwvfbk13• 1 year ago

How do they justify buying US war tech? By understanding what the US will do to their country if they don't buy it, and figuring out how to sugar coat this to their populace.

throw__away73912• 1 year ago

I think the administration is gambling on being able to consolidate global power before anyone is going to have a chance to build anything. Europe is completely reliant on the US and US technology for defense right now, these systems took decades and trillions of dollars to build and refine, and an 800 billion EUR investment does not magically create a military industrial complex overnight. Decades ago in my early career I briefly worked on some logistics software for the Joint Strike Fighter project and had some contact with a couple of the army of contractors working on the project. The scale and complexity of this effort blows away anything else I've ever seen in my career, which includes a number of multi-billion dollar infrastructure and nuclear power projects.

Trump talks about invading Canada or Greenland and people act like it is a joke. I don't think it is.

The US is in a position to completely dictate to Europe what they will or won't do, using Russia as a proxy for now. We are 48 days in. A couple of weeks ago I replied to someone suggesting the US could provide weapons to Russia with disbelief. I no longer consider that an impossible scenario. Europe stops buying F35s? Trump tells Europe that if they don't buy them he's going to sell them to Russia. I mean that's a relatively tame response compared to the options on the table.

Right now the only chance for Europe is to stop this madness in the US. We have this "take it down" act, the executive order to produce a report advising whether or not to declare martial law, the January 6th pardon of the Proud Boys who are now effectively a paramilitary force of thousands waiting for Trump to deploy. These are all familiar elements in history and I think we are in for a bloody, bloody summer. I think we're going to see government forces opening fire on protesters, martial law declared, and the implementation of Chinese style suppression and crackdown on dissent online. Maybe attempts to strip US citizens of their citizenship and "deport" them for good measure, anything to try to sow fear into average people to not step out of line. If the administration is successful in quashing the opposition and getting everyone to go back to work, Europe could easily next on the chopping block. Remember all the things Bannon said about the EU during the first administration.

swat535• 1 year ago

No one should have placed their trust in the U.S to begin with.

Let's not forget that American history is riddled with interventionist failures, from Afghanistan to Vietnam, and CIA-backed operations that destabilized the Middle East and Africa, leaving behind suffering and chaos.

Meanwhile, American corporations have shown blatant disregard for local laws, privacy, and security while exploiting loopholes to dodge taxes, further eroding global trust. Europe literally had to fine them millions, just to get them to start paying _minimum_ attention..

The recent instability in American and the division between its own citizens has exacerbated the issue and now with Trump, I believe it has reach new heights, even causing conflict with its (arguably) closest ally and loving neighbor: Canada.

As a Canadian, it saddens me to write this, because I have nothing but love for American people.

xnx5• 1 year ago

There is no sophisticated chess game being played here. These people are stupid as they are vindictive. No one in the US will benefit from this.

wakawaka284• 1 year ago

Anyone you buy equipment from can withdraw support. The US would only withdraw support if you turn against them, same as any other country selling such equipment.

bayindirh3• 1 year ago

This is one of the peak "move fast, break things" moments for the US. However, people warned about Chesterton's fences for years...

I think we have passed the Rubicon for quite some time. There's no turning back now. The equilibrium will be found in another configuration.

hsuduebc22• 1 year ago

What's truly eroding trust is the voting system. A system that places so much power in a single individual with complete immunity exposes its vulnerabilities-especially in a time when people can be manipulated so effectively. To be honest, I see the lack of justice as the biggest problem. If the highest courts in the U.S. are essentially political institutions, shaped by those in power rather than acting as neutral arbiters of justice, that seems absurd to me. It feels like you can basically do whatever you want. And the lifetime mandate? That's a joke. As a European, I'm sorry for shitting on Europeans. It's far from ideal here, but I'm finally starting to appreciate what we have. Let's hope this would not spread.

Valodim• 1 year ago

It didn't used to be "complete immunity", that's part of the problem

esalman2• 1 year ago

Lack of trust on voting system has been brewing for a while. The Democratic establishment has successfully and unsuccessfully tried to shoehorn choice candidates last few election cycles. While republican candidates have been questionable, there's no denying that they went with whoever the voters wanted.

yannis• 1 year ago

no country will want to buy F16s

US needs to diversify and have an industrial policy. It also needs to rethink capitalism. Maybe new capitalism with US characteristics and more humanism thrown in. As to the defense industry it needs to shrink and be part of the industrial policy, not depend on warmongering to exist. You can have peace and a defiance industry without wars.

petre• 1 year ago

We will buy tge Dassault Rafale, thank you.

billmcneale• 1 year ago

they have proven already that other's interests do not matter for them

I disagree. Their interests matter greatly to them, they are just totally unequipped to understand who, and what, they are voting for.

pessimizer• 1 year ago

This is the end of an empire

Empires are not good.

I am really amazed there are still almost half of the people able to twist reality to defend what is a direct attack against their own personal interests

Self-interest is a middle-class religion. I think that a lot of Americans think that what we are doing is morally wrong. I also think that the idea that everybody else is going to shun our military exports over ditching Ukraine is absolutely hilarious. Ukraine isn't paying for any of this, they don't even count as a customer. Everybody has been free at all times to buy from the UK, France, and Germany, and if they don't see the difference between themselves and Ukraine, they should make decisions about their futures accordingly.

I might remind them in passing that borrowing money from Germany to buy weapons from Germany was what brought Greece's economy down. Also I'd remind them, for what it's worth, that again they're partnering with Germany or France or the UK to invade Russia for unintelligible reasons.

rt276ah• 1 year ago

they're partnering with Germany or France or the UK to invade Russia

Can we stop this nonsense on both sides? Russia does not want to invade NATO countries, and for sure Germany, France and the UK do not want to invade Russia.

Britain is hawkish because they love continental powers fighting against each other and pulling the strings. They will not send their 50,000 soldiers to Moscow.

xnx5• 1 year ago

A strong economy only exists with a strong democracy. Billionaires thought this administration would be good for them, but they are just as stupid as anyone.

drysine3• 1 year ago

It's not the first time it happens. For example, in 2006 the US stopped supplying spare parts to F-16s it sold to Venezuela.[0] Oddly, other countries kept buying F-16s.

Or think about Boeing and Airbus stopping servicing the planes they sold to Russia. Other countries are still buying from them as if nothing happened.

[0] https://www.foxnews.com/story/venezuela-threatens-to-sell-f-...

bad_user4• 1 year ago

The difference is that now European countries, and other (former?) US allies are starting to see the US as a threat. With people like Trump in power, the chance of a military conflict between the EU and the US is now non-zero, so what's on everyone's mind going forward will be independence from US tech. Maybe you haven't seen European news and commentary.

US's republicans still don't grasp what a diplomatic mess Trump is causing, which will surely affect all trade. Actually, I'm expecting consequences for the entire US tech sector, not just the defence sector.

tlogan• 1 year ago

Buying high-tech American weapons comes with an implicit condition: they can only be used with U.S. approval.

The U.S. has long leveraged this strategy to control governments. Do you think Saudi Arabia could use its American-made jets to attack Israel?

Now, Trump is pressuring Ukraine to start negotiation under these terms:

1. Allowing parts of Ukraine to be annexed,

2. Permanently blocking NATO membership, and

3. Signing a “mineral deal” to sell resources to the U.S. at cut-rate prices.

chiefalchemist2• 1 year ago

Not being troll-y or intentionally obtuse but I have to ask: when has The Military Industrial Complex acted in my / our best interest?

Sure there’s plenty about US policy and actions that have been normalized, but that doesn’t mean they should have been adopted. It doesn’t mean those things should persist without thought or challenge. Even going about that the wrong way is more productive

Yes, The System is fragile (as opposed to antifragile). But then let’s discuss that, not insist on the persistence of fragile-ness.

anabab2• 1 year ago

when has The Military Industrial Complex acted in my / our best interest?

[Not a US citizen/resident; never worked in MIC-related area]

a). MIC is an industrial sector creating jobs, doing some R&D (which can trickle down into the civilian sector) and bringing hundreds of billions they do in exports into country; all of those seem benefitial for the overall economy. Of course those can be achieved in non-military-related areas, but so far there was a working machine - and a wrench is already thrown into the gears.

b). The last three years have shown that large-scale wars are still on the table and having a working and oiled MIC is much better than having a degraded one.

6SixTy• 1 year ago

Doesn't matter that countries doesn't want F16s, pretty much any US component inside these systems means that they require US approval for the whole thing. Saab Gripens use a Swedish built version of a US powerplant, which allowed the US to deny sales of the Gripen to Colombia.

bbqfog• 1 year ago

It’s in my personal interest to not spread war and weapons throughout the world. We should cut off all weapons exports.

ipv6ipv42• 1 year ago

I am really amazed there are still almost half of the people able to twist reality to defend what is a direct attack against their own personal interests (they have proven already that other's interests do not matter for them). This sounds like self-flagellation seen from the outside.

They aren't thinking, really. If you look at the online comments from people who support these actions, you'll notice these characteristics: they are usually listing the same talking points, using the exact same collection of key words or "facts" (even in different languages, across different cultures) often strung together like chants, have a conspiratorial notion of a hidden puppeteer directing events or people they disapprove of, conversely they often have a messianic belief in their chosen prophet, and they are usually inexplicably very angry.

You will also notice that the vast majority of them very rapidly, and across cultural boundaries, start parroting the latest talking points. Talking points that didn't exist days before and weren't on anyone's minds.

It's a form of mass hysteria.

brokenmachine9• 1 year ago

Bots. It's bots.

Some idiots, but mostly bots.

jpgvm• 1 year ago

... and just like that, America cedes arms export leadership.

China will laugh all the way to the bank.

esalman2• 1 year ago

If US shine and trust is based on proliferation of war then it probably deserves to erode.

yodsanklai2• 1 year ago

I am really amazed there are still almost half of the people able to twist reality to defend what is a direct attack against their own personal interests

Sometimes people are more interested in inflicting pain to others than to improve their own situation.

vonnik• 1 year ago

The main victim of this order is the US defense industry.

What Ukrainians need most are the low-cost drones made of commercial parts from Asia which have made it hard for the Russians to fire artillery and supply the front. To produce these drones, they need cash. The Europeans have mastered the art of sending cash to Ukrainian vendors that serve actual battlefront needs, and doing so under strict supervision to prevent fraud. Europe can fill the gap the Us is leaving in military aid if they spend their cash right.

For the last two years, I have supported a US non-profit sending non-lethal aid to Ukraine, my CB if it used for drone defense and EW.

https://ukrainedefensefund.org/

Cheap is a technological frontier. If you operate on that frontier, you are able to trade less expensive pieces for more expensive pieces, pawns for queens. This is the cost-exchange ratio. All other things being equal, the country that best lowers the cost basis of its materiel will win a war of attrition; ie the other side exhausts its resources first. The US does not operate on the frontier of cheap because of bad incentives, namely cost-plus procurement.

betteryourweb• 1 year ago

this is the best news ever... all these other countries keep up conflict to keep the bankers happy while they exploit our resiurces for corrupt politicians and business men... Everyone crying about the economy, but our economy is already shit and extending out these corrupt ppl corrupt directives will only keep us (on the private side) in economic turmoil... We've been in perpetual conflict over 2 decades... It's time to focus on us...

nullstyle• 1 year ago

If someone thinks that "We've been in perpetual conflict" includes the support being to given to ukraine, in which we send them cluster munitions that we would otherwise have to pay to dismantle while risking virtually zero american armed service member lives, they need to recalibrate their senses because they're not doing a good job.

The Ukrainian people deserve sovereignty, full stop. If someone believes in traditional American values, (e.g. life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) they should support the fight against russian aggression, and IMO the flimsy and poor arguments being made about focusing on our economy reek of dishonesty when someone thinks about how integrated the US economy is with the world's.

philwelch5• 1 year ago

Did Ukraine buy any F-16’s? No. They’ve benefitted from the generosity of the United States since 2017, and thanks in large part to that generosity they succeeded in the defense of Kyiv in 2022. Now it’s 2025 and the war has been stalemated for a couple of years. Does the United States have an open-ended obligation to continue supporting, at its own expense, yet another forever war on the other side of the world?

The United States is still being taken for granted. And I have to laugh at the implication that the American economy will be ruined by the effect on the American arms industry when almost every American ally was neglecting their own military, instead taking American security guarantees for granted.

lostdog6• 1 year ago

Interesting how the exact phrases "forever war," "open-ended obligation," and "taken for granted" keep coming up. Always in comments that lack critical thought or explanation, and never support these talking points and just take them as a given.

It's an attempt to pretend that real USA screwups, like Vietnam and Iraq II, are at all similar to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. So, philwelch, please compare and contrast. Without just echoing what you've heard, what are the pros and cons of supporting Ukraine in fighting off Russia?

ETA: Also "on the hook." As though Ukraine is forcing us to give them money?

darkhorn3• 1 year ago

Then why USA was defending those countries in first place? Only for goodwill?

tguvot5• 1 year ago

F-16 arrived from Netherlands as USA was unwilling to supply them.

About defense of Kyiv, it has nothing to do with usa generosity and everything to do with creativity and a lot of luck. i'll suggest to read about how it was managed. there is a 50 pager released by uk miliary on this topic

abe_m• 1 year ago

I think Ukraine is a bit unique in how they got the jets. Since they were given the jets during a war, there wasn't much negotiation involved, relative to a country trying to buy plane in peace-time.

In normal peace-time procurement, there is usually significant locally made content required, plus much deeper training. I'd suspect that countries who acquire arms in that way are much more able to continue without US support.

When Iran was still in the US good graces, they bought a bunch of F14s. After their 1979 revolution, they kept operating their F14s. The US actually retired and destroyed all their F14s during the retirement to prevent spares from finding their way to Iran.

cbmuser• 1 year ago

This means that no country will want to buy F16s.

This means that no country will buy any US-supplied military equipment.

Trump has destroyed the trust in the US defense sector for years to come.

Absolutely irresponsible action.

timewizard• 1 year ago

the US shine

Oh no! We lost our "shine" because we aren't the premier weapons dealer on the planet anymore!

a massive effect on the US economy

You see the problem. You just ignore it. You pretend it's a secret virtue.

end of an empire

Good. I'm absolutely tired of being a citizen of an "empire." Take your dusty imperialism and go away; please, your warmongering ways absolutely disgust me.

a direct attack against their own personal interests

It's not. You want it to be for propaganda purposes. See what I mean about living in an empire? This is completely churlish and gross.

CapricornNoble5• 1 year ago

This means that no country will want to buy F16s.

This is just HNers being late to the party.

Back in the 1990s, the US blocked sale of F-16s to Indonesia due to human rights concerns (eventually worked out).[0] Thailand has F-16s but more recently switched procurement to Swedish Gripens, partly to avoid reliance on a single combat aircraft supplier. Thailand also does bilateral training with PLAAF (Chinese Air Force), and their F-16s are apparently barred from participating. [1] There are rumors Egypt is switching from F-16s to Chinese J-10s, largely because the US refuses to sell Egypt modernizations and air-to-air missiles that would make them competitive against the Israeli Air Force.[2] The move away from the US as a combat aircraft supplier has been building steam for decades now. In the past there simply weren't many options competitive with the F-16 (both affordable and capable), but that's not the case in 2025.

This is going to have a massive effect on the US economy, internal consumption will not save it.

I guess this really is the question: what is the expected overall quality of life for the average American when our continent-sized economy is largely functioning under conditions of autarky? The US's imports and exports are lower in 2023 than they were in 1913. Even in 1913 the US had the world's largest GDP (but not GDP/capita, was still much lower than the UK's at the time).

[0] https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA441694.pdf

[1] https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/3279377/why-t...

[2] https://fmso.tradoc.army.mil/2024/egypt-is-rumored-to-have-s...

theahura• 1 year ago

Obligatory: https://open.substack.com/pub/theahura/p/the-five-year-old-t...

Trump is constantly failing the five year old test. A child could tell you that this is the wrong thing to do.

grej• 1 year ago

European defence companies are about to see the biggest demand boom of our lifetime.

pydry15• 1 year ago

The Soviet arms industry experienced a similar boom in the 1980s due to an eye wateringly expensive arms race with America.

Spoiler alert: it did not end well for them.

Putin is setting another trap.

tim33320• 1 year ago

I'm not sure how this plays out as Putin setting a trap? This is probably going to be a bit expensive for European taxpayers, myself included, but we'll get by.

Russia on the other hand may have issues similar to the 80s/90s if we get serious with sanctions on shipping oil.

bigyabai2• 1 year ago

I think you misunderstand why exactly the USSR's weapon production hurt them. There were a number of circumstances that were specific to the Soviets that made their decisions uniquely self-destructive:

1. They already had an enormous weapon stockpile from the 60s and 70s that was becoming rapidly outdated, and was manufactured with few basically no limit on the unit count being made, resulting in tens-of-thousands of surplus weapons being funded by the state and the economy bending to support an oversized MIC.

2. Soviet Russia had a struggling economy in the 60s and 70s, and an almost nonfunctional one in the 80s. The idea of developing new digital weapons was basically trashed, and the "next generation" Soviet weaponry became the surplus analog stuff they stockpiled. Research and prototyping ground to a halt as Russia lost self-sufficiency on the technology that mattered.

3. The Soviet-Afghanistan war weakened the USSR's traditional force composition to the point that it was doubtful they could fight a traditional war, even with a relatively untrained adversary. Thousands of Soviet soldiers died to prove that Russia's doctrine wasn't going to win a pitched battle against a well-funded enemy.

Europe already avoided over-arming themselves like the USSR, they have a modernized economy, and they aren't fighting proxy wars against forces they can't beat. As an American citizen I'm more concerned with our own country resting on it's laurels, struggling to modernize it's supply chain and threatening to fight wars in the Levant with no clear goal.

oezi8• 1 year ago

Trump wants to cut the military as well, so it will be double disastrous for the US military complex.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/13/defense-stocks-drop-after-tr...

cmrdporcupine3• 1 year ago

Rheinmetall has already been going absolutely bonkers on the stock market.

amelius2• 1 year ago

Wouldn't be surprised if Trump bought shares.

MrDresden2• 1 year ago

Most of them have had double digits growth in their stock price over the last few days[0]:

"Britain’s BAE Systems rose by 15% on Monday, Germany’s Rheinmetall gained 14%, France’s Thales increased 16% and Italy’s Leonardo was also up 16%. In London the surge in defence related shares helped to push the FTSE 100 to a new record high"

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/mar/03/european-de...

Chance-Device11• 1 year ago

I think I’ll use this thread to make a prediction.

At the end of Trump’s term:

- Europe will still be using F-16s and F-35s

- The US will still be in NATO, and will still be actively committed to the alliance

- European defense spending will be massively higher, with manufacturing and supply chains that are far less easily disrupted

- The US forces deployed to Europe will still be there, but will be bolstered by more European troops

- Russia will have maintained its status as simultaneously a threat and a non-threat

- Whatever the outcome in Ukraine, suddenly, nobody will care. The media won’t talk about it, people will have largely forgotten, and some other controversy or distraction will be the story of the day.

All of which will nicely serve the broader long term interests of the United States.

As it always is, no matter who is in the White House.

kragen10• 1 year ago

Do you have reasoning to support this improbable conjunction, or are you just seeking to bet money?

Chance-Device11• 1 year ago

The strategic interests of the US stay the same. All of this is posturing which will only improve the alliance which the US leads. Carrot or stick, this president or that president, certain things don’t change. All that changes is the implementation.

silvestrov3• 1 year ago

- The US will still be in NATO, and will still be actively committed to the alliance

This is already gone: "US ‘to cease all future military exercises in Europe’" https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/2025/03/08/us-to-cea...

Chance-Device11• 1 year ago

I wasn’t aware that Trumps term had ended after only three months.

rtp4me• 1 year ago

Honestly, my gut feeling tells me the same. Time will tell...

bitcurious• 1 year ago

One more prediction: a number of our allies will test domestically built nuclear weapons, including Germany, Poland, and South Korea.

Chance-Device11• 1 year ago

Unlikely. Nuclear independence threatens US hegemony. It won’t be allowed to happen. The US wants Europe stronger, not independent.

gip6• 1 year ago

Probably accurate for the coming 4 years.

In the middle to long term though, Europe should and will decouple from the US in defense and tech. US influence will be reduced. European almost made a fatal mistake with Galileo that the US wanted to kill [0] and I don't think they will make that mistake again. F-35, Starlink, air defense will be built by European companies.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)

perlgeek4• 1 year ago

- Whatever the outcome in Ukraine, suddenly, nobody will care. The media won’t talk about it, people will have largely forgotten, and some other controversy or distraction will be the story of the day.

I'm sure the Ukrainians will care, and most of us in Europe will too.

Chance-Device11• 1 year ago

I certainly agree that the Ukrainians will care about it very much, but you, unless you are in an Eastern European country, most likely will not.

The reason that you care right now is because it is in US interests that you care. As soon as that changes, you won’t. You’ll be too busy caring about something else.

hollywood_court• 1 year ago

Congratulations to Russia for winning the Cold War I guess.

simion3144• 1 year ago

I remember when Europe was launching stuff in space and USA americans were calling this stupid and wasteful, they demanded Europe give th money to Elon

lucasyvas5• 1 year ago

I find some of the comments I’ve read today in this thread somewhat enlightening - there is intelligent conversation about the capabilities of the American hardware and its software.

The sophistication of the F-35 cannot be debated. But the rest of the world doesn’t trust the US anymore, so it doesn’t matter how good it is - people would gladly explore a worse product because they see it as lower risk.

That’s the reality of where America is at the moment. There are many Americans on Hacker News (if not the majority) and naturally the merits of the product that America produces are being discussed, and its superiority is front and center.

This viewpoint is not relevant to the rest of the world. We don’t want the US’ stuff anymore and the only thing that can save that relationship is full software control. If America wants to make sales it needs to adjust to that expectation, or buyers are going elsewhere.

The argument is missing the forest for the trees - the relationship is more important than the product itself. The sooner that is acknowledged the more likely a political course correction is possible. Otherwise, sure, you might see a few short term F-35 sales conclude. But the purchasing will stop as soon as it can.

titzer3• 1 year ago

It's only been 2 months. America in free fall.

childintime• 1 year ago

Middle finger politics at work, brought about and cheered on by evangelical christians.

aa-jv• 1 year ago

The world has been getting progressively more and more sick of America's shit since March, 2003.

galleywest200• 1 year ago

and its superiority is front and center.

The vast majority of the comments I am reading on this site are not stating this. The vast majority, even the Americans, are agreeing that this is a bad decision. Unsure where you got this from.

lucasyvas5• 1 year ago

Specifically the F-35, as that phrasing is ambiguous within the context I wrote it.

d4vlx• 1 year ago

I think he is referring to the F-35 only here. On military discussion forums it is the consensus that the F-35 is superior to everything else out there with the only exception being that the F-22 has superior air to air combat capabilities.

throwaway4847618• 1 year ago

The F35 was an enormously expensive program only possible by increasing the production run through sales to partners/allies. It was predicated on a defense model currently burning down.

jm4• 1 year ago

Absolutely. This isn’t just about the F16 and F35 either. It effectively ends or drastically changes the upcoming NGAD before they even get started. Any previous sales projections are irrelevant in a world where the USA has essentially remotely disabled an ally’s fighter jets without cause. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have to redesign major components of the NGAD in light of a budget that looks drastically different than it did a month ago.

bamboozled6• 1 year ago

It's getting the point where people are actively avoiding USA made goods as a protest. To tell you the truth, it's not as hard to do as avoiding Chinese made goods so I think America is going to lose out massively. Right now as it stands today, I feel a lot less guilty about buying Chinese than I have in the past. Not because China is "better" but because supporting the current regime feels just as not, if not more morally bankrupt.

Sure "tech" is hard to avoid but all the rest is still a massive loss for US companies and I suppose we'll see Europe and Asia working even hard to avoid American tech dependency now.

If political change is going to happen swiftly back to something more sane, it's going to be because of poor economic policy, and right now, that's looking like a given.

Uupis• 1 year ago

Yeah, I was surprised to find myself concluding that "tech" is, to me, quite literally the only hiccup.

bdelmas2• 1 year ago

Just 2 points missing.

1. The sale of planes like the F-35 is not just about the plane. It’s about the ability to be a nation with nuclear power by “renting” the US nuclear missile it can launch. People bought it mainly for that. The pilot and YouTuber ATE Chuet did a video talking about this if you want to dive into it.

2. The plane in itself is not as capable as say the Rafale. They tried to do way too many things with it. The vertical takeoff capability in particular made the plane worst in every other aspect and its own design is very questionable. A Dassault engineer talks about it in this video [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/AVUn0e9Ic2o?si=1mTiFpZLCvRRlrIU

alephnerd4• 1 year ago

The Dassault Rafale and F35 are meant for two different types of missions, and can't be viewed as competitors.

Also F35s don't need to be ALIS enabled. Israel's Adir version of the F35 uses a separate set of parts and systems co-developed with France and India.

Realistically, I don't see Ukraine getting the Dassault Rafale in the near future. They'll probably go with either the Gripen due to it's lower cost or the Eurofighter due to Germany's strong relations with Ukraine.

I also wouldn't rule out the potential of Ukraine potentially rolling out it's own jet fighter program - much of China's jet program owes it's origins to Ukrainian firms in the 2010s

garyfirestorm• 1 year ago

I remember a similar analogy. No matter how hard you encrypt your device - if the border police holds a hammer to your head and forces you to unlock your phone, it’s as good as no encryption.

maxnevermind• 1 year ago

We don’t want the US’ stuff anymore

I wonder why this sentiment is not reflected in stock prices. It seems like major defense companies are close to ATH and keep growing. Not trying to argue, just wonder what is the reason for it.

etherealG• 1 year ago

Because stock prices and the people's interests they reflect only care about immediate returns that allow investors to then dump those returns into the next immediate returning investment again, to maximize return with no consideration for the overall health of the system they operate in. Capitalism. Long term health of the stock systems. Long term health of the underlying value they reflect. Nothing long term matters in a stock buy at all.

Why do you even ask this question, did the answer really not seem obvious, or was it rhetorical?

ajmurmann2• 1 year ago

I think it's a combination of the market not believing the reality of the unprecedented policy shift and things only getting clearer the last ~2 weeks. If you look at that time frame, US defense stock is definitely suffering: https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/industrials/aerospace-defe... especially if you compare this to Korean (https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/KDEF/) or European defense stock (https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/EUAD/ and https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RNMBY/ for a longer perspective since EUAD is new). A large portion of that money could have gone to the US defense sector, but that's not an option anymore.

tankenmate• 1 year ago

If you look at European arms manufacturers you'll see that their stock prices have gone up substantially (take Rheinmetall for example, up 169% YoY). But always remember, the stock price can be wrong, and when a downward correction comes to disabuse optimism it tends to be painful.

TrapLord_Rhodo2• 1 year ago

Because nothing the OP stated is true... The difference between a superior product in war is the difference between winning and losing, not a cost control mechanism. a f35 would destroy a fleet of other aircraft, VTOL land on an aircraft carrier, and be launching a second volley before any other aircraft even had radar signature of the f35.

We don’t want the US’ stuff anymore and the only thing that can save that relationship is full software control.

This is not how this works... You do have full software control when doing deals of this size. However, that does not mean that you have to provide software updates. The program in question is about find the different frequency's the russians are using so the f-16 can continue it's jamming capabilities. This is not "Full source control" It's whether the US should be using US Cyber Assets to be manually update the frequency's detected.

wuschel• 1 year ago

While this might be the thinking of many critical citizens, I would hope that this translates into political and governmental action. This is unfortunately not an automatism.

One problem remains if politics decide to scrap the F-35 deal in Germany:

While the Eurofighter was an alternative to the F-35, it is not certified to carry tactical nuclear weapons. The phased-out Tornado was the go to platform for this particular scenario.

Source: German Luftwaffe personel

syntex• 1 year ago

I wonder why Poland is still buying F35 and other European countries.

preisschild2• 1 year ago

Because it's the only mass-produced (and thus relatively cheap) 5th Gen fighter that gives you a lot of advantages over 4th Gen and it will likely take at least a decade before mass-produced EUropean alternatives are available.

But yeah, actual experts with access to hardware should validate if there is a kill switch and if replacement parts / weapons could be reverse engineered before buying any more.

fpoling• 1 year ago

Poland was already pissed off with US arm industry under Biden with slow deliveries of US weapons and started to order more and more from South Korea. I guess it will only accelerate.

iamsanteri• 1 year ago

Hahahaha, do they even know what they are doing to their US hegemony?! This kind of short-term thinking leads to the US enemies laughing all their way into the bank. They don‘t even understand what they‘re losing here. If they don’t try to path-correct very soon this is the beginning of a gradual decline. Is the current U.S. leadership really that afraid? There is no reason to act like this otherwise. Or this is some very very incredibly smart way of ”peace through strength”. Go figure and good luck all.

yimby20012• 1 year ago

They aren’t even useful the anti-air is too good for either side to use jets

outer_web8• 1 year ago

Incorrect. The explanation is above.

fvrther• 1 year ago

France sending jets while the U.S. waves the white flag? Looks like the surrender baton just got passed westward.

nxm5• 1 year ago

Sigh… a few jets can’t compare to level of aid American tax payer has given the past few years. More than OK with France finally doing something.

Etheryte2• 1 year ago

Europe has given more aid to Ukraine in total numbers than America if I'm not mistaken? So I'm not really sure if I see what you mean.

altacc• 1 year ago

The US' contribution has been incredibly significant and the war would have gone very differently without US support but the idea that the US has contributed most money is false and driven by hubris.

There's various ways of tracking support and by many metrics there are European countries that have given more than the US once you account for population & GDP. It gets more complicated for EU members as the EU has given financial support, so the largest funders of the EU, like France, have paid proportionally more via the EU than directly.

https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-s... https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/these-co...

Also worth remembering that 70% of that aid from the US never left the US and was spent on procuring weapons from the US.

https://econofact.org/factbrief/does-most-u-s-aid-to-ukraine...

insane_dreamer2• 1 year ago

that's misinformation

brokenmachine9• 1 year ago

The "aid" that the US has given mostly helps the US get rid of their older weapons that they would have to pay to dispose of, and that "aid" money stays in the US, helping US industries and making US jobs.

But I wouldn't expect a businessman the calibre of Trump, who has managed to bankrupt multiple casinos, to understand any of that.

Maybe more tariffs will help the American tax payers.

Springtime2• 1 year ago

The article is written to give the reader the impression only the US can reprogram the jamming system and the comments seem to mostly be taking it at face value.

In the very Forbes article the OP's article cites it links to info about this F-16 reprogramming effort[1], showing it was collaboration between the US/Norway/Denmark and that the US electronic warfare team wasn't familiar with the system, yet within two weeks they say they managed to reprogram them to meet the initial deadline.

The 68th EWS assembled a dedicated team comprised of a mixture of seasoned experts and bright, young engineers to approach the reprograming challenge. Their first task was to understand the unfamiliar EW system and how to reprogram it.
Relying on data provided by Denmark and Norway, then adapting new processes and approaches to the usual process, the team was able to understand the system and start their work.
After understanding the system, the 68th EWS deviated again from normal methods and sent its members overseas to a partner-nation lab to collaboratively develop and test the system alongside coalition teammates.

[1] https://www.dvidshub.net/news/479401/dominate-spectrum-350th...

intended2• 1 year ago

The article does state that america has decided not to provide support.

Is this changed?

Springtime2• 1 year ago

My comment was a reflection on discourse of the article here. The US has pulled support for providing further jamming reprogramming but way the article is written clearly was giving readers the impression the systems are US specific and only able to be programmed by the US.

Evidenced by most comments on HN at the time I posted not being about the software support per se being withdrawn but jumping off the premise it was only programmable by the US, with comment chains ranging from US software and supplied aircraft can't be trusted to going so far as talking about kill switches. This led to a very noisy, knee-jerky discussion based on an incorrect basis.

Quotes from the OP's article:

Ukrainian pilots are not receiving updates, and the programs could soon become obsolete [...] France’s Mirage 2000s are equipped with their own powerful jammers, and the Americans are not involved in their programming.
In the longer term, the Ukrainians could refit their F-16s with non-American electronic countermeasures [...] But that could take time and money...

Now contrast to the original Forbes citation which explained the US team doing the reprogramming wasn't even familiar with the system until being tasked to reprogram it for use in Ukraine, doing so in just two weeks and it being a multi-national effort with two European countries and an overseas facility.

Had the discourse began with that there would still be criticism of the government's decision, given the US was leading the reprogramming effort, but with clarity on what was occurring.

ea550ff70a• 1 year ago

Fckd up

joshdavham3• 1 year ago

Regarding flagging: I think the worry is that, with all the political news constantly generated by Donald in the white house, HN might get submerged by politics constantly rather than the hacker-related stuff we all come here for.

ifyoubuildit• 1 year ago

That and the discussions are basically devoid of any new info or insight. If you were to take a random comment from each of these threads, youd probably have a hard time telling which came from where.

jmward012• 1 year ago

True. This post is just being used as a reason to continue previous threads with very little connection to the submission. I am of two minds on this. The first is 'I want my life to be about cool tech and interesting ideas' and the second is 'This is a critical moment in history so people need to discuss it more than anything else'. At this exact moment I lean towards the latter so I think it is, unfortunately, important to get everyone out into discussion and action even in discussion forums like HN.

-1• 1 year ago

I disagree. The majority of HN readers are Americans and a vocal and active subset don’t like seeing articles which are critical of their “great” nation.

joshdavham3• 1 year ago

I respect your opinion, but as a non-American myself (Canadian), I also really don't like having my feed filled with whatever the last drama was that Donald stirred up. HN for me is an escape from other news outlets.

iancmceachern• 1 year ago

Other countries who fly then will fill in the gaps. They may start making replacement parts themselves, that's what I would do if I were them.

tehjoker2• 1 year ago

My suspicion is Trump is putting pressure on Zelensky (a) because he hates him personally and (b) because he wants an even bigger mineral rights deal. The thinking being, let Zelensky stew in it without U.S. help and suffer some humiliating defeats and let him come crawling back to the table so that he can sell of the majority of his country to the Americans, far more than the Russians will ever get.

iw2rmb2• 1 year ago

It's because Russia is on the verge of economic collapse and Putin forces Trump to cancel sanctions critical to them.

At this point, Russia got maximum from this war. These rare minerals deal is just to distract and it's nothing compared to oil, manganese and soil Russia will capture.

Also, I'm struggling to find any reason for Zelensky to sign the deal – no protection, zero chance to get land back. Just thrown under the bus. EU is better option.

netsharc• 1 year ago

It's 2 assholes friendly with each other sharing the spoils of war: Putin gives Trump the opportunity to brag about bringing $500B to the US/maybe it'll be today's Halliburton that'll get the mining rights, for a donation to the new Trump Mansion, and Putin gets everything else.

niemandhier• 1 year ago

Could there be an orchestrated effort by volunteers to replace what the Americans were doing or does this rely on intelligence insight the Americans have?

In country if 40 Million desperate people as educated as the Ukrainians there should be quite the talent pool to try to hack this.

hkyu123• 1 year ago

So much warmongering going on here. The site where majority used to call to end US as world police, stop interfering and instigating overthrowing government now wants the opposite. This site is surely astroturfed or suddenly people have turned violent.

lif• 1 year ago

I can assure you that there would never be any chance of paid shill brigades shouting down opposing viewpoints on HackerNews. Instead, as I have been informed many times, posts critical of Trump are being flagged. The posts that make it through then naturally are flooded with independent thinkers who just happen to all be in agreement. I mean, how could you not agree with them, right?

Those who disagree about this particular topic obviously deserve whatever they get here. That's why ad hominem rules do not apply to them, and there is no need to be civil when replying to Russian trolls such as them!!

If astroturfing were happening, it would show up as most anyone critical of the astroturf comments being downvoted and/or flagged into grey oblivion, while the astroturf brigade would present as an unusually large number of comments that all agree with each other.

Anyway, I have been keeping track for a small study I a doing on information warfare, and look forward to presenting my research on this. Am still gathering screenshots and other data. So far, I am in awe at the deep thinking and high level of civil discourse on display here. I really like that folks here show respect even to those who disagree.

hkyu123• 1 year ago

Deep thinking, civil discourse? Your comment even indicates that if you disagree you are russian troll. How come a left leaning site become a rabid warmongering right leaning one. It seems like left and right switched sides on some issues.

retrorangular• 1 year ago

Many here are anti-war, not pacifist. They disliked the US starting wars. Likewise, they dislike Russia starting wars. That's neither astroturfing nor people turning violent. Quite the opposite: many abhor violence, and letting people invade other countries without consequence does not lead to a world with less violence.

People don't want the US to interfere with domestic politics in Ukraine, they want it to help the national government that has overwhelming support from the local populace fend off an invasion from a foreign nation. They're not in favor of overthrowing the government, they want to prevent that very thing from happening.

abujazar• 1 year ago

I guess the Danes (just like us Norwegians) think the choice of F-35 rather than neighbouring allies' planes was wise... In contrast to the F-16, one can only assume that Trump & co can basically disable the F-35 or at least render it completely useless for battle. Norwegian operation of the F-35 is even completely dependent on American personnel for years to come.

bsdice• 1 year ago

Used to be "buy cheap, buy twice", now it's "buy American, buy twice".

One step could be to replace what Israel replaced, for more independance. Wouldn't buy their solution though, they sell bad pagers.

Trump has the soccer world cup in USA soon. Spectators could make it hell, boo the USA anthem at every game. I think they will.

cornhole• 1 year ago

capitulation will not bring peace

I_am_tiberius• 1 year ago

I wonder when European founders start switching from Azure/AWS/Google to domestic alternatives. I feel the risk of being thrown out all of the sudden increases every day.

jacquesm2• 1 year ago

Already happening in multiple places.

serpix• 1 year ago

So is it going to be Kubernetes as the IaC stack from now on? I'm asking as a heads up as I foresee a potential major demand for infrastructure migrations in the future.

perlgeek4• 1 year ago

I work for one of the domestic alternatives.

Guess where our network gear vendors are? (Currently using mostly Arista, but also some Juniper core routers, used to have Cisco gear too).

Guess where our OS is being sold from? (Even when use Linux, much of it is RHEL).

We use VMWare products (yep, US), and Openshift (RHEL, also US).

We use F5 and A10 load balancers. Both US.

There's sooo much off-the-shelf hardware, software and firmware from the US; replacing one of them would be a big to huge integration project; replacing them all would be an endless nightmare, especially if the only alternative is from China. If there even is a practical alternative.

darkhorn3• 1 year ago

Definatly going to happen for critical infrastructure, especially when there is a Russian asset at the head of the States.

m3kw9• 1 year ago

America is turning into Russia in real time right now, it’s nuts and a lot of people is saying Trump is playing 6D chess

d_burfoot• 1 year ago

The Ukraine Today article seems to be a copy of this Forbes article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2025/03/07/france-to-t...

For additional context, here's an article from August about how the USAF helped to upgrade the F-16 electronic warfare capabilities: https://www.airandspaceforces.com/ukraine-f-16-electronic-wa...

The words "lose support" is carrying a lot of weight in this reporting.

maelito• 1 year ago

France's Rafales just had an incredible sale boost.

HumblyTossed• 1 year ago

The US has been compromised by Putin. It’s very clear for all to see.

matt-p4• 1 year ago

"why did everyone stop buying our planes and weapons"

ozgrakkurt• 1 year ago

I don’t understand, why does the government of US has to give support for privately manufactured weapons. The company that sells the weapons should do that right?

Also what does US gain if all countries are using f16?

rad_gruchalski12• 1 year ago

1. ITAR, 2. They get money.

davethedevguy• 1 year ago

This seems like a huge own goal for the US.

Who will want to buy American military technology, when the ability to employ it is at the whim of whoever wins the next election?

Especially as it's clear now than any alliance with the US is fragile at best, and could end overnight depending on which side of the bed Trump wakes up on.

mahkeiro• 1 year ago

This will soon be not only limited to military technologies

jacquesm2• 1 year ago

Today your aircraft, tomorrow all your mobile phones. I'm pretty sure those could all be remote bricked.

bigyabai2• 1 year ago

Nuh uh! Hacker News told me that American businesses have the ultimate moral imperative to cease operations in any country that demands invasive control of my devices.

Surely my smartphone OEM would fight the entire American government before handing over my data.

zapnuk• 1 year ago

Let's assume a Russian asset somehow becomes President of the USA.

What would he have done? How would he weaken the USA and strengthen Russia?

At this point, I don't see a difference between Trump + GOP (leaders) and actual traitors.

shmerl• 1 year ago

Does anyone still have any doubts that Trump is helping Putin? He consistently helps Russian fascists using "boiling the frog" method to avoid doing it too rapidly. But it's still glaringly obvious.

Everyone who for voted for this scum should be blamed.

paulsutter• 1 year ago

Am I reading this right? Nothing has been disabled, they're no longer sending frequency updates? Not even clear if this is related to the current spat.

the Biden Air Force was able to keep up with the Russian adaptation by constantly tweaking the AN/ALQ-131 frequencies, under Trump, Ukrainian pilots are not receiving updates, and the programs could soon become obsolete.

If so, title seems inflammatory. Not that I support the action, just saying it should be characterized accurately

justahuman74• 1 year ago

This is going to make Australia think twice about those Virginia subs

nabla9• 1 year ago

Even if Trumpism is gone by 2028, nothing goes back to normal. We'll see the raise of ITAR-free weapons systems from Europe and Asian "former" US allies and cooperation around the US.

What Trump and MAGA people don't realize is that 11 carrier groups sailing around the seas alone are not that big a threat. Defence Cooperation Agreement (DCA) and Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) provide unsinkable airfields, supply depots for the US all over the world. They are massive power multiplier for the US military.

dboreham5• 1 year ago

There goes the US defense industry and thank you very much from Saab.

Simon_O_Rourke• 1 year ago

If I was a defense minister in Western Europe right now I'd go looking at whatever the Dassault, Saab or other European based defense tech can provide. I'd also immediately halt any pilot training in the US. I can see shares in Raytheon, Lockheed, etc. taking losses in the next couple of quarters, I mean here we have a president that won't even spend money on its own defense tech for export, and is now actively shutting down that export market.

insane_dreamer2• 1 year ago

It's hard to feel sorry for Raytheon Lockheed and the like, but it's looking like they should have thrown a few tens of millions at Trump's inauguration. It's pay to play now.

alienthrowaway3• 1 year ago

Which is why EU defense company share prices have been on a tear. The only US defense contractor that had a good week/month is SpaceX.

pseudony• 1 year ago

Beyond being morally reprehensible (and it really is), this is a humongous own-goal.

I don't think US arms manufacturers should expect many future orders from the EU.

ashoeafoot8• 1 year ago

What a move to break the spine of us forces and industrial complex at the same time .

PoignardAzur• 1 year ago

This is yet another "People said the US would never do that, it would undermine their credibility too much, we shouldn't spread FUD -> oops, they did it anyway" moment.

I'm hoping that people eventually understand that "losing credibility" isn't a deterrent when the offending party is entrenched enough that they believe (correctly or not) that everyone will keep buying their stuff anyway.

mixxit• 1 year ago

it seems so sad that americans dont find it worth while to stand up to their president

Element_• 1 year ago

And if the American defense sector wasn't bruised enough from the last month, Elon musk was on social media this weekend claiming he could collapse the Ukranian frontlines by disabling Starlink and insulting the Polish foreign minister for buying Starlink systems...

https://bsky.app/profile/tatarigami.bsky.social/post/3ljxhgc... https://bsky.app/profile/tendar.bsky.social/post/3ljx3esi74k...

justin667• 1 year ago

Musk might not value Poland’s patronage but the rest of the American defense industry certainly does. Poland is a huge buyer of arms.

I can’t imagine what the internal struggles look like right now, but it definitely hasn’t dawned on most of the Trump people that whatever budgetary gains they make by randomly firing people will be offset - to put it mildly - by the effect fucking up the arms export market will have on the federal budget.

physhster• 1 year ago

Really makes you wonder if that "president" could be teaming up with the other side...

yctim• 1 year ago

This is a sign of a rapid decline of the US in the world stage, faster than I expected a year ago.

A new world order is being established and the US wouldn't be a leader in that world.

DrNosferatu5• 1 year ago

The EU should buy - or even license produce - Swedish Saab Gripens to help the Ukrainians resist.

Low cost, simple to operate, and specially designed to fight Russian aggression.

deeviant2• 1 year ago

They are not low cost, they cost nearly as much as an F35.

DrNosferatu5• 1 year ago

That’s with subsequent production F35 batches / “lots”: then the Gripen can be cheaper too if made in larger scale.

DrNosferatu5• 1 year ago

You simply cannot trust US military equipment anymore.

How do you know they won’t do to your equipment what they did to Ukraine’s F16s?

geenat• 1 year ago

Cost per flight hour.

Indeed though, F35 has become relatively inexpensive per unit, as intended.

DrNosferatu5• 1 year ago

The first steps are already underway, nevertheless the European Democracies should start a, new, NATO-like military Alliance on their own, but without Trump's America.

(and without the notorious US-made military equipment kill-switch ability - like with the F16s here)

And while we're at it, this time will be different: Instead of the membership criteria being anti-soviet communism, as in NATO, it should be effective Liberal Democracy - and - Freedom from Exceptionalist Exemptions, namely from the International Rule of Law. So, to be part,

1. Compulsory International Criminal Court membership and compliance - hence no exceptionalistic US, and no exceptionalistic Israel.

2. No "Illiberal Democracies": say, for example, composite of a minimum 0.67 score on the WJP Rule of Law Index and others: therefore no Orbanic Hungary, and no illiberal others like it. Poland, Slovakia, Italy: time to make some hard choices if you want in.

3. Democratic backsliding removes you rights in the Alliance, and, can proportionally lead to outright expulsion.

Not one more new military equipment purchase from the US, (and dispreference for other non-qualifying nations procurement). Member nations should use their - substantial - industrial capacity to equip themselves with indigenous military materiel.

Hey, it would be actually great for the economy!

Initially European scope, but bridges to a broader global scope (or even a secondary sister-Alliance) with open-ended partnerships with Canada, Australia, New Zeland, Japan, South Korea, and yes: Taiwan.

US and/or Israel want to join, if a more Democratic future selves? Simple: fully join the ICC, and meet the Alliance's full criteria as every other member. Same applies for prospective new members.

Sweden shows how principled positions can be maintained while building serious defense capabilities. Now multiply that model by Europe's combined industrial and technological base.

We just need the political will to execute - instead of just rolling over and wagging our tail to bullies.

Animats• 1 year ago

Sweden will reportedly be supplying Ukraine with Saab-built Gripen fighters.[1][2] Maybe. Apparently Sweden has been holding off on transfer of 14 Gripens while Ukraine was learning to use and service F-16s.

The Gripen has advantages for Ukraine. It's a more rugged aircraft, with lower maintenance demands and lower operating cost. It can operate from very basic airstrips and roads. Saab boasts about this.[3] Their pitch mentions that servicing an aircraft between missions requires just one trained tech assisted by five other workers. The USAF likes to operate from big, well-equipped, secure air bases, and US aircraft tend to be designed for that environment.

The US has, in the past, tried to discourage other countries from buying the Gripen, to protect US manufacturers. That sales advantage just disappeared.

[1] https://min.news/en/military/a409faa4bc530b328f75ed6ccff23b7...

[2] https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/03/04/saab-ceo-pushes-for-s...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyD0liioY8E

guerrilla5• 1 year ago

Fascinating. What's with the US approach then? In general, it seems like lean forces tend to win. Afghanistan (twice) and Vietnam, for example. The Houthis as another example.

whymeogod4• 1 year ago

I thought the US lost in Afghanistan and Vietnam. Am I misunderstanding something in your post?

wqaatwt10• 1 year ago

The Taliban/Mujahideen didn’t win per se, they just survived long enough for the foreign “empires” to lose interest.

Vietnam wasn’t a conventional conflict either. If you’re willing to lose complete control of most of “your” country and sustain 10x higher casualties than your opponent you might have a chance, but that’s an extremely steep price to pay.

willvarfar3• 1 year ago

Various components in the Gripen, particularly the engine which Volvo licensed from GE, are from the US and the US has a veto on them. It is currently blocking sale of Gripen to Colombia, for example.

toomuchtodo4• 1 year ago

Are there any other compatible engines for the platform?

quelup• 1 year ago

The comments in this thread freak me out. Either the world's media has brainwashed the population into believing America is failing and the 'right' is evil/dumb, or I'm totally delussioned (as an American) for seeing mostly good in what the current administration is doing. Both are terrifying.

throwaway4847618• 1 year ago

What exactly is the good here?

whymeogod4• 1 year ago

with kindness and respect.

Ideally, "hacker news" is for people who have a hacker/engineer mindset. Look at the actual facts of the situation, not the flashy sales brochure.

Odds are that your second hypothesis is the correct one. You may wish to start by comparing what you think the current administration is doing with what it is actually doing.

You cannot count on Fox News to be accurate, they have never claimed to present "accurate" news.

You may be interested in the results of this study, where Fox viewers were paid to watch CNN for a month.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/fox-news-study-compari...

ajuc9• 1 year ago

"The right" isn't one thing.

MAGA is a particular brand of "the right" that is pretty clearly evil/dumb.

Ultimately USA is just 350 million people. Without its allies it's just another country. You can't bully half the world into "better deals" forever. Some countries might agree short-term out of desperation, but long term they'll throw you under the bus.

Consider how you would behave if your business partner changed the price +25% -25% every few days, threatened to cut you off if you don't do what he wants and insulted you randomly. You'd search for a reliable competition.

rwyinuse2• 1 year ago

I think it's time for foreign buyers of F-35 to evaluate that choice too.

throwaway46713• 1 year ago

Meanwhile, Trump forgets what Aukus is, and one of his peoples is making concerned noises about whether it's a good idea ([1]).

If the point is to piss off every single one of the US' allies in an any% speedrun, the current administration seems to be doing a pretty bang-up job of this.

It's terrifying, though. The world's (current) superpower might have a big military and all, but actively signalling that you don't really need friends can only lead to a decrease in overall geopolitical stability, right?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/09/trump-pick-for...

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK• 1 year ago

As russians say, pendosy tupyyye.

DrNosferatu5• 1 year ago

I would be hard pressed to find decisions more helpful to Putin (and destructive to Ukraine) than what Trump has made so far.

In fact, it seems quite many others are asking the same questions - a US Senate Committee has just directly asked,

“is Trump a Russian asset”?

- via Forbes:

https://youtu.be/ibfVfAETlmA?t=16s

upghost• 1 year ago

I've been unable to find a primary source confirming this information or providing technical details on the significance or consequences of the decision.

Every article I've seen parrots the same language and they all point back to this same article[1] as the source of the information, but the article itself provides no proof whatsoever or explanation.

This smells like propaganda. And it seems to be quite effective here. Before going for each other's throats on this maybe it would be better if we verified the facts.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2025/03/07/france-to-t...

red-iron-pine• 1 year ago

Russia aggressively chases the agi-prop. Ironically, they outsourced a lot of the online presence efforts to Ukraine and Eastern Europe pre-2014; this is why Ukraine has a strong online propaganda presence, and is bolstered by NATO efforts.

Both sides have a lot to say about F-16s and it's both sides' interest to flog various angles to death.

I suspect you won't see real appraisals of the impact for a while yet, and maybe only after the war ends.

ashoeafoot8• 1 year ago

Boeing is as good as bankrupt now?

US Ends Support For Ukrainian F-16s

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