Almost 70% of the EU is on board with helping Ukraine. Just like every Nationalist movements, it's always around 30% of assholes who want to destroy everything because they are morons.
AFD is literally supported in massive influence campaigns by Russia.
Clearly the european people are mad at the status quo. We can do both, ie. improve quality of life through higher spending and also spend more on defence and Ukraine aid.
This is achievable if we tax the rich and companies fairly. Of course every single major political party is against this as they are all in the pockets of the upper class and corporations to varying degrees.
Oh for fucks sake, AfD is 20% of the vote in Germany, Scholz (SPD) lost in part for not supporting Ukraine enough.
Ukraine has overwhelming support in Europe, and for Christ sake they do too in USA, even Republicans favor supporting Ukraine.
It's just their idiotic undemocratic 2 party system in USA that made Trump win, and give him almost absolute unchecked power.
AfD has no chance to get to power that's anywhere near like what Trump has. A majority will clearly be created around them.
The only parliamentary problem is that AfD makes it so neither left or right have a majority, which will probably force cooperation between left and right. But both sides support Ukraine.
We side with the US: war on our eastern front.
We side with Russia: war on our western front.
We stay on our own, like Afd, Hungary and RN wants: war on both sides.
It's OK: we are Europeans, we have evolved an art of war, and we can take on foes. But we do need politicians with enough balls to announce the bad news.
Russia is the easiest foe to bring down, it has been economically ground to death by their current war. We can take their leadership out quite fast if it comes to that , we all know that , it's just that no one had the balls to do it because naturally, nukes are frightening. But there isn't much choice and the more we linger the higher the probability of nukes going of anyways (but by what will they be replaced and if we succeed, there has been 20 years of "z-patriots" brainwashing that will fast destroy anybody they don't like at the top of Russia)
Then there is the US, they don't like us but there has to be a way to at least make them back-off our territory.
I think the first thing to do is strike that new US empire economically (yeah, we'll lose some feathers, but who cares about feathers when our dream of long lasting peace has been shattered in such a way that our own survival is in jeopardy (read again the first three sentences I wrote)).
The best weapon at-hand we have to kill influence from both countries is to ban (when I say "ban", I mean it as totally cut off, no vpn's, no DNS masquerading: this is serious business, not a music pirating site), so ban quite a few IM services and ban any crypto transaction on EU soil while forcing all our banks and companies to surrender all their crypto assets to the ECB to be used on a surprise attack, in the middle of one of the dips those crypto have from time to time. If influencers can't be paid, then they won influence much apart from what we pay them to say. There will be hard, stupidly obvious propaganda to be made. And as Russia or the recent elections in the US show: most people are too dumb to notice brainwashing when it's applied to them, so be it.
As far as real weapons go: apart from France, the EU is too dependant on US weapon tech to do anything meaningful against the US. So we've got French nukes (hurray!) but that's all, and they cannot be used except if troops mass near the EU border. And France hasn't got enough conventional weapons for everyone, their army is quite good but is, understandably, made to protect their borders, not the vast borders of the EU despite their relatively good logistics.
So our at-hand weapons are the size of our market and the ability to seriously fuck around with others economies. Let's do that and go further if we really need to but we cannot count on big military manoeuvres for the foreseeable future (six months is the Max period on which we can test scenarios in these uncertain times).
Fucking mortifying, honestly. It’s insane that this is actually happening. We’re interacting with a (former?) ally as if we were trying to run a mafia shakedown (and that’s kinda exactly what the admin is trying to pull)
Listening to some of the Trump and Zelensky interaction. Trump and Vance are just shameless.
Sorry US-ians, wishing bad things for the US kind of. You guys have to get your house in order! A Presidential monarchy is not great. Even taking Trump and Vance at face value, the value of US agreements is purely at the whim of the current President. In under 4 years, it could all change. The are speaking only for themselves.
What they wanted was to do was to provoke him to blow up at them in order to manufacture an excuse to claim that he was the one who refused peace. They failed, but they're gonna claim that's what happened anyway.