France’s Macron calls for major hike in defence spending: ‘To be free, we must be feared’
France’s Macron calls for major hike in defence spending: ‘To be free, we must be feared’
To be free in this world we must be feared. To be feared we must be powerful.
Hmmm... 🤔
To be powerful, we must have better weapons, lots of them.
That's the vibe coming from most nations around the globe.
The weapon industry couldn't be happier.
To be powerful, we must have better weapons
He's even speaking like carricatural villain now.
Ok, so of the 7 Billion hike (of the total 64B he aims at!), what is the business case?
Has anyone seen it? Is it 3B for troops and 1B for French made equipment and 3B on American made? Or 6B on American equipment and 1B on troop readiness? What percentage is for contingency? (American made stuff, very easily and practically instantly Trump can make them grounded), is the 7B hike for France defense, or to buy American to directly ship to Ukraine? That, and many others, are question you will never see the media ask, and until there is an answer and accountability, it is just money laundering ... pretty much just like shipping airplanes full of sacks of money to Baghdad and expecting desirable outcomes.
Bingo. After 1st Iraq war and destruction of USSR, US came to be feared and reap the fruits of hegemony. It also allowed the MIC of US and other NATO countries to turn into ridiculous level of grift and now that someone dared to call them out on it, the Emperor's clothes are disappearing.
Their solution: pump more money into the same grift.
The only fucking country France has had a problem with for the past century was a hypermilitarized Germany. Maybe keep your priorities straight and a boot on the heads of the perfidious deutsch
They're more concerned about fucking with Algeria I'm sure
europe once again not beating the allegations that europeans are ethnically fascist
We must have the ability to bomb our colonial African nations into submission.
Yeah I don't buy this. He probably has ties with weapon manufacturers.
which western-alligned leader hasn't?
Isn't France the largest weapons exporter per capita?
Petit Jupiter strikes again.
The Western European ethos stays strong!
In other words, to be "free" we must militarily subdue weaker countries to extract their wealth.
Free healthcare, no homeless people through social housing. Wealth tax. Free public transport. We can spend so much and raise fear in the hearts of all US capitalists and rightwing scum. They will think twice about going to Europe.
Correct me if I'm wrong but couldn't the EU part of NATO have halted Russia's "special military operation" in the very beginning, if they had actually decided to go in Ukraine? I seem to recall they didn't want to go in because of various reasons, but I don't think lack of military capability was one of them. Instead they decided to trickle in weapons as to "not be involved." Did anything of significance change so that Europe is suddenly super weak militarily against Russia? I guess Europe is weak against the US, but that's not quite the framing used.
China has become a superpower surpassing the US and sells Russia an abundance of inexpensive high-quality goods and exchanges high-quality military technology. This allows Russia to fight with higher tech weapons in greater quantaties on their doorstep. The EU thought it was going to be another Iraq/Afghanistan where the US would do the heavy lifting, waltz in and then the EU would chime in by patrolling areas.
Hm. I guess that makws sense. So the Russians are in a better position technologically while probably weaker in manpower than in the beginning of the war. But the tech could probably offset that. Economically they're probably overall benefitting from shifting directly to Chinese products that have much lower profit margins than what they used to pay for European and US goods that flooded in after 1991. So their PPP ratio is probably rising. Would be interesting to see if that's borne out in data. If they're able to make more missiles, drones and such for less, in a sustainable fashion, then I guess there is a reason for building up deterrent manufacturing in the EU to counter it.
I think that explains why his wife looks the way she does.
