What was it that changed your minds? Assassinations on your soil? Starting massive war on your doorstep? Planning terrorist actions against your aircraft? Sending military drones into your airspace? Tampering with your elections to try to do to you what they did to the US? Shooting down that airliner a while back? Trying to blind your military pilots with lasers? Sabotaging your undersea cables? Constantly threatening to nuke you if you don’t let them do whatever they want? What was it?
In a novel interpretation, the Commission argued that the shockwaves unleashed by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine have caused a “serious economic impact” for the EU as a whole, triggering “serious supply disruptions, higher uncertainty, increased risk premia, lower investment and consumer spending”, as well as countless hybrid attacks in the form of drone incursions, sabotage and disinformation campaigns.
Oh
Well, fine I guess, as long as you start fighting back at some point before they figure out how to take over your capital cities and enslave anyone they can get their hands on including yourselves, which is clearly the fucking plan.
Well, fine I guess, as long as you start fighting back at some point before they figure out how to take over your capital cities and enslave anyone they can get their hands on including yourselves, which is clearly the fucking plan.
EU is a trade union and doesn’t have tools/powers to have real common foreign policy outside of the mandate for negotiating trade deals. It’s a bit unreasonable to expect for it to be responsible for foreign policy matters like war reparations between other countries, neither of which is an EU member. This line of reasoning at least makes it appear that it’s within EU competence legally to be involved.
Well, but part of my point is they are already in a hybrid war with Russia at this point. Russian drones in Poland, fighter jets in Estonia, DHL bombing plans, election interference, and so on. It’s not just a Ukraine thing.
If a violent street gang is waging a violent war on one of your neighbors, then maybe you can say you don’t want to be involved. Once they’re cutting your power lines, once they’ve come over to your house and tried your door a few times to see if it’s unlocked, opened up and gone through your mail, that kind of thing, it’s time to recognize what’s up. I feel like about 30% of the EU (the eastern part mostly) realizes this, and the rest don’t care all that much and just want to keep collecting paychecks and doing trade deals and hoping it will all blow over or be someone else’s problem.
Maybe the HOA isn’t the right venue for talking about that. I get what you mean. Regardless, it needs to be talked about and reacted to, is my point. Bullies generally keep pushing until they get pushback, it’s very dangerous to do nothing. Remember when Russian fighters violated Turkey’s airspace? 17 seconds later, Turkey shot the fighter down. Job done. Now Russia and Turkey are buds again. It’s just how this type of mentality operates. The EU / US’s “escalation management” just comes across as weakness in my opinion, it just invites more escalation.
EU as an organisation isn’t equipped to deal with stuff like this, because it wasn’t ever meant to. We don’t have a common foreign policy or even a common budget, yet we expect it to deal militarily with a war between two non-members. I’m not saying this to take a stab at EU. EU does what it can with competencies it has. Individual states passing the buck to EU is just convenient way of not doing much at all unfortunately.
Yes, you said that already. Then I responded. Replying to my response just to repeat what you said before, as if I hadn’t already responded addressing it, doesn’t add too much.
In particular, you saying “between two non-members” means you completely missed a big part of my message. Try searching for “Poland” and “Estonia” to help you find the relevant part. Or maybe just read the whole thing and then respond to the new thing instead of repeating.
Edit: Actually, one other point: So I don’t really care whether the EU response comes within the structure of EU government, or within the structure of the individual governments involved that are part of the EU. My point is, they should be responding more than they are. If the individual governments decided to talk outside of the building that houses the EU offices, and decided to start blowing up these fighters that violate their airspace with their individual militaries, that would be fine to me. That was sort of what I meant in talking about the HOA, but maybe that way of explaining it fleshes it out in a little more detail.
