Comment by anthk

> Any of the above moves (military bases, Visa/MC, ASML, etc) would make the US suffer, but it would collapse the EU

And many other places - most countries depend in US tech and increasingly so (recent NH stories about Vietnam mandating banks only use unrooted mobile phones). Just card payments not working would be an economic disaster. So would closing down all the businesses and services that rely on AWS, GCP and Azure. So would whatever the US chose to do through Apple, MS, and Google OSes.

> we'll all see how far Russia can project power. Not as far as they'd like, but enough to make life miserable in a half-dozen or more current-NATO countries. Which puts pressure on their neighbors of course. This would be a shooting war in the east, which would require central and western European countries to decide whether they want to spend blood and treasure to respond

I am more optimistic than you about this. Russia is struggling just against Ukraine. They might just invade the Baltic states but anything more would force Western Europe to commit and the Russians know this. Even in Ukraine they invaded because we had signalled we would do nothing by not responding to the previous invasion of Ukraine, to threats to invade and previous Russian invasions of other countries.

> The rhetoric here in the US is that RU and CN are waiting to pounce on Greenland already, and that if we don't, they will. I honestly don't know if there's even a shred of truth to that - RU isn't strong enough to hold it, and CN can't project at that distance

If Greenland becomes independent in a few years time would it then become more of a threat?

> RU isn't strong enough to hold it, and CN can't project at that distance

China is building its armed forces, and there are ways of getting a country within your sphere if influence short of invasion.

> I wish wisdom, resilience, and peace, for all of us.

We all do but I think we are living in a new cold war.

> This is just an exercise in establishing dominance (i.e. The End of Politeness).

I agree.

It's a way to assert dominance and the EU countries are partially responsible for the state of things.

I mean, when you outsource your manufacturing capabilities to China, your tech services to the US and your security to NATO, then it frees up a lot of cash to spend on other things and that is probably why life in the EU is pretty good.

Unfortunately the other side of this coin is that it leaves you completely unprepared if/when things change quickly.

> Europe has a decade or two of hard work and crippling costs

Once again unfortunately, many EU countries are already maxing out their budgets each year and running sky high deficits so there is not much dry powder to absorb these costs.

Raising more money through taxes is politically unpalatable when a lot of the EU countries are already in the top 10 of most taxed countries on the planet.

The only notable exceptions are Poland and Germany but they won't be able to carry the rest of the EU by themselves.

> maybe even split the EU into two factions of American-bully-reluctantly-aligned countries vs American-bully-righteously-andor-selfservingly-opposed countries.

The smallest EU countries have no choice. There is no EU army and therefore if the US leaves there is no one to replace it. It's a basic case of choosing the best worst outcome. Become a vassal of Russia or become a vassal of the US.

Yeah, I think it is naive of the grandparent to believe that iPhones, Android phones with Google Play Services, a lot of cloud services can be replaced overnight. That said, it might not happen overnight, but it will surely happen.

I feel like we are close to a tipping point where governments and companies will move off US services en masse as fast as they reasonably can. I think this movement already started. E.g. our local university has forbidden use of US (well, any non-EU) LLMs for work and are trialing Mistral. Two years ago they would have gone Gemini without thinking (since they are already using Google Workspace). They are also extending support for their Linux workspace, which has primarily been maintained for CS'y groups, but they want to be ready to roll it out when needed.

A lot of organizations (especially non-profits, universities, etc.) have woken up when Microsoft relinquished Microsoft 365 access of the ICC chief prosecutor overnight.

I guess one side effect of the US going rogue is open source getting a lot more traction.

I hope that the EU (and UK) will also invest heavily in iOS and Google Android alternatives, because that will be the hardest bits to replace, but as long as AOSP still exists it will be possible to bootstrap reasonably quickly.