“I am yet to hear from anyone serious inside the U.S. administration, and I stress anyone serious in the U.S. administration, saying that they are somehow withdrawing from NATO,” Stubb said at an event at London School of Economics.
“What President Trump is doing now is correct. He is putting pressure on European states to increase their defence expenditure … and take more responsibility for their own security,” Stubb said.
He’s obviously not in the right Signal group …
He is on a stupid “let’s play nice with USA and maybe the leopard doesn’t eat our face” campaign. Even though this leopard has memory of gold fish regarding who his friends are. As Finn it is sad and pathetic. We didn’t scream USA to defend us before we joined NATO and now suddenly supposedly we are utterly incapable of anything should USA be mean to us, since we didn’t say thank you and wear a suit.
Guy is literally putting nice words to Trumps mouth, when in reality there is none.
Hey our dear president, as a Finnish conscript reserve what I’m I to you? A joke? There is 900k reserves and USA doesn’t make our field artillery. Stop pandering to the orange one. It’s embarrassing, under mines our international position and is pointless since the guy being pondered changes his mind everytime he talks to new person or watches new episode of FOX news.
Except on Greenland, Canada and Panama. Which seems to be Trump’s only consistent positions. Two of which we are bound to defend per having joined NATO in case USA decides to go on “freedom delivering world tour” again.
Edit: when we did this to USSR, it was called finlandisation. Back then we had real fear based reason to do it. But this new round, this is voluntary and it makes it way worse.
Another Finnish conscript here. I didn’t vote for the guy, but he’s been pretty good on his job so far. He understands that the orange one has ‘special needs’. And this point of view has been widely reported and discussed too.
USA, like it or not, is still a (too) big part of effective defence around here as majority of Europe has forgotten what kind of country Russia is and just left their military strenght go down the drain. Our own army is pretty capable of stopping the Russian attack should it happen, but in the long run we need allies and at least for now USA is one of them.
So, if maintaining that relationship requires some pandering of that orange toddler, then it does. There’s bigger things in the play than showing off with national pride. I don’t like the situation either, but that’s just a part of the game and we need to play with the cards we have.
At least so far ‘speak nicely and carry a big stick’ -approach seems to work. European stick just is not big enough at the moment that we could rely only on that. And I hope that it changes pretty soon, but it takes a while to change continent wide mindset.
The size of the stick is purely about comfort level. You seriously suggest 140 million Russians will beat 480 million European union population. With better industrial capacity, more planes and so on.
They bogged down with 40 million Ukrainians.
What having USA buys “it isn’t even a fight”. Which seems to be many peoples comfort level. My comfort level is “99% it isn’t a fight, 1% it is a fight, it won’t be a walk over picnic to Moscow”.
I also could get driven over by a drunk driver tomorrow and that is more likely, than Russia attacking us in next decade even without USA on our side.
“Owwww please daddy USA, save us from having to have any level of risk to concern with at all, 1% of risk is too much risk”.
Majority of European fighter jets depend on US suppliers for spare parts and maintenance for a start. Same with helicopters. Also, the Europe as a whole has problems on delivering even the most common artillery shells to Ukraine in quantities they would need.
So, as I mentioned, our military is well capable of stopping Russian invasion at the border, but holding it on the long term requires allies and co-operation. Also, size of the population has very little to do with military capabilities, which was proven by Finns a few decades ago and currently in Ukraine.
I haven’t heard any serious talk from the US since January 19th
It feels like 50% of the noise coming from there is flat-out lies, and the other 50% is bullshit instead.
What would be the benefit of going through with it now rather than when things get serious? Right now the status quo gives them leverage with tariffs.
