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Neil Lewis's avatar

"Europe could destroy the US economy with a coordinated sell-off of American bonds. European countries can immediately expel the US soldiers on their soldiers, who do not have an automatic right to be here but are here on the basis of national permissions."

And tariffs. Start with a 200% tariff on US defence products?

Eleanor Mayrhofer's avatar

I'm not sure what to think. I'd love your thoughts on these two divergent perspectives:

From the Concis: https://open.substack.com/pub/shankarnarayan/p/deny-the-oxygen?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Or this fellow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/corbenic_dear-president-ursula-von-der-leyen-i-am-activity-7414020171780001792-VzuW?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAAMLNsBu0oLzUB_d-LX2B6ShVpCQS1tbTI

What this tells me is that at the end of the day, is that the EU is not Venezuela. There are major tools (and threats) they can leverage before taking military action. I also agree with one of the commenters in the LinkedIn post that the EU can't throw the first punch, but if the US does invade, the EU needs to give it a financial bloody nose right away with a promise of more to come.

Dave Keating's avatar

Yes I agree of course that the EU can't throw the first punch - Europe is not the aggressor here, the aggressors are Russia and the United States. But Europe needs to make the consequences of a US forced annexation clear now, otherwise there is no deterrent. Europe did so as Russia threatened Ukraine before then invasion in 2022, and then followed through after the invasion. But they are not doing so now. Will check out the links, thanks!

Eleanor Mayrhofer's avatar

Appreciate the reply! My only hope is that there are backchannel things happening that we can't see, but perhaps that's hopelessly naive.

Marguerite's avatar

That's not necessarily true. Why would anyone believe they have two months? We know when Trump lies, right? When his mouth moves. In fact, he had said something similar in some situation in the Middle East, he made one of his throwaway comments that referred to a time frame, only to bomb them ahead of that time.