EU has more people than the US and similar levels of wealth. They could choose to spend as much as the US on winning war if they wanted to. They don't because you can't just spend on everything you want, there are always trade offs and compromises (inflation and standard of living are the most likely to be compromised if you don't think about them). The EU is now faced with the likelihood that they must spend more on defense and in turn compromise something else - this is a hard problem.

[–] jaxxed@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago

The EU has more ppl, but more importantly, they have spare industrial capacity - DE in particular has Ulverston high quality industrial capacity to spare.

You can't really talk about wealth on this topic, and have to instead talk about economy - and of course the US has a monster economy. What the EU lacks is political cohesion around support for Ulraine.

We are not talking about what EU can spend on Ukraine, we have to talk about what they will spend. Does buying tomahawks make more sense than investing in the domestic Ukr military industrial capacity? The value of the spend on US weapons lower than the value of the development of domestic capacity (EU and/or Ukr); not considering any political capital gained with the Americans.