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I really dislike the narrative 'eu can't leave nato' / 'eu can't push back on the us because we need them. I'd really like to know:
The eu can't allow itself to be treated like this, but also can't allow itself to be forced into a passive stance of having to agree. The eu needs to be able to stand up to this bully (and all the others).
The question is: For what do we need them?
They certainly will not respect Article 5 of the NATO treaty. They do not respect the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Denmark. They will use any(!) leverage they have against us, no matter what we do. What do we get for playing nice? Nothing! If I look at Starmer, Merz, Kallas, ...., it looks like Chamberlain 2.0 and we know from experience that this will not work.
Maybe we buy some time but I do not see attempts to end the dependency. All I see is the hope that everything will be ok once Trump is gone. I doubt it.
For everyday life mostly payment processors and IT infrastructure. For both of them there's some change in the plans, but it's painfully slow and with the orange toddler it's a reasonable threat to assume that those might vanish from EU overnight if there's even moderate push for any change which he doesn't like.
Then there's obviously international trade, support for sanctions against Russia, support for Ukraine (whatever's left of it) and a ton of other things, but specially Visa and Mastercard are pretty important part of everyday life for Joe Averages around Europe.
One word: gmail
Imagine the absolute IT and everyday life apocalypse if all european gmail users were no longer able to view their mails.
Outside of the usual, this possibility was the main push for me to migrate away from gmail.
At least in here Microsoft cloud going out would be a order of magnitude bigger issue than any Google service. Also it's just not email/instant messaging, a ton of infrastructure on companies, financial and government, are dependent on AWS or Azure. Our team (and many others) could spin up replacement services relatively fast for basic email/file sharing/instant messaging but everything beyond that would be absolute pain in the rear.
I'd imagine gmail would fuck with the average person more (which would then overload every company with support requests though), while microsoft services would screw the corporations. Didn't even think about how bad that would be.
Overall we're just completely fucked when it comes to IT infrastructure if the US really wants us to be.
On a personal level that would be worse (in general, I personally don't use gmail/hotmail/outlook..), I agree. But in here governments, healthcare, insurance companies, banks and pretty much everything relies on US based tech at least somewhat, so all of that going away tomorrow would grind nearly the whole society down to a halt.
For Ukraine support, the US isn't providing any directly I don't think. IIRC, the US has stopped all support but allows the sale of weapons to send to Ukraine. That's still useful, as Europe can only manufacture so much, but we aren't providing any funding anymore.
yes God forbid you can't buy loot boxes in your video games... better be colonized by a rapist pedophile
No sure, did not meant that the eu legally can't but indirectly is forced to stay because of the consequences.
Those consequences wouldn't only be military, the eu is fucked across the board if we say goodbye to our 'ally'.
Edit to clarify: i'm writing 'eu' but i guess it'd be factually better if i wrote 'the other nato-members'.
Well nato membership isn't an eu thing. It's up to induvidual countries.
And they can leave, an exit protocol exists. More likely they mean "we are not ready to accept the implications of leaving"
The us thing is probably the dependancy of us produced weaponry
No sure, did not meant that the eu legally can't but indirectly is forced to stay because of the consequences.
Those consequences wouldn't only be military, the eu is fucked across the board if we say goodbye to our 'ally'.