(February 24, 2019 at 10:53 am)Mathilda Wrote:(February 24, 2019 at 10:32 am)Yonadav Wrote: I don't know, Mathilda. Our defense spending is orders of magnitude greater than anyone else's. It's one of the reasons that we keep saying that we can't pay for healthcare. I wonder if the EU really does outspend us on total R&D, and even if it does, that is a pretty recent development. In America, we tend to believe that Europeans would be at war again, were it not for US soldiers serving as hostages in the European alliance. Our dark humor about Europeans being at each other's throats again, were it not for us, isn't quite funny. We really are pretty sure that you folks would be trying to kill each other again, within 15 years of a complete US withdrawal from European affairs. So we're off to make space safe for everyone.
That's interesting to hear because the perception in Europe is very different. America is more likely to be viewed as imperialistic. The motivation for the European Union isn't just to stop another European war but to give us clout to resist American standards. A huge fear about Brexit for example is that a trade deal with America will see much lower standards in food, farming and health care.
In the aftermath of brexit, the brexiteers would undoutedly attempt to insert Britain militarily as an independent imperialist power into regions of conflict, send Britain’s one lone aircraft carrier the world to show the flag so as to flatter nationalists and nestagic imperialists and create the impression Britain was still its own greater power, not beholden to the EU or weakened by brexit, and brexit was a decisive step towards renewed greatness and not a petulant insertion of aging head into sand.
