Subject: Re: More EU views on the trade deal
The concern is that it's a violation of international law and the entire Westphalian order for a country like Russia to just invade another country.

That's not the concern. What you're describing above is the Diplomats Getting The Vapors stage of things. That should have happened when Putin seized the Crimea or his invasion of Georgia. The full scale invasion of the Ukraine is a whole other kettle of fish; no diplomat at Whitehall or Brussels is under the illusion that some tea and crumpets are going to be the answer.

...which, again, is why the EU Commission's hint that they'll be buying tons of weapons from the US is so laughable. It's a growth industry and a reliable source of export revenues for Germany - the government's 100% on board with having that extra military expenditure be made domestically.

Laughable, eh. How many 5th generation+ aircraft does the European Union build? The answer is - zero. Their NGF airframe won't enter service until the 2030s.

Germany's got about 200K members serving in their armed forces - they could relocate an existing brigade to another NATO country within a few days. They just can't generate produce an extra 100 tanks in the space of a moment any more than we can.

You're missing the point. The reason why it's going to take Germany 3 years to deploy anyone is because they haven't got anyone to deploy.

But we do more of sending them financial products in exchange for useful physical things than the reverse. There's benefits to that. Having ready access to lots of physical things that can be used for a wide variety of economically viable activities is a benefit, and those things are often much more useful than the financial products we send them in return (like the bullion of old). Trump's policy is to try to change that balance, and to start getting fewer useful physical things from Europe.

Sigh. I've also been reading your analysis of tariffs in the other thread and you're really missing the bigger picture in some ways.
There are more than a few in the government that think 2027+ is when things get spicy with China. That means the US needs to be getting ready -now- to have certain things good to go and lined up.

Trump is doing 2 things right now. He's attempting a forced reset of the US economy by applying tariffs and setting incentives for firms to onshore production of certain things here in the US. He's also tying the rapid expansion of local sourcing of critical materials, components and production of entire systems to US national security to degrees that haven't been done before. I'd encourage you to read up on what Anduril Industries is up to along with Palantir and a few others.

Allowing the status quo to continue wasn't going to work in the long term. We can't keep growing our economy at these kinds of rates and racking up this kind of debt forever. Something needed to be done.