No. of Recommendations: 9
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.Their military has ~200,000 active duty members. The reason it's going to take them that long to send
those tanks is because it takes that long to build 100+ new tanks from scratch.
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.I think you're missing the bigger picture in some ways, too. The fact that China has become a very large national security risk does not mean that Europe becomes any less of a national security risk. A new large threat in Asia might affect the
relative military needs of the two theaters, but it doesn't reduce or diminish the specific threats posed in the European theater.
So if the response to rising Chinese power is to
transfer resources from one theater to the other, there are downsides to that. It increases our exposure to the risk of negative consequences in Europe, if we're not maintaining as heavy a footprint there to put a lid on things.
I don't disagree that China is a very serious threat, or even that countering it is be more important than countering intra-European conflicts (Russia is another matter). But that doesn't make any other threats in the world any less serious, except on a
relative level.
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. Would have thought that would argue
against continuing our present taxing and spending levels over the next decade, as the OBBB does. If the argument is that we can't rack up debt, that's a
taxation and spending argument, not a tariffs and trade argument. Foreign investors don't hold an especially large percentage of our federal debt these days, and it's been declining for the last twenty years or so:
https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/foreign-investor......so the weapon to attack debt is
fiscal policy, not trade policy.
