U.S. officials have told European allies they want them to keep buying American-made arms, amid recent moves by the European Union to limit U.S. manufacturers’ participation in weapons tenders, five sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.
Maffia. All of them.
As I always said, the US never cared about the defense expenditure of European countries except as a way to bolster US exports.
It was always about extortion and never about defense.
Yep, they were fine with ‘footing the bill for European defense’ as long as enough members bought F35s and whatever other pointless toys the US produced. Only France basically stuck with producing everything domestically.
Trump never really understood what that unspoken part of the bargain really was about. If Europe is going to actually spend 2% of GDP, they’re going to keep that money domestically as much as possible instead of sending all that spending overseas in dollars.
You’d think a businessman as bigly smart (people tell him all the time, many people) as he is would understand this.
I still don’t know if he’s just stupid or if he’s just doing what Putin wants by undermining NATO. I guess both could be true at the same time.
He’s a dealer, not a businessman. Deal ≠ business economics ≠ national economics ≠ global economics.
If you apply the “art of the deal” to the global economy, you’ll wreck it. Well, if you apply his “art of the deal”, you’ll wreck basically anything except you’re own wallet.
Trump never really understood that most US “aid” is literally the US gov recycling old ordinance and equipment to continue siphoning tax dollars into the military industrial complex and it’s oligarchs — expenses DOGE have not touched and do not consider “waste”… for some, certainly not fascist imperialism, reason…
Trump never really understood
You could have stopped there.
“No, we don’t like that. We insist that you do not.”
“Art of ze deal, non?”
There is nobody more entitled on this planet than the Orange man and his followers.
“Here’s a tariff! Fuck you!”
We don’t trust you anymore. We won’t buy from you
“Noooo, but you must!”
Fuck 'em.
Have they thanked us for buying their weapons yet…
And I don’t think they were wearing the right suits …
MAGA: AMERICA FIRST!
Rest of world: OK, I guess we need to put ourselves first, too.
MAGA: NOT LIKE THAT!
I dunno I heard some American with a spray tan say that they didn’t need Europe or Canada…
We want Greenland. We think you are all worthless freeloaders. We wish to kill your businesses with tariffs because you dared to sell us things (and we don’t care how bad that will be for our people. My voters are too stupid and brainwashed to care and the opposition doesn’t matter)… Also buy our weapons!
Let’s ditch the American weapons.
According to two of the sources, Rubio said any exclusion of U.S. companies from European tenders would be seen negatively by Washington,
Ah ah ah ! “Would be seen negatively”… Ah ah ah !
This sounds like it came from the same guy who wanted to sue companies for not advertising on twitter
They say this after taunting Germany last month on a visit in Munich where they basically said you‘d have to have military power to be sovereign.
Maybe they should object to the reasons that made us buying European in the first place.
Well … We want you to put the orange turd in jail and quit being dicks to everybody. You can’t always get what you want, can you?
Sounds like the Defense Industry doesn’t want anybody upsetting the apple cart.
I wonder if these powerful businesses could come up with a solution? 🤔