Mitch McConell says the quiet part out loud.
Exact full quote from CNN:
“People think, increasingly it appears, that we shouldn’t be doing this. Well, let me start by saying we haven’t lost a single American in this war,” McConnell said. “Most of the money that we spend related to Ukraine is actually spent in the US, replenishing weapons, more modern weapons. So it’s actually employing people here and improving our own military for what may lie ahead.”
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/4085063
What? There was no risk and there was a ridiculous amount of money to be made. You have people in the intelligence community talking since the early 2000s how important it is to ‘empower poland, to drive a wedge between germany and russia’. The Americans had been threatening to ‘do something about’ the pipeline for years. And when they did it, the pan European media blackout made sure there was no risk involved. You yourself is a proof of that.
Meanwhile Europe will deindustrialize while paying hand over fist for American gas. They must also continue to dismantle their welfare state and spend that money in American weapons. But european governments don’t care, they are all personally invested in american investment funds shares anyway. Why else would the german foreign minister claim that the opinion of german voters are not relevant to her?
Vassals at least had a two way relationship with the King. This is borderline colonial.
They threatened to blow it up for years without end and now you gotta buy natural gas from them at a premium.
What. We’re not buying US gas, not in any noticeable amount, that is. First of all usage was cut drastically (the likes of BASF could switch to other energy sources), most gas we still consume comes from Norway, LNG overall is only a tiny portion and of that most is Qatar.
If the US really did it then Germany is holding tight right now for Ukraine’s sake and there’s going to be hell to pay after the war.
Oh, and you gotta cut your welfare system and spend it all on american weapons too.
What. The only reason any amount of US hardware is on our shopping list is because Eurofighter GmbH doesn’t want to give the US access to data they’d need to certify US nukes for the Typhoon because industrial espionage. F-35s are already certified, available off the shelf, and our Tornado fleet really needs replacement but really, it’s just for the nukes: The EWAR Tornados are getting replaced not by F-35s, but more, freshly designed, Eurofighters. Down the line there’s going to be FCAS and likely French instead of US nukes. Now it’s not that I’m saying that France would be less prone to industrial espionage than the US, in fact they’re notorious for it, but they already have all that data through Airbus anyway.
Poland is going on a shopping spree for quite a lot of American hardware, but that’s another topic, also, focussed very much on airframes. Tanks and artillery are onshored South Korean systems (which are onshored German systems). France will never buy American because strategic autonomy, in fact they were right-out insulted when hearing Germany is going to buy F35s, but seem to have cooled down seeing that it’s a stop-gap solution.
As a third party can see, the risk to the Americans really was zero. Everything to gain, nothing to possibly lose. What, are the Germans gonna rebel somehow? They’ll fall over themselves to pretend the chains aren’t even there.
I mean revoking SAP licenses alone would crash the US economy so we don’t even have to wait until actual hardware that they depend on breaks.
Thing is Germany produces approximately everything there is under the sun and in a gazillion of areas we’re the only producers. Think a hospital’s logistics collapsing because they can’t get replacement parts for their pneumatic tube system, any more. The stuff you never think of, that’s what’s suddenly going to be missing, everywhere. Or when did you last think about how to get blood samples from bed to lab, drugs from pharmacy to bed, in a large hospital? Certainly not by email.
But realistically speaking the US would probably willingly pay damages and reparations. Materially or in some diplomatic quid pro quo manner and all of that is going to happen behind closed doors and we’ll know once records get unsealed.
