Can the EU be trusted with its own nukes? — RT World News

With l Farmers Rebellion, her The economy is decliningand her The decline of traditional partiesYou might think the EU has enough to worry about at home. However, its completely detached elites like to think broadly. What is bigger than nuclear weapons? And so they ended up falling prey to one of Donald Trump's usual crude provocations. The former – and likely future – US president did just that. to caution And that NATO members who do not spend enough on defense will not be able to rely on American protection during his reign.

It is quite plausible – why do declining, but still relatively wealthy, EU countries continue to behave like beggars on defence? – Trump's threat has triggered many expected collapses. White House Toot Toot About “Horrible and disturbed” Speech of the man who noUnlike current President Joe Biden, who is overseeing genocide with Israel. Go to the number, as they say in the US. On the other hand many Republicans have shown clear indifference, if not explicit agreement. Certainly this reflects what many ordinary Americans believe as well; That is, if they are thinking about Europe at all.

And as if the big scary orange guy hadn't done enough damage yet, next came the Pentagon, which (sort of) open That Russia — that famous gas station that sends its soldiers with shovels to seize German washing machines — is building, if not a Death Star, then at least something equally sinister in space: Sputnik déjà vu all over again, as Perhaps America's greatest philosophers said. All this, of course, against a backdrop of NATO's continued panic-mongering, which seems to have succeeded in scaring NATO more than anything else.

It is no wonder, then, that the reactions within the European Union and Europe to Trump's mockery were characterized by intense anxiety about abandoning the European Union. Among its symptoms was the call for the bloc – or NATO members in Europe; The issue is ambiguous: obtaining its own nuclear power. One way or another, Christian Lindner, Germany Minister of FinanceHe wasted no time decimating the state budget in an economy his Cabinet colleague, the children's book author and Economy Minister Robert Habeck, has just described as… “Badly bad” For the pen condition It calls on France (whose nuclear weapons are not subject to NATO) and Britain (which is no longer even a member of the European Union) – the two small nuclear powers – to intervene as the new security parents by extending their nuclear umbrellas to include everyone.

Katarina Barly, the eternally fresh-eyed Vice-President of the European Parliament The most prominent candidates in the European Union elections for the German Social Democratic Party – A party that leads a deeply unpopular government while approaching extinction at the ballot box – and Manfred WeberAs for the head of the Conservative bloc in the European Parliament, he keeps things more general: they simply suggest that the EU must get its own weapons of mass destruction, one way or another. Donald Tusk, recently reinstated as Viceroy of EU-controlled Poland, has raised similar voices. Well, who cares about details, right? This position of “Get involved and then you see.” It has proven an overwhelming success in Ukraine.

In fact, this is not a problem caused by Trump: In a world with more than one nuclear power, the US nuclear umbrella is over—and cannot be relied upon—anywhere other than the United States itself Fundamentally unreliable, of course. Permanent structural problem. Those who prefer realism to wishful thinking always understand this.

Henry Kissinger, for example, is a vicious and sometimes brutally honest practitioner Realpolitikwas explained as early as the 1950s – and perhaps more succinctly in A Television interview in 1958 – A little more than a decade after the dawn of the nuclear age. If an agent abroad is attacked so severely or successfully that only a US nuclear strike remains to respond, any American president – ​​whatever treaties are in place or what promises are made – will always face an impossible choice: shoot down the agent or suffer a retaliatory strike on America itself. It is true that various policies have been put in place to alleviate this dilemma (“Limited” Nuclear war, nuclear weapons sharing, or NATO intermediate-range missiles in the 1980s), but in reality, it cannot be solved.

And yet here we are. The European Union, which appears to be suffering from historical amnesia, is sparking talk of searching for nuclear weapons of its own. no Nuclear weapons already existed in US-allied Europe anyway, and in the national arsenals of France and Britain and US bases in Five countries from NATOAt least, we're already used to it, but different nuclear weapons, new nuclear weapons. We have yet to discover nuclear weapons, their policies, and their rules. What could go wrong? Everything, really. But let's be a little more detailed.

First of all, the elites in the EU and Europe immediately showed, as expected, division and confusion. In essence, although no one intended to advocate nuclear weapons as a challenge to the United States, it was still too much for NATO's hard-line compradorists: German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. And the head of NATO. From the Defense Committee of the German Parliament – W “jokingly” “Volksstorm”-nostalgia (No kidding) – Mary Agnes Strack Zimmerman rushed to It contains The somewhat unintentionally subversive idea that Europe might try to do anything significant on its own. Do not accept the idea! A house divided against itself is not a safe place to have nuclear weapons.

Second, nuclear weapons are of course reserved for extreme emergencies, a means of last resort either to serve deterrence through the threat of retaliation on the basis that we will take you with us when everything is lost anyway (the purpose of Britain and France's plan). arsenals) or, at best, in the event of imminent and catastrophic defeat. One implication of this fact is that the decision to use it will end with either one person or a very small group hiding in a basement. Who would it be in the case of the European Union? Chairman of the committee, for example? That someone like Ursula von der Leyen, who is self-promoting, short-sighted, reckless, power-grabbing, and devoid of any electoral legitimacy, really serves the United States and not Europe? good luck!

How might the EU overcome the fact that any such final decision-maker would also have national allegiances: perhaps an Estonian or Polish citizen, from countries with their own risky agendas and, frankly, nationalist complexes? Or perhaps someone from Spain or Greece, which countries might largely be spared the immediate effects of large-scale fighting in Central Europe, and thus would have no reasonable incentive to burn down Madrid or Athens to make a final point about Latvia or indeed Germany? Form a committee (consensus rules or majority vote on when to press the last red button?), and all you'll get is a doubling down of clashing and divided loyalties.

Third, and more generally, can you imagine today's European Union – or anything emerging from it – possessing weapons of mass destruction? That is, a club of nations, most of which are now stubbornly complicit (ICJ be damned) in the ongoing genocide in the Middle East (perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinians), and many of which have a pathological obsession with crusades against Russia. None of them can realize that the greatest threat to their sovereignty comes from their own “Allies” in Washington.

This brings us to the final and most fundamental problem: this entire discussion of nuclear weapons for Europe is built on strangely vague premises that reveal that the EU and Europe are not at all politically mature enough to possess such weapons (if any country possesses them at all). Because if that were the case, Iran's strategists and politicians would honestly acknowledge and discuss one simple fact: that nuclear power must be capable of deterrence. all A very dangerous potential adversary, including of course the United States. However, these are the same leaders who simply ignored that the greatest act of war, eco-terrorism, and destruction of critical infrastructure against the EU – the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines – was launched by Washington, whether directly or via proxies. .

The European Union is a large bloc of countries in an increasingly unstable and lawless world, where wider proliferation of nuclear weapons becomes inevitable. In theory, such an entity would be a candidate to possess such weapons. However, in reality, the EU lacks three essential qualities for it to even consider having one: it is too divided, it has no serious concept of its own interests as separate from, even opposed to, the United States, and it lacks an elite capable of engaging with the United States. They can be remotely trusted with weapons capable of ending the world. There, of course, he is not alone. But isn't having one United States on planet Earth already bad enough?