doglatine
3mo ago
Fun to think what European defense and industrial policy might look like in the event of a total breakdown in the post-war transatlantic alliance system (conditional on European leaders actually growing a pair, i.e., on hell freezing over). Here are some ideas that came out of a drunken groupchat with some security wonk friends tonight and summarised by R1:
Defense
• European Defense Force with Independent Command: Phased withdrawal from NATO integrated command structure while establishing a purely European military alliance with France as the nuclear guarantor and Germany providing conventional backbone.
• Strategic Defense Technology Embargo: Immediate moratorium on new U.S. defense procurement contracts with accelerated transition plan (5-7 years) to phase out existing U.S. systems. European defense contractors given emergency powers to reverse-engineer critical components.
• Military Base Sovereignty Initiative: Formal 24-month notice to terminate all Status of Forces Agreements with the U.S., with negotiated transition periods only where absolutely necessary for European security.
• European Nuclear Deterrent Expansion: Franco-German nuclear sharing agreement with French warheads placed under joint European command structure. Fast-track development of new European delivery systems not dependent on U.S. technology.
• Counter-Intelligence Offensive: Comprehensive review of all U.S. intelligence operations in Europe with expulsion of suspected intelligence officers and enhanced counter-surveillance against U.S. electronic intelligence gathering.
Economics & Industry
• Strategic Industry Protection Act: Mandatory European ownership requirements for critical infrastructure and technology companies. Forced divestiture of U.S. majority-owned assets in energy, telecommunications, defense, and advanced manufacturing within 36 months.
• Digital Sovereignty Enforcement: European internet traffic routing law requiring all European data to remain on European networks. Complete firewall system to regulate U.S. digital services with capability to block access if diplomatic conditions deteriorate.
• Energy Independence Acceleration Plan: Emergency powers for nuclear construction in willing nations with cross-border agreements to share capacity. German solar/wind expansion with French nuclear backup through enhanced grid interconnections. Phaseout of U.S. energy imports.
• European Technology Sovereignty Fund: €500 billion fund for European alternatives to U.S. technology platforms, semiconductor manufacturing, and cloud services with preferential procurement rules for European public entities.
• Space Independence Initiative: Tripling of European Space Agency budget with fast-track development of alternative satellite networks. Security review of all SpaceX operations in Europe with potential for forced technology transfer.
Finance & Diplomacy
• Euro Primacy Initiative: Requirement for all energy transactions involving European entities to be conducted in euros. Introduction of euro-denominated oil and gas contracts with major suppliers.
• European Clearing House: New European interbank settlement system isolated from U.S. financial infrastructure with capability to process transactions with sanctioned entities if determined to be in European strategic interest.
• Anti-Dollar Diplomacy Campaign: Strategic diplomatic engagement with BICS [sic] nations to create formal mechanisms for reducing dollar dependency in international trade.
• Counter-Sanctions Framework: Preemptive legislation authorizing immediate reciprocal sanctions against U.S. entities if sanctions are placed on European companies. Includes targeting of U.S. financial institutions operating in Europe.
• European Foreign Asset Protection Law: Legal framework to shield European overseas assets from potential U.S. seizure through complex ownership structures and diplomatic agreements with third countries.
Economic Countermeasures
• Reciprocal Tariff Authorization: Automatic trigger mechanism imposing 35% tariffs on U.S. goods in response to any U.S. tariff increases, particularly targeting politically sensitive sectors (agriculture, automotive, aerospace).
• European Export Control Regime: Restrictions on European exports that support critical U.S. supply chains, leveraging dependencies in areas like specialty chemicals, precision components, and industrial machinery.
• Intellectual Property Retaliation System: Framework for suspending U.S. intellectual property protections in Europe in response to economic aggression, with particular focus on pharmaceutical and entertainment industries.
• Corporate Tax Equalization: Special taxation regime for U.S. multinational corporations operating in Europe to offset advantages from U.S. economic policies hostile to European interests.
doglatine
3mo ago
For broadly the same reasons that the Soviet Union supported Communist parties around the world. Of course American citizens don't need to care about their ideological fellow travellers outside the US (to be clear, I'm mainly talking about Reform, FN, AfD, and so on - I agree that the Tory party are at best a 'post-ideological' organisation), and isolationism has always been and remains a choice that the US can make. If the US is happy to wash its hands of affairs in Israel, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Brazil, or anywhere else, no-one is stopping them from doing that.
However, to the extent that US wants to secure markets for its exports, have influence on international organisations, gain intelligence on threats overseas, limit the rise of China, control immigration flows, and protect its allies, it will in turn need international partners. This will be far easier if they can help get some ideologically sympathetic parties into positions of power.
doglatine
3mo ago
America currently spends a comparatively small amount of money in exchange for global hegemon status. This means that it has a huge influence in the foreign policy of most G20 nations. European leaders line up to kowtow to the new Big Man in The White House after every US election. If China seems to be making inroads into European markets, America can lean on domestic governments to have them barred or stymied. US arms manufacturers are prioritised for contracts across the free world. Its tech companies are given comparatively free rein. Its cultural products dominate cinemas and streaming services. Its navy and airforce can rely on a global network of old European bases for staging and resupply. It has an outsize seat at every serious international forum.
All of that currently relies on a 'package deal' with its allies - in exchange for security guarantees and a committee to upholding the LIO, it gets to be the Leader Of The Free World, with all the perks and privileges that entails.
The US can drop the package, and try to negotiate for these privileges on a line-by-line basis. My expectation, though, is that some of them will be outright off the table, while others will be a lot more expensive to purchase individually.
In the UK, France, and Germany, Trump’s approval ratings are his lowest in basically the entire world, and even in the explicitly reactionary European subs like /r/badunitedkingdom, Trump is a very divisive figure.
If anything, Trump's shenanigans will be a boon to the various dissident right-wing parties in the EU.
This distancing is literally already happening.
A lot of American conservatives seem to be in blissful ignorance about how negatively Trump is perceived in Europe, especially given the bizarre events of the last month. I literally know more self-identified European fascists than European Trump stans. Of course, there’s no reason why Americans have to care what Europeans think, but when we’re literally talking about European public opinion, it’s important to get things right.
However, I don’t want to presume; if you’re a European, though, I’d be curious to know where you’re from (maybe Poland?) such that your perceptions of Trump’s reputation here are so different from mine.
doglatine
3mo ago
As a Brit, it pains me to see another Anglosphere country repeat the folly of throwing its empire away.
doglatine
3mo ago
"Have you said thank you?" "Yes, frequently." "But have you said thank you today?"
This is the way you talk to a child, not a junior partner. The US has bought vast amounts of soft power in Ukraine and a permanent ally on the doorstep of its long-term geopolitical adversary, and is squandering those expensive gains for the sake of Trump's TV show.
doglatine
3mo ago
Worth noting that this kind of incident is very bad for right-wing parties in Europe and the Anglosphere. Trump is monumentally unpopular in Europe, the UK, Canada, and Australia, and support for Ukraine remains very high. Additionally, this kind of "Reality TV diplomacy" is generally poorly received outside the US. The result will be that right-wing parties in these countries will likely have to distance themselves from Trump, and even that may not be enough to restore their pre-Trump election hopes (witness the recent resurgence of the LPC, in no small a gift from Trump).
Even if American conservatives don't care about Ukraine, I assume some of them care about global influence and leadership, especially among their historical allies. Part of the key to achieving this is assisting in the political success of ideological conspecifics in these nations, whereas this kind of bluster entirely thwarts that goal.
Of course, there are some on the American right who would be only too happy to dismantle the post-WW2 alliance system in favour of a more narrowly transactional approach, even at the cost of global influence and leadership. Even setting aside that this is unlikely to be a long-term winning position ideologically with the American electorate, I would note that empires are hard to build and easy to lose. The consequences of a global geopolitical decoupling between the US and its historical allies could be significant: US defense contractors being excluded from arms deals, tariffs or barriers to US firms operating in the EU, a rise in Chinese economic influence in the developed world, and a sidelining of US interests in global forums.
doglatine
3mo ago
FWIW Grok 3 has not impressed me at all so far. It seems very confused about its abilities and more prone to hallucination than any post GPT-4 class model I’ve used. Additionally, the benchmark scores so far have been underwhelming. For example, a lot of Grok 3’s higher scores (the bits of the bar charts shaded in a lighter colour) rely on cons@64, shorthand for running the input prompt 64 times and then taking the consensus of results, which isn’t practical for most people. xAI are not alone in doing this, but it does make a difference for pairwise comparisons.
Musk has thrown vast amounts of money and compute at xAI and in the process he’s built something not quite SotA. OpenAI still the team to beat on performance, DeepSeek on efficiency, and Anthropic for vibes.
doglatine
4mo ago
Surely part of having a triple-lock on the branches of government allows you to get past varieties of "your rules" towards "our rules"?
doglatine
4mo ago
I'd say the flip-side of that is that it's a mistake to read modern concepts of homosexual identity into historical reports same-sex activity. There are lots of contexts - from militaries to prisons to boarding schools - where a significant proportion of men will engage in some degree of same-sex sexual experimentation. This doesn't mean that those men are socially or intrinsically homosexual or even bisexual, any more than it means that the Ancient Greeks were homosexual in the modern connotation of the term.
doglatine
4mo ago
Definitely possible that’s the reason, but dudes fucking dudes was definitely a thing in the Middle Ages (and viewed in a very dim light), and notably it didn’t usually take the form of an exclusive sexual identity (cf Achilles and Briseis and Patroclus) so calling them “bisexual” is arguably a bit anachronistic. Maybe there was some Plaion DEI influence, but it’s also possible that they just wanted to expand the romantic options open to players.
doglatine
4mo ago
I don’t know, actually. There’s been at least a hint of homoeroticism between Hans and Henry before. Nothing that couldn’t be passed off as “locker room banter”, but it wouldn’t be the first time that young men going to war together and getting up to mischief might do a bit of fooling around.
Yes, my thoughts exactly. While I haven’t reached that part of the game yet, my immediate thought when I heard about this NPC was that his dialogue likely reflects the arrogance or self-assurance of the 15th century Islamic world, and his dialogue shouldn’t be taken as “Word of God.”
In general, KCD does a good job of making its NPCs believably medieval and non-cartoonish, with my favourite example being an Inquisitor in the first game who is literally trying one of your childhood friends for heresy. If you respectfully question him about the need for this kind of policing of the faith, he gives a very good answer — in short, “listen kid, look around, open your eyes, Christendom is in crisis. We have an antipope in Avignon, we’re still recovering from the plague, we’ve lost Jerusalem, and everyone is scared and lost, the last thing we need is more addled fools proclaiming that they’ve got a direct hotline to God.”
doglatine
4mo ago
As a huge fan of the first game, I’d flag that in addition to the main antagonist being gay, there’s a very sympathetic novice monk you can meet in Sasau Monastery, and if you dig into his backstory with some snooping, you can learn that he was sent to the monastery after a love affair with another man. You can confront him about this, and either tell him you don’t see what he did as sinful, or that you consider his acts abominable. So gay themes were definitely present in a subdued way in the first game.
doglatine
4mo ago
Trump seems to be very interested in acquisitions and land. Maybe it's a legacy thing, or maybe he's just a real estate developer at heart. Possibly Bibi told him words to the effect of "we've got a nice patch of real estate for you on the Med, want to take it off our hands?" and Trump got suckered.
doglatine
4mo ago
Perhaps the clearest case here is animal welfare. I care about the issue a lot, and no-one would normally think it relevant to ask me “How does animal suffering affect you personally?”
doglatine
4mo ago
the broader rationalist sphere as a bunch of very crazy people
Awesome fiction tho
doglatine
5mo ago
Despite being a huge fan of the 40K universe (and an enthusiastic modeler/painter), I've never actually read any Black Library books, just some old Warhammer fantasy stuff from the 1990s. I take it you'd recommend the Ciaphias Cain books then?
I very much relate to this, and I worry about it, because back when I was a college student I’d read long-form fiction for pleasure all the time. My inclination to do so has been in steady decline since then.
One of my resolutions for 2025 is to try rebuilding my pleasure-reading habits via simpler, more accessible, and more addictive reading projects — cheesy fantasy, military sci-fi, Black Library texts, LitRPGs, etc.. Once I've refreshed the relevant pathways in my brain and once again enjoy long-form reading as a go-to leisure activity, I can get ambitious again. With all that in mind, I’m so far a couple of thousand pages into Alexander Wales’ “Worth the Candle” series and absolutely loving it.
doglatine
5mo ago
Basically all Western immigration systems are incontinent in the sense that they —
(1) allow the right for anyone arriving in the country (legally or illegally) to lodge a claim for asylum in accordance with the 1951 UN refugee convention
(2) provide guaranteed rights for new citizens to sponsor visas for non-citizen family members
(3) do not condition entitlements (benefits, voting rights, etc.) on any basis beyond citizenship; once you’re in, you’re in, and any attempts to restrict this principle can be resisted via the “second class citizen” meme.
On top of this, educational polarisation means that the people actually making immigration decisions (magistrates and civil servants) are almost guaranteed to be sympathetic to any and all asylum and immigration claims.
In short, the West is utterly fucked unless and until governments are willing to make radical breaks in international treaties and national constitutional law.
To be sure, if future US administrations want to hit the 'reset' button and go back to the old ways of doing things, then they can try to be friends with whoever they like, as they have done in the past, as you note. However, the mainstream European left, right, and centre is deeply committed to the Liberal International Order that Trump is crusading against.
That means a Trump or future Vance administration has to look to the fringes for real allies, and basically no Communist or radical left organisations would given him a look, not least because of his stance on Israel and Gaza (which frustratingly are the primary fixation for the European radical left right now). That leaves basically only one group of parties that would are openly to a close alliance (as opposed to a marriage of convenience), namely the non-establishment nationalist right - parties like FN, Fidesz, AfD, and Reform, all of who have relatively cosy relationships with Trump already. However, the more Trump acts in ways that harm Europe's security interests, the harder it is for these parties to maintain this relationship, at least without suffering political harm.
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