Joint Declaration by Ministers of Germany, France, Poland, Italy, Spain, UK

Given the direction the US appears headed in this is a timely and critical issue for Europe to address.

0% chance Germany will commit to this, it will require too much political reform and no politician wants to spend the political capital on it. Germanys problems are institutional and the bureaucracy around the military is mostly built for self sabotage.

They just want the US to get off their backs so they can go back to building nord stream 3, there is no 4D chess being played here.

A timely message, particularly given the apparent sabotage of undersea cables and other hubrid warfare we've been seeing recently.

I hope this also helps with morale in Ukraine.

Full title:

> Joint Declaration by the Foreign Ministers of Germany, France, Poland, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom in Warsaw

For those blocked: https://archive.md/16A71

Related:

Finland and Germany on the severed undersea cable in the Baltic Sea

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42178018

> enhance resilience to cognitive warfare and hybrid threats in Europe, also through the relevant EU mechanisms, and promote the resilience of our societies

This is really interesting to me.

I'm wondering what a systematic approach to combat fake news, foreign interference, and other social media abuse would look like.

Serious questions: what was the point of giving ukraine weapons but not enabling them to attack russia for 2 years ?

You can't stop a war if you are only allowed to defend. That's not how ANY fight work in ANY field.

Does this also include dropping all restrictions on the missiles they've provided to Ukraine?

> strengthen NATO by stepping up our security and defence expenditure, in line with our previous commitments, while reaffirming that, in many cases, expenditure beyond 2% of GDP will be needed to address rising threats to security and meet the requirements to deter and defend across all domains in the Euro-Atlantic area

most of EU countries can barely pass a budget without deficit, can't see them actually cutting things to move budget to defense

It's either huge deficits or impossible policies that won't pass by any parliament

Good thing that Europe can buy arms and oil from the US!

>including the economic and financing power of the European Union and by reinforcing Europe’s industrial base. >invest in our critical military capabilities

Ain't that a joke. So first these people spent like 35 years deindustrializing away the old manufacturing sectors away, and then with the regulatory perpetual machine known as European Union they spent decades strangling any and all novel industries to death in their cribs. Not to mention the ever increasing tax burden this virtue signalling lunacy places on the populace. Now that it turns out that paper shuffling does not in fact produce anything physically tangible, they wish to wave a magic wand and somehow conjure an industrial base into existence that had taken previously taken well over half a century of careful cultivation to bring into being.

>enhance resilience to cognitive warfare and hybrid threats in Europe, also through the relevant EU mechanisms, and promote the resilience of our societies, Cool, so more regulations against freedom of speech then? It wouldn't do at all if young people wondered as to why there hasn't been any tangible economic growth for the last 15 years, or why they can't ever own a home like their parents or grandparents did. After all, asking those kind of questions is a threat to our European Union's democratic values.

To me this statement looks like, they can't really make bold statements, so they make vague ones instead

The timing is interesting. It seems too close to the Russian nuclear doctrine update to be planned that way, so I'm guessing it's instead partly about appeasing the new US administration?

"We'll buy more Lockheed Martin gear, please don't dismantle NATO"

"If you want peace, prepare for war."

Great news. Europe deserves lasting peace!

Weird that the declaration is by those few countries from EU + UK, yet they talk about the future of EU. Why weren't the other EU countries involed / invited?

So there's clearly a lot of reading between the lines to be done in recent days, since the US escalated the Ukraine war by allowing strikes into Russia with US missiles.

Along with Trump's blow and bluster on the issue - don't forget he'll be in charge in just a month or so.

It seems some kind of campaign is in progress, and anyone taking the news at face value at the moment is probably being manipulated.

I see a few problems with this declaration.

1. There’s no hard commitment to NATO budget targets. Until Germany spends at least 2% for a decade on rebuilding it’s military, those are just words. Next coalition may change it any time.

2. There’s zero chance there will be a peace anywhere close to what’s desired by Ukraine or that Ukraine will be the sole party to negotiations. NATO has already lost this war because it was too slow, indecisive and weak. Again empty words and everyone understands that.

3. EU is nowhere close in military integration and economic flexibility to match the threat, even with that declaration. For example I cannot imagine IG Metall agreeing to work in three shifts to boost production of shells or drones.

What is really necessary is to admit that USA cannot guarantee anyone anything, this war is lost and partitioning of Ukraine now will save lives. EU has to build its own union army with nuclear deterrence, fast-track admission of the remaining part of Ukraine and put there its own military (maybe in violation of the peace treaty).

Or accept that we have a bigger goal than democracy in Eastern Europe and work with Putin on climate change and global security, hoping that he will die soon anyway and things will get easier if next president won’t have KGB background.

Never forget: Russia can end the war tomorrow. Simply give up and start retreating.

Well, that's why Russia supported its newly-reelected useful idiot here in America, right?

I wonder what the body-language experts say about their body language when they got out of the off-the-record face-to-face meeting they had in (IIRC) Finland.

No notes of that meeting were kept. How the hell can the president be able to not keep a record of their meeting with an adversarial power's president?

This just a few days after Joe Biden authorizes Ukraine to use U.S. long-range missiles in Russia.

How many of Russia's ~5k nukes are these countries willing to take hits from in order to protect Ukraine?

That is nice posturing. They drag out "hybrid warfare" yet again to move more power to the EU, increase defense spending and strengthen the U.S. dependency.

Meanwhile EU citizens are getting poorer, industry moves away from Germany and the geopolitical situation gets worse. The audacity of these ministers to claim that "their" security policy has worked is unparalleled. Merkel warned of NATO expansion, now incompetent war mongers like Baerbock, Habeck, Scholz (and Merz in the opposition) claim they have the solutions while the world is burning.

Their pensions are safe. The future of the EU economy and the citizen's pensions are not.

It's time for peace, not time to further enrich and empower the military industrial "defence" sector.

I fail to understand how would the permission to attack Russia with long range weapons would benefit any other than the arms dealing elite.

Russia is not going away, nato is not going away.

The only option is peace.