I hate China
this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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Its so funny to me that it takes Sweden like a week to become an official NATO member but Ukraine is still getting lead on.
Countries in active conflicts cannot join NATO
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Huzzah! Welcome to the team, Sweden. We can all be self defense buddies together! =D
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Irasshaimase~ er, welcome! This isn't really that big of news imo, they were pretty much already a member kinda.
I don't like the expansion of NATO, but due to Russia's recent imperialism, Sweden's and Finland's reactions are completely reasonable. A much healthier alternative would have been actually advancing towards an integrated European defense system involving EU members, with a door open to certain neighbours such as Norway, but it's pretty hard to do that when the political groups that could actually promote that alternative are schizophrenically tolerating positions such as "I'm a pacifist, so I'm advocating for my own country's disarmament despite my neighbours starting wars very recently" and "if Ukraine didn't want to get invaded, they shouldn't have sought guarantees against Russian aggression from third countries".
I think Europeans in general psychologically still feel themselves weak without NATO, unable to fill the needs of their own defense.
I've been reading about 1st Indochina war yesterday, so - emotionally biased.
EU's population: 448 million
EU GDP: 19 trillion dollars
Russia's population: 143 million
Russia's GDP: 1,78 trillion dollars
Simplifying a bit here (I'm obviously taking Morocco and Belarus for granted, assuming that Turkey wouldn't attack Greece, and so on), but it's pretty much a "gotta get our shit together" situation, because there's no reason why we should depend on the US for defense, or anything else.
That's about architecture more than resources. "Gotta get our shit together" doesn't negate the fact that shit isn't together yet.
It's good to have resources, but such a situation is still weakness. Only I think NATO in some sense is a contributing factor, and EU frankly too, both not in the least because of all those veto and consensus rules.
I assume you meant trillion and not million for those gdp figures? Even then, they're low.
Fixed, good catch
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