That would rule out Murdoch…

The war in Ukraine also binds Western resources, which means they can not be used against China directly. Hence Trump wanting peace in Ukraine. However it also means the Europe is rearming, which creates military potential. This might very well turn into a highly intressting dynamic, if Ukraine wins the war. Since Trump largely stopped supporting Ukraine, the support would be mostly European. It also eliminates the biggest threat to Europe at least for a few years. So you end up with a massive military potential in Europe, which the US really would like to use against China. So the US turns from the protector of Europe into wanting Europe to send aid, if China starts some sort of war. Obviously Trump turning the US into a dictatorship does not help at all.

Every country in the world considers Taiwan to be offically part of China. The difference is what government they consider legitimate. As for the EU, Taiwan is de facto treated as an independent country with nearly all countries having de facto embassies in Taiwan and Taiwan having de facto embassies in EU countries as well.

So accept might be quite strong in this case.

China is not waging a massive war right now. So if I were part of a Russo-Chinese couple, then I would prefer China.

Thank god everybody over 18 has developed those skills…

3.5% is roughly what is needed to bring a military like the Bundeswehr to a level to fight a large scale war within a few years. Most of Europe is in a similar situation to Germany here.

The 1.5% are just a way to appease Trump. It is easy to pick some budget items, which would have been paid anyway, and call them defence spending. In the case of Germany it is actually even better, as Germany has recently changed its consitutional debt brake to include defence spending. So this basically opens up the debt brake to pretty much any sort of infrastructure spending…

3.5% of it are for military spending as currently measured by NATO(right now Germany is at 2% of GDP). The other 1.5% are meant for defence infrastructure, resilience and civil prepardness. You could make a good case of say wind trubines being defence related, as they make German infrastructure more resilient to events similar to Russia turning of gas supply to Germany.

GDP per capita of Russia is at about the global one. So there are a lot of alternatives for potential migrants. The biggest source for Russia is Central Asia and we are seeing a shift away from going to Russia in that region. For example the Uzbeks work with South Korea on 100k migrant visas.

Another huge part is that Russia is targeting migrant workers on a massive scale right now.

Russia has billions in frozen assets and they sell oil at a discount. Putin has the money for massive infrastructure spending to grow the economy, if he wanted to.

Exactly. Even in the best case there are sanctions against them. Worsed case something like Syria, Sudan or Yemen is going on and they commit war crimes.

If sanctions against Israel for violating human rights is “doing the right thing”, then it would imply sanctions against other countries for violating human rights as well. Basically that would mean some form of sanctions against the entire Middle East. Certainly that does not mean good relations with those countries.

“Doing the right thing” basically means pissing of all Arab countries as well. They are all authoritarian regimes right now. So any principled stance against them would mean being hated by the entire Middle East.

The strategy if a rules based international order is dead already. Not due to the EU, but the US was the center point of that and they just broke the system. There will also always be flaws in the EU, which will be pointed out by Russian propaganda. There is plenty of racism in the EU and it is not going away. There places like New Caledonia, which are in a very complex limbo of colonialism with France, which half the population loves and the other half hates. Easy to turn that into propaganda.

The right to protest has not been destroyed by foreign policy either, but by big fossil fuel. The first massive crack downs were not on anti Israel protests, but on climate protests.

EDIT: Just to be clear, it should be done to do the right thing, but not because it would actually help the EU. It just is not going to.

Israel obviously…

The admin seems to have an account https://social.bund.de/@itteam

Russia is trying to restore the Soviet Union and Kazakhstan is a key country for that. Especially since it has a massive Russian population similar to Ukraine.

Kazakhstan…

Russia might be advancing, but it is doing so incredibly slowly. Over the last year Russia took 0.75% of Ukraine. None of which being a major city. Saying Ukraine will fall due to that is pretty naive. This is clearly a war of attrition.

When you look at that Russia is in much worse shape. Its massive Soviet era weapons stockpiles are shrinking. The economy seems to be in trouble and they have to pay a lot of money to attract new soldiers. This is not to say the war will end soon. I can not predict that, but that there are other metrics involved in a war, which matter a lot. Keep in mind that WW1 ended with not a single enemy soldier on German core soil(besides colonies).

200 spies is a lot. MI6 has 3644 employees total, which obviously mostly are not in embassies.

This is also done today, but more importantly: Why does it make anybody a cunt? Embassies are meant to promote one countries interest in another country. Military sales are certainly part of that. They do not seem to have bribed anybody or something like that, otherwise it would be part of the article.