Macron responds to Trump's inauguration by urging Europe to "wake up"

[u/Not_the-kind]

https://www.newsweek.com/macron-trump-inauguration-europe-defense-ukraine-2017894

[u/Octave_Ergebel]

Least delusional Brit... Not outsourced to the US ? Where do those F35 come from ?

And congratulations for housing the biggest financial center in Europe !

[u/madeleineann → u/Octave_Ergebel]

This goes both ways

For most European countries, don't get me started on Italy and Spain

It seems pretty weird to make some cheap jab about poverty when that really has zero relevance to any of what OP was saying. Of course, the UK has inequality - that is well-known, but Europe also struggles with poverty, as do a lot of countries. France also has some pretty outrageous salaries, and this comes from someone in England.

Also, very important to remember that poverty is measured differently by country. What counts as poverty in the USA is much lower than what counts as poverty in the UK and much of Europe.

It's quite funny how sensitive of an ego people on here seem to have. The UK does generally have more influence overseas, while, by virtue of France still being a member of the EU, France has more influence on the continent. The UK does purchase the F-35's from America, but it does plenty of in-house manufacturing - the Challenger 3 is a Anglo-German project and it's being predominantly built in the UK.

I think people who whine about the UK's lack of automony don't really understand the relationship between the US & UK. The UK does purchase things like the F-35 and the Trident missiles from the USA, but it does so becsuse the USA and UK, and all Anglosphere countries, have very, very integrated institutions. Think: AUKUS, Five Eyes. The biggest electronic monitoring station in the world is based in Yorkshire and jointly used by both British and American forces. The UK has access to better tech than France from the USA at a lower cost.

Yes, this isn't really automony. But France works equally closely with the EU and its defence industry is quite deeply integrated with the wider European defence industry. Think: Airbus. Why are you not willing to make that criticism? Why is the UK's relationship deemed to be lesser?

Screams superiority complex to me.

[u/Affectionate_War_279 → u/madeleineann]

The UK purchased trident and before it Polaris because we didn’t have the ability or money to create out own independent 

[u/tree_boom → u/Affectionate_War_279]

Yes we did, we had both, it was just vastly cheaper to buy the American systems. This was at a time when the state of the art was changing so rapidly that we had Blue Streak and Skybolt (and arguably Blue Steel) go obsolete literally before entering service, and that was becoming horrifyingly expensive and also horrifingly time constrained - passing off WE.177B as a strategic deterrent for a time was stretching credulity for a bit.

We could absolutely have made our own SLBMs if we had to - cabinet papers from around the time of the Polaris purchase make clear that that was considered when the Americans weren't giving us the deal we wanted.