From Tuchman's The Guns of August:
A question that [Brigadier General Henry] Wilson asked of [General Ferdinand] Foch during his second visit in January 1910, evoked an answer which expressed in one sentence the problem of the alliance with England, as the French saw it. “What is the smallest British military force that would be of any practical assistance to you?” Wilson asked. Like a rapier flash came Foch’s reply, “A single British soldier—and we will see to it that he is killed.”
People's attitudes often change when their sons and daughters are on the line.
I think US rapidly crossed from being a useful ally, through being an unreliable one to a genuine hindrance for NATO, from Europe's PoV. Not sure about Canada, and I feel for them.
I'm confident Europe can get its act together against Russia. It has more people, far more GDP etc. But it's stuck an an awful trance of defeatism.
US meanwhile seems to be setting fire to so much of the world that they may soon be calling on allies to help them out. Ironic that the only NATO collective defense response was Europe joining the US in Afghanistan.
Somehow Europeans care more about Greenland than Ukraine, so maybe this is the final straw.
Can anyone articulate any rational reason for the threat of the US invading and annexing Greenland? Aside from economics, there is nothing preventing US or international mining interesting from mining there today, is there? What are the other possible reasons?
Does anybody get the looming impression that the probability they'll die in war is approaching 1? I don't know which country / group of countries it'll be against, but I get the impression that a lot of our fates are being written out right now.
Advertisements around where I live are gradually all becoming about joining the military. My country is sending troops to territories as if they are tripwires.
> Does anybody get the looming impression that the probability they'll die in war is approaching 1?
No. If I had this level of anxiety, I would disconnect from news and online media for a little while to take a walk in the forest to clear my mind and calm down.
I'm already there. I never use social media and I limit news consumption to once per week for catching up.
I'm seeing these messages in the real world. Adverts on the side of buses are telling me to enlist in greater frequency, and job sites have positions in the Royal Army pinned above everything else.
Not by colloquial usage of the term, which is often (and in this case) limited to the subset of larger global human-content firehoses where the problems inherent to that dynamic become more dramatic, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, shorts feeds, things like Instagram and Reddit maybe, etc.
As things get worse, this advice gets less relevant. You no longer have to be addicted to social media or 24-hour news to be worried about what's happening. You don't even really need to be paying explicit attention at all.
To call the headline "US threatens to invade Greenland" unprecedented would be an understatement. You only need to see it once to be justifiably anxious.
I'm too old for this: not only am I not going to get called up, I also remember the Cold War, where everyone really did think there was a significant risk of a nuclear exchange at any time.
Mind you, the logic of MAD was a lot more .. logical? The canonical example of a cold game theoretic perspective leading combined with enough irrational paranoia to make an unstable situation.
We're more likely to have a war over a dumb tweet.
Between war, climate change effects, antibiotic resistant bacteria and Alzheimer's, for myself I think I'd pick war. Hard to know what to wish for my children.
> However, the European Nato deployment consists of only a few dozen personnel as part of Danish-led joint exercises called Operation Arctic Endurance. While heavy in symbolism, it was not immediately clear how long they would stay.
Like, we came, we saw, we gone? How many ppls can they deploy in the long term?
This is a tripwire to spike cost of taking by force. Europe doesn't have the blue-water navy or air power to fight a peer war with America but also does not need to.
Europe cannot fight a peer war with America: on day one the Americans cut off our cloud services, and all government administration falls over.
(logical consequence of this is that the US invading Greenland is really bad for any US startups, such as one might find on HN, because it makes the EU much more likely to respond with "local only" rules)
Europe isn't the US and it isn't China, but it is collectively one of the preeminent military and economic powers in the world. So, as long as they'd like.
Ironically, the US military has historically had more military personnel deployed in Greenland than Denmark. The US has continuously operated a military base at Thule for the better part of a century.
These kinds of joint exercises are pretty common and largely symbolic.
(The wikipedia page about this contains blatant partisan propaganda. Gross.)
How many "ppls" did Afghanistan deploy, long-term, against TWO different superpowers, with only discreet, behind-the-scenes support from other nations?
Invasion and control of another country that has more than paleolithic technology is pretty damned hard. Harder than anyone who attempst it ever guesses. ("They will welcome us as liberators!" - the stupidest thing ever said by a pre-Trump POTUS.)
It's even harder if a majority of the invading population hates the idea, and a significant part of the military doubt the constitutionality of their orders.
Oh, and two nuclear powers would be openly defending Greenland.
It would be cheaper and more popular to pile $9B in bills on the National Mall and set them ablaze.
There's no reasonable debate about whether the US has the capability to capture Greenland. Obviously they do. It's in their backyard in an area the US military has been patrolling for decades, with (admittedly decrepit) US bases already present.
The question is whether the US is willing to pay the costs to do so. Sending European troops is attempting to raise the costs of invasion so that any rational actor would decide against it. Of course, we wouldn't be in this situation if all the parties involved were rational actors.
We had the capability to capture Iraq and Afghanistan too. Occupying a territory is the actual hard point. For one, Greenland is in the middle of nowhere compared to everywhere else the US has to keep eyes on, whereas its in the back yard of Canada and the UK.
More importantly though, its an incredibly cold and unhospitable place thats inhabited by 50k people whose little kids have more arctic survival skills than US special forces and who really, really don't want us there. Unlike Afghanistan, you can't patrol the skies nonstop with drones either due to the cold.
Basically, this isn't a choice between owning Greenland or keeping all our allies. Its a choice between keeping all our allies vs getting bogged down into the ultimate guerilla war and suddenly having nothing but hostile neighbors to the north.
From the UK: I suspect the response would be the same as the response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and the use of chemical weapons in the UK: a stiffly worded letter and some legal action, followed by efforts to disentangle economically. Maybe we'll sanction an oligarch or two.
We would see exactly what people in the US have been dealing with for 10 years. Everybody would wring their hands and say "unbelievable!" and then nobody with the actual capability to do anything about it actually does.
The entire world is just rooting for Father Time on this particular problem.
I believe that's true: if Trump attacked Greenland, NATO would fall apart (regardless of Europe's response, if they allow it or not), and then Putin would have a once in a generation chance to take the baltics, maybe mess with Poland. He would have to take that chance, and then Europe would have to retaliate, and its effectively WW3.
Spooky times, let's hope things fizzle out back to a rule based Pax Americana.
Edit: Interestingly, the likelyhood of things fizzling out would jump up quite a bit if Trump or Putin were to die. I think the US system of government is prone to electing Trumps, but it's not a given, I think the cult of personality would die and things would relax for now.
France is sending 15 soldiers, Germany 13. Not sure how much the other countries are sending, but at that rate, they seem to expect a US invasion force of 100 people and probably a few dogsleds?
The US has done this historically for allies, too, a small deployment along with a public reiteration of a defense commitment isn't saying the troops are intended to be sufficient to resist a threat, it is intended to show that going from threat to war means war with not just the territory attacked, but the power deploying (even small) forces, and potentially all of their available capabilities.
This is especially the case when the tripwire force is deployed by a nuclear power on the territory of a non-nuclear power facing a conventional threat from a nuclear power.
The above comment referencing Guns of August has it: the point is not to put up significant resistance, but, like the Minnesotans, force the US invasion force to have to kill or capture them in a way that produces as much negative publicity as possible if they do want to take Greenland.
Indeed the key point is to make sure it is not a bloodless operation. Maybe some pictures of dead white people on the TV will short circuit the part of the republican brain that worships strongmen.
Europe experiencing what LATAM, SE Asia and Africa have had to deal for a long time but now the shoe is on the other foot and it's a huge deal all the sudden.
I've been saying that the re-election of Trump firmly turned the US into a Latin American country: repressive right-wing government run for the benefit of US corporate interests, with questionable election integrity and widespread paramilitary violence against street protests.
Biden was ostensibly too old when he became President, but he hadn't started the obvious decline that we all witnessed in 2024.
And I still would much rather have had Biden for those four years than have had to face what we're facing now with Trump back then. Except with Trump being 4 years farther away from death than he is now...
Scenario 2: US troops land and would now have to deal with some NATO soldiers.
Regardless of how many NATO soldiers we're talking about, the geopolitical stakes in S2 are orders of magnitude higher than in S1. And so is the political backlash, problems at home, reasons for other nations to respond, etc.
So yes, these few troops, being there, in an official capacity as a NATO deployment no less, matters. Alot.
Why jump directly to conclusions ? Just take some popcorn and enjoy the development.
From my POV the whole "show" looks a lot like a cheap porno with a gangbang at the end. /s
In 2006, the big 5 Western European states (UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain) had a similar share of global GDP PPP to the US, double China's, and 4x India's. In 2026, their share is now half of the US and China's and is comparable to India's.
The "rules based" model that the EU promulgated only worked in the 1990s-2000s when we lived in a unipolar world where the US and the EU represented the bulk of global production and those 5 countries had the economic power to successfully negotiate or pushback against the US.
The rise of Asian economies, EU expansion leading to the inclusion of hybrid regimes like Hungary and Poland under PiS who monkeywrenched procedural work within the EU, and the EU+UK's lost decade due to the Eurozone Crisis and Brexit degraded their comparative power.
Additionally, countries like the US, China, Russia, India, Japan, South Korea, etc also began strategically leveraging FDI in order to negotiate with subsets of EU states unilaterally, which reduced the EU's aggregate negotiating power.
Edit: Can't reply
> Why does being rules-based have anything to do with it?
Access to markets and capital along with defending IP are predicated on mutually agreeing to those terms. When the EU (then including the UK) was at it's peak in the 2000s, it was able to drive favorable IP protection and market access agreeements to help underwrite innovation. The European "rules-based" system also eschewed large scale subsidized industrial policy, viewing these as potentially accelerating trade wars.
This is less true now in the 2020s, with countries like the US, China, Japan, India, and others adopting large scale industrial policy and subsidy programs (IRA/CHIPS, Make in China, GX 2040, PLI) and co-opting pillars of European industry like Volkswagen, BMW, Stellantis, Renault, ZF, Bayer, Sanofi, GSK, Dassault, Airbus, Leonardo, Safran, Rolls Royce, Siemens, EDF, TotalEnergie, etc to join these programs on their terms and having them lobby for their interests in Brussels.
> I think the main "culprit" is energy
Industrial energy prices in Europe only began spiking in 2022 following Russia's escalation of it's invasion in Ukraine (it started back in 2014). The trends I mentioned began all the way back in 2007-12 when energy prices were at all time lows.
Why does being rules-based have anything to do with it? Innovation industries, especially software, have been the massive driver of GDP growth globally since the 1990s. The US and China have been excellent at nurturing those industries domestically (China with its heavy hand of government, the US with the rawest capitalistic structures to support innovation investments) while Europeean countries haven't.
I think the main "culprit" is energy. Europe has had expensive energy prices for decades. Even poor countries in Europe pay 2-3x more for gasoline than Americans do (because of taxes - The EU requires a minimum of $1.47 of excise taxes per gallon of gasoline). I think these energy prices compound to a lot of manufacturing and business not manifesting in Europe.
All the other stuff matters too, but it's crazy to think that paying 2-3x more for fuel wouldn't show up as a negative influence on the economy somewhere. This is particularly the case because Europe didn't go heavily into nuclear and it is one of the worse places for solar power.
Does your partial amnesia also affect the part where US tech companies such as Facebook actively embedded engineers within political campaigns who then ran fake news campaigns for extreme candidates, resulting in the two-time refusal of US voters to vote for a woman?
There was also significant Facebook involvement in fake news concerning Brexit, Rohingya genocide, anti-EU and anti-Ukraine sentiment.
Now that we have established that US tech workers have significantly harmed free people and societies in various countries, I have to point out that also your reasoning is all wrong.
Brexit, Hungary, and Trump are not an example that the EU "rules based" model is not working, quite the opposite. When the EU flourishes as a free society due to free trade between people with extremely different cultural backgrounds, the people living under autocrats notice that this is could also be an option for their own future.
Due to this fact, the EU has been under massive attack by autocrats for quite some time, and workers at US tech companies have played a vital role in amplifying these attacks.
From Tuchman's The Guns of August: A question that [Brigadier General Henry] Wilson asked of [General Ferdinand] Foch during his second visit in January 1910, evoked an answer which expressed in one sentence the problem of the alliance with England, as the French saw it. “What is the smallest British military force that would be of any practical assistance to you?” Wilson asked. Like a rapier flash came Foch’s reply, “A single British soldier—and we will see to it that he is killed.”
People's attitudes often change when their sons and daughters are on the line.
I think US rapidly crossed from being a useful ally, through being an unreliable one to a genuine hindrance for NATO, from Europe's PoV. Not sure about Canada, and I feel for them.
I'm confident Europe can get its act together against Russia. It has more people, far more GDP etc. But it's stuck an an awful trance of defeatism.
US meanwhile seems to be setting fire to so much of the world that they may soon be calling on allies to help them out. Ironic that the only NATO collective defense response was Europe joining the US in Afghanistan.
Somehow Europeans care more about Greenland than Ukraine, so maybe this is the final straw.
Can anyone articulate any rational reason for the threat of the US invading and annexing Greenland? Aside from economics, there is nothing preventing US or international mining interesting from mining there today, is there? What are the other possible reasons?
Ronald Lauder, the billionaire, has floated the idea about buying Greenland with Trump since his first time in office.
The same Ronald Lauder then started buying businesses in Greenland.
The Guardian put out a good article on it: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/15/ronald-laude...
As usual with Trump, it's just brazen corruption.
Does anybody get the looming impression that the probability they'll die in war is approaching 1? I don't know which country / group of countries it'll be against, but I get the impression that a lot of our fates are being written out right now.
Advertisements around where I live are gradually all becoming about joining the military. My country is sending troops to territories as if they are tripwires.
> Does anybody get the looming impression that the probability they'll die in war is approaching 1?
No. If I had this level of anxiety, I would disconnect from news and online media for a little while to take a walk in the forest to clear my mind and calm down.
I'm already there. I never use social media and I limit news consumption to once per week for catching up.
I'm seeing these messages in the real world. Adverts on the side of buses are telling me to enlist in greater frequency, and job sites have positions in the Royal Army pinned above everything else.
This forum is social media.
Not by colloquial usage of the term, which is often (and in this case) limited to the subset of larger global human-content firehoses where the problems inherent to that dynamic become more dramatic, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, shorts feeds, things like Instagram and Reddit maybe, etc.
As things get worse, this advice gets less relevant. You no longer have to be addicted to social media or 24-hour news to be worried about what's happening. You don't even really need to be paying explicit attention at all.
To call the headline "US threatens to invade Greenland" unprecedented would be an understatement. You only need to see it once to be justifiably anxious.
Sounds very ominous. I hope you can get the help you need to make it through that.
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> I don't know which country / group of countries it'll be against
What do you mean? Only one country is threatening Greenland/Denmark/EU with military actions directed against the sovereignty of Greenland.
I'm too old for this: not only am I not going to get called up, I also remember the Cold War, where everyone really did think there was a significant risk of a nuclear exchange at any time.
Mind you, the logic of MAD was a lot more .. logical? The canonical example of a cold game theoretic perspective leading combined with enough irrational paranoia to make an unstable situation.
We're more likely to have a war over a dumb tweet.
Between war, climate change effects, antibiotic resistant bacteria and Alzheimer's, for myself I think I'd pick war. Hard to know what to wish for my children.
Not approaching 1, but certainly greater than zero and higher than it’s ever been in my life. Maybe 15-20%
Yes. Not necessarily 1 but a once in three generations high number, idk a 0,25.
I wonder how to survive? Nomad lifestyle?
That is exactly what these troops are. A tripwire force which hopefully doesn't get used for their intended purpose.
> However, the European Nato deployment consists of only a few dozen personnel as part of Danish-led joint exercises called Operation Arctic Endurance. While heavy in symbolism, it was not immediately clear how long they would stay.
Like, we came, we saw, we gone? How many ppls can they deploy in the long term?
One of the more stupid things here is that there's almost certainly many more US personnel already in Greenland in their internationally-agreed bases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pituffik_Space_Base
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/07/brief-history-...
I suspect the main limit is that nobody wants to be deployed in a dull frozen wasteland for very long.
This is a tripwire to spike cost of taking by force. Europe doesn't have the blue-water navy or air power to fight a peer war with America but also does not need to.
Europe cannot fight a peer war with America: on day one the Americans cut off our cloud services, and all government administration falls over.
(logical consequence of this is that the US invading Greenland is really bad for any US startups, such as one might find on HN, because it makes the EU much more likely to respond with "local only" rules)
Europe isn't the US and it isn't China, but it is collectively one of the preeminent military and economic powers in the world. So, as long as they'd like.
Ironically, the US military has historically had more military personnel deployed in Greenland than Denmark. The US has continuously operated a military base at Thule for the better part of a century.
These kinds of joint exercises are pretty common and largely symbolic.
(The wikipedia page about this contains blatant partisan propaganda. Gross.)
> How many ppls can they deploy in the long term?
How many "ppls" did Afghanistan deploy, long-term, against TWO different superpowers, with only discreet, behind-the-scenes support from other nations?
Invasion and control of another country that has more than paleolithic technology is pretty damned hard. Harder than anyone who attempst it ever guesses. ("They will welcome us as liberators!" - the stupidest thing ever said by a pre-Trump POTUS.)
It's even harder if a majority of the invading population hates the idea, and a significant part of the military doubt the constitutionality of their orders.
Oh, and two nuclear powers would be openly defending Greenland.
It would be cheaper and more popular to pile $9B in bills on the National Mall and set them ablaze.
Would we see a war if US tries to capture Greenland like they did in Venezuela? That’s the end of NATO as we know it and it will be it would be ETO?
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/05/world/europe/trump-greenl...
I don't think you can capture a >800k square mile island in the same way you can kidnap a dictator.
There's no reasonable debate about whether the US has the capability to capture Greenland. Obviously they do. It's in their backyard in an area the US military has been patrolling for decades, with (admittedly decrepit) US bases already present.
The question is whether the US is willing to pay the costs to do so. Sending European troops is attempting to raise the costs of invasion so that any rational actor would decide against it. Of course, we wouldn't be in this situation if all the parties involved were rational actors.
We had the capability to capture Iraq and Afghanistan too. Occupying a territory is the actual hard point. For one, Greenland is in the middle of nowhere compared to everywhere else the US has to keep eyes on, whereas its in the back yard of Canada and the UK.
More importantly though, its an incredibly cold and unhospitable place thats inhabited by 50k people whose little kids have more arctic survival skills than US special forces and who really, really don't want us there. Unlike Afghanistan, you can't patrol the skies nonstop with drones either due to the cold.
Basically, this isn't a choice between owning Greenland or keeping all our allies. Its a choice between keeping all our allies vs getting bogged down into the ultimate guerilla war and suddenly having nothing but hostile neighbors to the north.
Isn't there a rather large country mostly in the way between the USA and Greenland?
I'm sure Canada cares about what's happening, but planes and ships don't need to cross Canadian borders to get to Greenland.
Except most of that >800k square mile island is empty. They only need to capture the capital.
Which would be more consequential? The end of US participation in NATO, or the end of maintenance and updates to every ASML machine in the US?
From the UK: I suspect the response would be the same as the response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and the use of chemical weapons in the UK: a stiffly worded letter and some legal action, followed by efforts to disentangle economically. Maybe we'll sanction an oligarch or two.
We would see exactly what people in the US have been dealing with for 10 years. Everybody would wring their hands and say "unbelievable!" and then nobody with the actual capability to do anything about it actually does.
The entire world is just rooting for Father Time on this particular problem.
I believe that's true: if Trump attacked Greenland, NATO would fall apart (regardless of Europe's response, if they allow it or not), and then Putin would have a once in a generation chance to take the baltics, maybe mess with Poland. He would have to take that chance, and then Europe would have to retaliate, and its effectively WW3.
Spooky times, let's hope things fizzle out back to a rule based Pax Americana.
Edit: Interestingly, the likelyhood of things fizzling out would jump up quite a bit if Trump or Putin were to die. I think the US system of government is prone to electing Trumps, but it's not a given, I think the cult of personality would die and things would relax for now.
France is sending 15 soldiers, Germany 13. Not sure how much the other countries are sending, but at that rate, they seem to expect a US invasion force of 100 people and probably a few dogsleds?
The US has done this historically for allies, too, a small deployment along with a public reiteration of a defense commitment isn't saying the troops are intended to be sufficient to resist a threat, it is intended to show that going from threat to war means war with not just the territory attacked, but the power deploying (even small) forces, and potentially all of their available capabilities.
This is especially the case when the tripwire force is deployed by a nuclear power on the territory of a non-nuclear power facing a conventional threat from a nuclear power.
The above comment referencing Guns of August has it: the point is not to put up significant resistance, but, like the Minnesotans, force the US invasion force to have to kill or capture them in a way that produces as much negative publicity as possible if they do want to take Greenland.
Indeed the key point is to make sure it is not a bloodless operation. Maybe some pictures of dead white people on the TV will short circuit the part of the republican brain that worships strongmen.
It only takes one soldier to down an incoming US transport aircraft with a MANPAD?
Ok, and then what happens, Sun Tzu?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripwire_force?useskin=vector
Europe experiencing what LATAM, SE Asia and Africa have had to deal for a long time but now the shoe is on the other foot and it's a huge deal all the sudden.
I've been saying that the re-election of Trump firmly turned the US into a Latin American country: repressive right-wing government run for the benefit of US corporate interests, with questionable election integrity and widespread paramilitary violence against street protests.
Which is one reason why it reminds me of the Falklands War - with the USA in the role of Argentina.
Fun fact: the first ship sunk was built and launched as USS Phoenix.
Previously:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46631848
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46617108
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624266
We need to have a serious adult conversation about the fact that the US president clearly has dementia.
I don't know if it is diagnosable dementia. Senior disinhibition on the other hand...
When does severe cognitive decline cross over to dementia?
Did you have that discussion about Biden?
He wasn't invading or threatening to invade multiple countries at a time, including those of allies.
Yes, we did. And that discussion had a most definite conclusion.
There were A1 stories about his age and mental acuity constantly. The discussion was so intense that Biden dropped out of the presidential race.
Invading a NATO ally was never on the table.
No body would do that, only an insane person.
Imagine how much better things would be if we did have that discussion. Lets not make the same mistake twice
Yes, actually. Enough people did (media, dnc leaders and supporters) have that discussion, to the point that Biden did not run for re-election.
Biden was ostensibly too old when he became President, but he hadn't started the obvious decline that we all witnessed in 2024.
And I still would much rather have had Biden for those four years than have had to face what we're facing now with Trump back then. Except with Trump being 4 years farther away from death than he is now...
Germany has done more to secure greenland than Ukraine?
Greenland is a non-EU territory of an EU member. Ukraine currently is not part of the EU or its surrounding organizations.
Greenland is in NATO.
> A 15-strong French military contingent has arrived in Greenland
This reads like the start of a satirical joke. Is this really the best show of counter-force Europe has to offer?
Scenario 1: US troops land and just stay there
Scenario 2: US troops land and would now have to deal with some NATO soldiers.
Regardless of how many NATO soldiers we're talking about, the geopolitical stakes in S2 are orders of magnitude higher than in S1. And so is the political backlash, problems at home, reasons for other nations to respond, etc.
So yes, these few troops, being there, in an official capacity as a NATO deployment no less, matters. Alot.
"Counter force"?
I'm genuinely questioning your mentality in using this term. It sounds like something Fox News would say.
You should craft your questions more respectfully, using qualified facts and objections, rather than as a poorly-veiled political ad-hominem attack.
> This reads like the start of a satirical joke
Why jump directly to conclusions ? Just take some popcorn and enjoy the development. From my POV the whole "show" looks a lot like a cheap porno with a gangbang at the end. /s
Yes, it seems almost counter-productive.
I'm not even American, but wtf is Europe doing. They were once a moral bar now they're dropping the ball everywhere.
? How is this Europe's fault?
In 2006, the big 5 Western European states (UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain) had a similar share of global GDP PPP to the US, double China's, and 4x India's. In 2026, their share is now half of the US and China's and is comparable to India's.
The "rules based" model that the EU promulgated only worked in the 1990s-2000s when we lived in a unipolar world where the US and the EU represented the bulk of global production and those 5 countries had the economic power to successfully negotiate or pushback against the US.
The rise of Asian economies, EU expansion leading to the inclusion of hybrid regimes like Hungary and Poland under PiS who monkeywrenched procedural work within the EU, and the EU+UK's lost decade due to the Eurozone Crisis and Brexit degraded their comparative power.
Additionally, countries like the US, China, Russia, India, Japan, South Korea, etc also began strategically leveraging FDI in order to negotiate with subsets of EU states unilaterally, which reduced the EU's aggregate negotiating power.
Edit: Can't reply
> Why does being rules-based have anything to do with it?
Access to markets and capital along with defending IP are predicated on mutually agreeing to those terms. When the EU (then including the UK) was at it's peak in the 2000s, it was able to drive favorable IP protection and market access agreeements to help underwrite innovation. The European "rules-based" system also eschewed large scale subsidized industrial policy, viewing these as potentially accelerating trade wars.
This is less true now in the 2020s, with countries like the US, China, Japan, India, and others adopting large scale industrial policy and subsidy programs (IRA/CHIPS, Make in China, GX 2040, PLI) and co-opting pillars of European industry like Volkswagen, BMW, Stellantis, Renault, ZF, Bayer, Sanofi, GSK, Dassault, Airbus, Leonardo, Safran, Rolls Royce, Siemens, EDF, TotalEnergie, etc to join these programs on their terms and having them lobby for their interests in Brussels.
> I think the main "culprit" is energy
Industrial energy prices in Europe only began spiking in 2022 following Russia's escalation of it's invasion in Ukraine (it started back in 2014). The trends I mentioned began all the way back in 2007-12 when energy prices were at all time lows.
Why does being rules-based have anything to do with it? Innovation industries, especially software, have been the massive driver of GDP growth globally since the 1990s. The US and China have been excellent at nurturing those industries domestically (China with its heavy hand of government, the US with the rawest capitalistic structures to support innovation investments) while Europeean countries haven't.
I think the main "culprit" is energy. Europe has had expensive energy prices for decades. Even poor countries in Europe pay 2-3x more for gasoline than Americans do (because of taxes - The EU requires a minimum of $1.47 of excise taxes per gallon of gasoline). I think these energy prices compound to a lot of manufacturing and business not manifesting in Europe.
All the other stuff matters too, but it's crazy to think that paying 2-3x more for fuel wouldn't show up as a negative influence on the economy somewhere. This is particularly the case because Europe didn't go heavily into nuclear and it is one of the worse places for solar power.
Does your partial amnesia also affect the part where US tech companies such as Facebook actively embedded engineers within political campaigns who then ran fake news campaigns for extreme candidates, resulting in the two-time refusal of US voters to vote for a woman?
There was also significant Facebook involvement in fake news concerning Brexit, Rohingya genocide, anti-EU and anti-Ukraine sentiment.
Now that we have established that US tech workers have significantly harmed free people and societies in various countries, I have to point out that also your reasoning is all wrong.
Brexit, Hungary, and Trump are not an example that the EU "rules based" model is not working, quite the opposite. When the EU flourishes as a free society due to free trade between people with extremely different cultural backgrounds, the people living under autocrats notice that this is could also be an option for their own future.
Due to this fact, the EU has been under massive attack by autocrats for quite some time, and workers at US tech companies have played a vital role in amplifying these attacks.
Impressive how someone who worked at google takes a stance on morals and uses that to reverse causality and victim blame.
Europe is setting up a tripwire force because they know from the past that lunatic ramblings of a leader should be taken serious.
Impressive how you jump to blaming the victim so confidently.
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