– More Guns, Less Butter: How Will The EU Wed Austerity To Militarization?:
US President Joe Biden, long showing signs of decline, is now officially done for in five months time, if not sooner. The current odds-on favorite to be the next president speaks often about turning away from Europe. Governments are collapsing, and countries are fracturing across the EU. And the eurozone economy is a mess.
One might be tempted to come to the conclusion that it is time for the EU to start figuring out an exit strategy from its war against Russia. Trouble is, if the bloc’s crop of leaders were able to grasp the situation and act, they likely would have gotten out a long time ago – or never been game at all. Instead they kept digging deeper, and here again we have the EU doubling down.
EU diplomats have spent the past few weeks throwing a fit over Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s shuttle diplomacy efforts. In its very first session the newly elected Parliament produced a belligerent joint text, making all sorts of hardline demands, such as the removal of any restrictions on the Ukrainian use of Western weapons systems to strike Russian territory.
They also chose to reappoint one of the war’s biggest backers, Ursula von der Leyen, as president of the European Commission – the most powerful position in the EU. Let’s take a look at von der Leyen’s pitch as she worked to cobble together enough votes for her second five-year term and what the plan is now that she’s back. Emboldened by her reappointment, she is pushing for a defense union.
Politico describes this task as “the number one challenge of her second term: making huge amounts of EU money available to reindustrialize and re-arm the EU.”
Left unexplained is who would foot the bill for the ambitious plans, but the Commission and the European Central Bank continue to consider the possibility of issuing Eurobonds to finance the purchase or manufacture of weaponry, an idea considered off-limits until recently. Some background on the potential “miracle” of Euro defense bonds from Euractiv:
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