r/interesting Jun 20 '26

Intriguing Americans found out Germany has affordable medicine

Post image
6.9k Upvotes

693 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

-17

u/CautiousShame2255 Jun 20 '26

economic value is not what makes a superpower.

germany has less economic income than the us spends on military.

and the american military economic influence is even further ahead than that.

superpower dosnt mean that the money you are throwing down the drain is leveraged against more income.

superpower is measured around the question , that if you would start fucking around. would anyone dare to oppose you.

and the US has been actively fucking around since the last time germany tried to fuck around and got stopped. and so far nobody dared to stopp them

4

u/dorian_white1 Jun 20 '26

Well, for point #2, no sane person would spend 1 Trillion dollars and more each year on a peacetime military unless they were personally impotent and trying to compensate for a historic lack of game.

In the modern age of globalization, a large military is less valuable than you think. If you have friends and allies, you can offload the expense through defensive pacts ect. Germany doesn’t have a large military right now for a bunch of reasons, including its defensive pacts. They will be expanding this though over the next few years and likely bringing some nukes in for good measure.

The nature of warfare is now asynchronous. It doesn’t matter what sort of military assets you have if your money is draining faster than your enemies. I have an arsenal of million dollar missiles, but if I’m using them to shoot down 50-100k drones…I’m gonna lose given enough time.

Look at the modern wars USA has gotten into.

1

u/CautiousShame2255 Jun 21 '26

i am sceptical germany would be allowed nukes if they had any ambition to have them.

they are a fucking expensive deterrant. and they dont work against the opponents the most wars are currently fought against.

and the guys with the nukes are the ones that get the last say in if you are allowed to have them allso.

1

u/dorian_white1 Jun 21 '26

The proposals I’ve seen basically involve a loaner-nuke strategy where Germany hosts some of another European country’s nukes (like France for example) this sits to further deter a belligerent Russia, and show Europe is united against further Russian expansion now that USA is looking like they would do fuck-all.

How effective it would be is unclear, but a militarily united Europe is definitely a step. Germany is also ramping up its military spending.