So broadly speaking I do think most difficulties of attaining prosperity are about the fact that long-run planning and long-run economic growth generally requires some kind of immediate cost bearing by somebody.

Right? And we all do that if we borrow money to go to university.

We're making an investment that's costly to us now and will pay off a long time in the future.

Many investments have that quality quality but political systems are not

well structured to support that kind of time-based decision-making.

And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.

In the last days, Emmanuel Macron, the President of France

has made headlines by suggesting that Europe should be less closely

aligned with the United States and that in particular on Taiwan Europe should not follow what Macron implied was America's hawkish stance.

In the debate that followed on these remarks, I think that people have run two importantly

distinct things together, as indeed did Macron himself in his remarks.

The first point is that Europe doesn't need to have good reason to increase its strategic autonomy.

It is true that the United States is in some ways increasingly inward looking, that we averted major

catastrophe during the presence of Donald Trump quite narrowly, and that is entirely imaginable imaginable that Donald Trump or another isolationist might be back in power

in 2024 or 2028 or 2032 and that Europe therefore finally needs to build the capacity to protect its values and to stand up to its interests independently in the hopes of a continued close partnership with the United States.

But in the awareness that there may come a moment in which Europe has to be able as best can to stand up for some of these values itself.

But what Macron is suggesting is actually an incredibly unambitious, incredibly pressing vision

of what that kind of strategic autonomy would look like,

rather than envisaging a Europe,

but is actually able to stand up for its own values and interests.

He imagines a Europe that simply the couples from the United States in order to try and

appease any power that is important.

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