All right, Alexander, let's talk about the European Union's push towards a war economy,

or is it a push towards more centralization of power?

Is that what this is really all about?

What are your thoughts?

Because we are getting a stream of articles and statements

connected to how the European Union needs to ramp up the manufacturing of weapons and

needs to invest in weapons manufacturing. It needs to increase their military budgets and

their military spending.

And all of this has to be done from a European, from an EU level.

It all has to be coordinated from the offices in Brussels.

What are your thoughts?

Well, I should say straight away that there's been a brilliant

article about this by Tom Longo. And he points out that really all this talk about rearmament

serves a completely different agenda because rearmament within the EU is industrially, for all practical

purposes, impossible. EU industries are in decline. The manufacturing capacity to convert,

you know, to transform the EU into a military superpower

does not exist if the EU got all together and appointed the right planners and did a job

of pulling together all the, you know, all the universities to churn out STEM graduates and things of that kind.

Perhaps in 20 years, you know, with a complete change of industrial policy,

they might get themselves to the kind of position where the United States, you know, was 30 years ago,

in a situation where, you know,

they could start producing convincing amount of weapons.

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