I'm John Batson with my colleague, Anato Leibbon, of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

He's the director of the Eurasia program.

The headlines from Brussels about the European Union include a 150 billion euro loan account for European Union countries.

There are 27 of them to use that money to enhance, augment or restart their weapons

production.

The UK, the U.S., and Turkey are said to be excluded from the original thinking about

the plan, which is puzzling enough.

And now we come to a headline from Brussels.

EU leaders urge to back Ukraine with weapons boost.

Anatol fragmentation is what Europe does best. So I'm not going to go one way or the other on this,

but right now, suddenly when Europe is talking about a European military and NATO is puzzling about its future with the

United States, they're dividing up the money that they're going to borrow and saying some

are to have access to it, some or not. Is this going in a good direction from your intuition?

Well, it represents the success, I mean, at least so far on paper, of Macron and the French

view of European Rearmament, which is that it must be part of building or rebuilding

European industry.

In other words, you know, this is, as it's been called military Keynesianism, you're trying

to stimulate the economies, which of course runs counter to trying to build up the militaries

quickly and to a considerably extent counter to helping Ukraine in the short term.

Because if you're going to do that, you actually need to buy the greater part of the stuff

from the US because European military industries have declined

to the extent that they can't do it quickly. The Germans were holding out for much more rapid

...