- 00:00Walk us through how much of a challenge it would be for Europe to step up its military support if we do indeed get that US support out of the picture? There is no understating how much of a challenge it would actually be for Europe to step up and pick up the part that the US would or would leave behind. Until now, until the since the beginning of the war, we can say that the U.S. and Europe have been roughly splitting the cake. They have been roughly splitting the burden of supporting Ukraine. But it’s clear that while Europe has come up with most financial aid, it’s the U.S. that has been delivering the actual weapons, the military equipment that Ukraine so, so urgently needs. And the U.S. has also been providing a lot of intelligence sharing. So it is a really big hole that the U.S. would leave behind if it were to step down. Walk us through that ramp up, though. I mean, what does that even look like when it comes to actually acting on it? For example, when we heard about in the Draghi report, we’ve heard about it from the EU commission, we’ve certainly heard it from Ursula von der Leyen as well. How is it actually progressing? Are we seeing signs that there will be that kind of defence ramp up and it’s going to bear fruit down the road? So there is definitely an understanding in Europe that something needs to be done and it’s very urgent. How we actually get there is a different question. And when we look at the estimates of how much Europe would have to come up with in the next decade, it’s like we’re talking hundreds of billions of dollars and there is no clear plan right now for how to come up with that kind of money, especially when we look at the state that a lot of European powers are in. They have very tight budgetary situations. They have domestic political turmoil. So there is no clear path forward right now, especially considering the fact that the Europe, the European countries defense industry is quite fragmented. It has been operating, you know, at low level for the past decade, since the end of the Cold War. So it’s definitely clear that there will be a huge effort ahead. It’s not entirely clear how they will get there.
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