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Comment by nine_k

Trust forms dependencies. It's sort of the point of it. Cooperation is dependence.

Independence is often achieved with violent struggle, or just a lot of struggle.

US and EU used to be good partners. Still are, but maybe not as good now. Achieving independence would be costly, because cooperation increases efficiency, and cutting it incurs costs and discomfort. There should be quite a bit of incentive to e.g. drop AWS or stop using Google. Building local equivalents is not impossible, but again is pretty costly and slow.

In other news, all of the world's most advanced semiconductor manufacturing, everywhere, depends on machines produced my one Dutch company, ASML. A ton of actual production depends on one small island nation, Taiwan. There is a number of examples like that. Achieving autarky, North Korea-style, is really really costly, and slows you down quite a bit.

parent nine_k 1 year ago

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