Press

“The British defence industrial sector is still strong,” says Ian Bond, deputy director of the Centre for European Reform. “It makes sense to include Britain in what the European Union is doing to cope with a world in which you basically can’t be certain that the Americans would turn up if you were attacked.”

Ian Bond señala en un reciente artículo del Centre for European Reform (CER) que el aprendizaje de la primera legislatura de Trump por parte de los europeos es que podría “no hacer siempre exactamente lo que decía que quería (ya fuera construir un muro en la frontera con México o abandonar la OTAN), pero sus amenazas debían tomarse en serio, aunque no se cumplieran por sus efectos perjudiciales”.

Eine Lösung wie im Coronafonds hätte den Vorteil, dass die EU Gegenleistungen verlangen könnte, sodass die Europäer ihre Ausgaben besser koordinieren und so die Effizienz der Militärausgaben verbessern, sagt der Ökonom Sander Tordoir. 

Robert Brinkley, who was our man in Ukraine, raised the issue of Russian kompromat and referred to Trump as “an agent of Russian influence”; but the meeting’s host at the Centre for European Reform, Ian Bond (former ambassador to Latvia), responded — reasonably, I thought — that it was the consequences of the US president’s behaviour rather than its possible causes that should most trouble us: Trump truly is the Kremlin’s most useful idiot.

John Springford of the CER warns that the picture looks even gloomier when you measure UK performance against countries most like us — so excluding the US and Germany — and including Australia, Canada and the Netherlands.  “Trade intensity in countries whose trends most closely matched the UK’s before 2019 is about 10 per cent higher than before the pandemic. For an open economy dependent on trade for cheaper products, innovation and productivity growth, this is awful performance,” he says.

Die EU, der European Stability Mechanism (ESM) und die Europäische Investitionsbank sind mit einem „Triple A“-Rating bewertet. Der Chefökonom der Denkfabrik Centre for European Reform (CER), Sander Tordoir, empfiehlt das Auflegen einer Anleihe im Volumen von 500 Milliarden Euro für die Aufrüstung.