Spain strengthens ties with China as Sánchez backs Beijing's Middle East role

Very good questions, thanks for writing them. I’d say those are some possible solutions: **Veto Workarounds:** - Qualified majority voting instead of unanimity (Ursula Van Der Leyen brought up this point herself a few days ago regarding foreign politics) - Coalitions of the Willings: Allow subgroups of states to act without all 27 (that’s the way NORDEFCO currently works, the same thing could be done for the Mediterranean, the Balkans, Eastern Europe, then integrate them with an overall structure) - NATO-like system: mimic how article 5 works: because you don’t want to lose close allies, most countries spontaneously choose to intervene and collaborate. Trust is a valuable currency, even more than money . **Required military budget workarounds:** - Incentives: The EU could tie access to certain funds (eg. EDF) or industrial contracts to participation in joint projects - Flexiblity: allowing states to contribute capabilities (cyber tech, logistics…) instead of money, reducing resistances - You don’t need common forced military budget, you need a structure/framework that makes National armies collaborate repeatedly and apply their existing shared European geopolitical view/interests/values. Once that is set, you can use National armies together Admittedly, this may remain a weakness of such a system . **On the other hand, this system may prove superior in many ways:** - Diversification: each national army has a different military doctrine/training structure/mentality: building deep cooperation without uniformity allows to pass down peak specializations (eg. Nordic countries are the world’s best in arctic operations, Greece/Spain in amphibious operations, France has good power projection/intelligence, East European on land, Germany in logistics, Italy in naval operations…). Traditional Uniformity may be killing those different mentalities reducing creative military approaches - Optimization: similarly, this structure allows successful national policies to scale up and be adopted, it works as a creative forge for new military ideas - Adaptability: A networked defense union can scale up or down as needed (eg. a crisis in the Sahel can be addressed by France, Italy, and Spain governments, which know the situation better, with others contributing niche capabilities. A single government with a top-down approach can’t do that as well) - Resistance: Unlike a single army, a distributed system is harder to paralyze. If one country opts out, others can still operate - Enlargement: it is easy to absorb other partners as they don’t have to concede National military sovereignty: the US cannot absorb Mexico into its defenses, the EU could easily absorb Ukraine

>We all know china aint doing that. Before 2016, no one thought the US would elect Trump. Disregarding a bad scenario because you think it's unlikely to happen is just making the same mistake twice. >Learning from a corrupt fool which isn't an IF. why are you talking IFs Because we're discussing the future consequences of current day decisions. No one can predict the future with perfect accuracy so we have to think in terms of possible scenarios and contingencies rather than assuming a single course of events when weighing options. >The circus is on full display I'd refrain from ad hominem. It weakens your credibility unless you're preaching to an audience that's already on your side.

So you are telling me you don’t know anything about Chinese history. When a good leader dies, their favorite thing to do is replace them with a corrupt government that results in the entire country fracturing into warring states.