Thorsten Benner

Deutsche Bahn kauft Elektrobusse in China – Gewerkschafter sind empört Die Deutsche Bahn braucht Elektrobusse, fündig wurde sie beim Hersteller BYD aus China. Angesichts von Appellen zum Standortpatriotismus findet die Gewerkschaft EVG das einen »schlechten Scherz«.

Es braucht Ministerentscheidung, um diesen Wahnsinn zu stoppen.

Es braucht Aufklärung, wie es zu Ausschreibungsmodalitäten kommen konnte, die industriepolitischen Selbstmord begünstigen.

Und es braucht Rahmensetzungen, damit so etwas nie wieder passieren kann.

www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/u...

Die 100% staatseigene Deutsche Bahn will Hunderte BYD-Elektrobusse kaufen.

Man braucht gar nicht von Sicherheitsrisiken anfangen, dass sich staatseigene Busse im Konfliktfall von Russlands Verbündeten China manipulieren lassen.

Es ist ein unglaubliches industriepolitisches Totalversagen.

This Windows 98 illustration is a very apt visualization of some of the Eurostack dreams.

German 100% state owned Deutsche Bahn to buy hundreds of BYD buses.

The absolute travesty & short-sightedness of throwing struggling European manufacturers under the bus in favor of Chinese company.

This cannot stand. And we need regulation to prevent this.

www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/u...

Beijing claims the mantle of global governance and uses it to as cover for its aggressive historical revisionism („correct narrative of WW II and defend victorious outcomes“ is code for Beijing‘s aspiration to control Taiwan).

global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202512/10/...

I guess we can count Beijing establishing the „Group of Friend of Global Governance“ at the UN as the official death knell of global governance.

Macron this week proposed trading away export controls on European made semiconductor equipment.
Trump just weakened the US arguments against that.

„Europe wants to avoid becoming a museum of 20th-century manufacturing, we need an urgent reset and a long-term plan“.

Hard to disagree with the Ford CEO.

www.ft.com/content/4b9b...

„Selbstbewusst aufzutreten – ohne zu eskalieren“.

Meine Kollegin @sofielillistoffel.bsky.social heute im STERN zu ihrer neuen Studie zum Umgang mit Trumps Außenpolitik.

www.stern.de/politik/ausl...

Exclusive: US sets 2027 deadline for Europe-led NATO defense, officials say The United States wants Europe to take over the majority of NATO's conventional defense capabilities, from intelligence to missiles, by 2027, Pentagon officials told diplomats in Washington this week,...

And even if/where the US administration was not receptive we should have long pushed our own plan for burden-shifting.
For now we are again just left with scrambling having missed the chance to set the agenda and propose concrete timetable.

www.reuters.com/business/aer...

It‘s a daddy management delusion to have believed that it‘s better to not push burden-shifting plans proactively for that will only trigger US withdrawal. It was clear the US would act on this eventually.

European stupidity comes to bite us.
We had a year since Trump got elected (and in fact 9 years since he first got elected) to come up with our own timetable for burden-shifting on critical enablers for European defense.
We did nothing. And now we are being served an ultimatum.

The failure of European elites to muster a convincing response to the rise of new political forces poses grave risks. The US factors plays a role but this is mostly on us. And keeping US on board might be net neutral since more rapid increase defense might even lead to more political dysfunction.

I don‘t find much new in there on Europe. What am I missing? We had a pretty empty meltdown over Vance‘s cultural war stuff in the Munich speech. Maybe this time we focus on action. NSS is right that Europeans fail to convert wealth into might. Let‘s discuss how we change that.

The Thinker VI The Unbearable Lightness of Strategy

The unbearable lightness of strategy.
Jeremy Shapiro has an unrivaled ability to speak truth to bullshit.

blueblaze.substack.com/p/the-thinke...

Thorsten Benner, Elisabeth Winter und Wolfgang Schroeder auf der Bühne

Wolfgang Schroeder, @tbenner.bsky.social & Elisabeth Winter eröffnen das Politische Symposium. Sie betonen: Die Selbstsicherheit des Landes wird von innen und außen in Frage gestellt. Zu diskutieren ist: Wie kann das Erfolgsmodell erneuert und neue strategische Handlungsfähigkeit gewonnen werden?

Good to be back in Delhi. Thank you for the invite, Happymon Jacob, Raja Mohan & India‘s World.

Just had to get out of my room since the 🇷🇺delegation needs the whole floor ahead of Putin‘s arrival tomorrow. Left a few copies of the Ackermann/Cameron/Mathou piece for the new arrivals.

The New German War Machine After World War II, Germany embraced pacifism as a form of atonement. Now the country is arming itself again.

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

„I got the sense that the German military is more popular in Vilnius than in Görlitz“.

Isaac Stanley-Becker‘s story on Germany’s belated reinvestment into the Bundeswehr in the face of Russian threats and shrinking US commitment is well worth reading.

Make Money Not War: Trump’s Real Plan for Peace in Ukraine The Kremlin pitched the White House on peace through business. To Europe’s dismay, the president and his envoy are on board.

www.wsj.com/world/russia...

It is really quite striking that Witkoff sounds 100% like the German advocates of Nord Stream and business deals with the Kremlin as a bridge to peace and stability.

With the only difference that those doing the deals are now supposed to be Americans not Germans.

China is making trade impossible Europe has nothing to offer and difficult decisions to make

„Yet when the good options are gone, the bad are all that is left. China is making trade impossible. If it will buy nothing from others but commodities and consumer goods, they must prepare to do the same“.

www.ft.com/content/f294...

„It is now increasingly hard to see how Europe, in particular, can avoid large-scale protection if it is to retain any industry at all“.

FT on dealing with the China shock.

It‘s becoming increasingly clear that Volkswagen‘s „In China, for China“ is morphing more and more into „in China, for Europe“ given cost advantages of producing EVs in China and limited appetite of Chinese consumers for VW EVs.

www.ft.com/content/b772...

Das ist nur ein Vorbote. Die Brandmauer wird nicht zu halten sein, weder in der Wirtschaft noch insgesamt.

And the prospect of a bad Ukraine-Russia outcome should only make this more urgent.

We should reserve a significant part of the bandwidth of our debate, focus and action on this burden-shifting on critical enablers otherwise we will not make use of the time Europeans bought by surrendering to Trump in the trade war.

At the same time, Europeans need to adapt their war fighting doctrine since Europeans can‘t fight wars in Europe the same way without the full array / mass of US assets.

That nothing much has changed within the first Trump year doesn‘t mean this will stay like this. The question is whether Europeans will try to shape this by themselves proposing a timetable or whether they will wait for the US to set the timetable possibly in a haphazard and self-defeating way.

US will likely act no matter what on burden-shifting — because it objectively needs to if it wants to have a chance to keep much of its role in the Indo-Pacific faced with Chinese power & because many are also ideologically inclined to push for a significant reduction of the US footprint in Europe.