Why the framing of alliances like it’s a boolean?

The question of “can we trust the American government” is now being asked more often. Existing alliances and new potential alliances face that question, whether or not you personally believe that they should trust America.

Even if no concrete actions are being performed with asking that question, the fact that question is even being asked is a major drop from where we were.

The US has become unreliable and erratic. Countries aren’t cutting ties or anything, but certainly investing to reduce exposure to capricious US leadership. Much of Europe is increasing domestic military production rather than just buying more from the US precisely because the US has publicly discussed leaving NATO and/or not honoring its guarantees.

No one is going to walk away from that kind of alliance tomorrow, sure. Stuff like "we're going to remotely disable military equipment we've sold you" is going to have consequences though. It's not walking away from alliances, it's just focusing on more stable countries.

I observe serious financial commitments towards walking away from US tech:

The EU is pumping money into what they call "digital sovereignty" left and right. Germany just cancelled their Microsoft subscriptions and replaced them with self-funded Open Source for Schleswig-Holstein, which is roughly 5% of all government employees. That's one hell of a trial run. Germany's "OpenDesk" and France’s "La Suite numérique" even made into the new "Franco-German Economic Agenda 2025", which self-describes as "bilateral coordination to full swing for a more sovereign Europe".

lol this is a joke right? Ask any Canadian if they think America is driving a hard bargain or pushing away its closest ally.

Are you sure?

I mean, the current administration has repeatedly threatened to invade militarily two of its allies. Also, it has repeatedly threatened to not honor military agreements with most others, and both the current president and vice-president have insulted the leaders of several allied countries to their face.

Oh, and if that weren't sufficient, the current admin has unilaterally broken all trade treaties (alongside most intellectual property treaties) it held with its commercial partners.

The EU is slow at it, but it's no accident that everybody is doing their best to move away from US tech and military dependencies.

Roughly speaking, an aircraft must fulfill a certain amount of economy (cheap, low cost to operate), safety, and performance.

If you compromise on safety, you get something that is still suitable for the military. If you don't care about economics you can participate in the space race.

But for commercial air travel, you don't have the luxury to pick just two; a competitive commercial airliner has to perform exceedingly well in all three regards.

If you're an airline using expensive aircraft you will go bankrupt. If your aircraft is too slow then your competitors will eat your lunch, and if you have a reputation of being unsafe then your customers will run away or the government will pull the plug (likely both).

IMHO affordable commercial air travel is one of the biggest marvels of 20th century engineering.

China currently can't make the high-performance, efficient, long-life jet engines that US & Europe make. The commercial market is heavily cost-sensitive, so they can't compete there currently as a result.

This doesn't matter so much for military purposes: they can easily eat the cost of a higher maintenance and replacement schedule on a smaller number of military jets with fewer hours on them.

This gives them more iteration cycles, speeding their building up of experience. They're catching up. Industrial espionage will help them along too, but not as much as the experience from engineering their own designs.

But commercial jet liners aren't as important to China for security. They have high speed railroads for that.

So… you'd think the USA would be able to built a nationwide, high-speed rail network?

See what I did there?

It’s would be a result of where the money and resources go, I assume. Apparently they haven’t felt a need to manufacture their own commercial jets but they did for military jets. They definitely feel the need in the case of chips.

C919

Much higher standards than European ones? Because the cars do sell there as well.

>I would strongly wager it's vastly more likely that these Chinese vehicles do not meet US safety standards

This was correct a few years years ago.

It's actually the opposite nowadays, most of these cars are safer than the typical 2.5L 4 cylinder American car. Both the EU and Australia has been completely flooded with these cars, to an extent that you'd have to see it to believe it.

Chinese companies make cars with 5-star European crash ratings. They are perfectly capable of meeting US safety standards.

It's not 5 years behind, engine tech is more on a ~15 year cycle, or even more.

CFM LEAP, latest short-to-medium-haul airliner engine from CFM (GE+Safran) is from 2013 (first run). Its predecessor, CFM56, is from 1974 (first run) and saw a few evolutions, including as late as 2009.