At least the European media who reported on the conference all appeared to agree that the speech of J.D. Vance was entirely intended for consumption by supporters of the current US government within the USA. It was a bit uncomfortable when J.D. Vance attempted a couple of jokes that were greeted with total silence.
Whatever position a person holds, if you are part of a community, it's constructive to find commonalities but destructive to focus on division. It's not unreasonable to highlight differences, but if one ONLY focuses on divisions, it's only of benefit to nations hostile to the community you are part of.
The only concrete outcome I've been able to note is that European arms manufacturers have seen a notable uptick in sales - especially on items with high pricetags and the attendent long-term support and supply of spare parts. After all, Russia has seen it's arms sales fall off a cliff. I believe India had sent back over 100 tanks (T90 varients?) for modification only to see Russia hang on to them (reputidly for their own use). While I can totally understand Russian thinking, it's likely that India is going to look elsewhere, especially in light of the fact that Russia's tanks appear to have underperformed in Ukraine and Russia.
Both the Eurofighter (UK, Germany, Italy and Spain and the Mirage 2000 (France) offer modern air supremecy aircraft (in 2023 France overtook Russia to become the world's second largest arms supplier). While it's almost certainly the case that the F35 has the best all round performance, for nations who only foresee defensive wars, both the Eurofighter and the Mirage offer certain benefits. Not least the cost and intraoprability of weapons systems. In a few years Japan will also be offering the F-X which may well prove to be competitive.
Likewise there are several European as well as South Korean and soon Japanese MBTs that are comparible.
What US manufacturers face is possible political interference in the support and spares. Given that the support is required for decades and buyers are generally risk-averse, it's problematic to buy US made weapons if politicians can, in effect, prevent such weapons from being used effectively.
I think everyone can see that the US is entering another period of isolationism. Hisorically, isolationism has always ended badly for the US. After all, the US relies of basing large forces on European soil. I really don't know how that will end but it does strike me that unaligned nations especially are the most likely to look for a source that is free from political interference.
As for the internal DOGE rationalization of the US government, it does appear that insufficient thought has gone into some of those redundencies. It's also the case that you need people with experience to train up incoming staff. That nuclear safety safety staff were mistakenly terminated is concerning. Those people were trained by the previous generations. Spending just a couple of months to understand what roles people are play and how their removal will affect institutional knowledge is a serious issue. I do understand how the Silicon Valley mantra 'move fast and break things' makes sense when dealing with consumer products, we are already witness to 'endification' AKA 'crapification' and how it ultimately results in power and resources becoming concentrated within the wealthy elite. Once a single monolithic gateway to goods and services becomes established, there becomes no need to maintain the high standards that drew people to use a given gateway.
A good example of just how serious (and costly and time consuming) loss of institutional knowledge can be would be the remanufacture of FOGBANK. The fact that nobody understood WHY manufacturers were unable to reproduce the material cost many years and many billions of $. In retrospect, even I am aware that the purity and the specific impurities found in a chemical can result in huge differences. The simplest example I can think of is a reaction that used cyclohexanone as catalyst. When researchers attmpted to reproduce the reaction decades later, they were unable to do so. It was only by careful research that establised that the presence of 2,3-cyclohexenone as co-catalyst was VITAL to the reaction. That the product was impure was actually a feature rather than a bug.
Now I can only give that example as chemistry is my field. But it strikes me as logical that before you decide if people working for the FAA are needed, you need to invest some time and effort in understanding what those people actually do. To take an extreme position, if the number of air accidents within the US double over the next 4 years, that's 4 years in which experienced staff will be retiring BUT over those same 4 years, they had nobody to pass their institutional knowledge onto younger staff members. But by the time such an analysis is possible, reversing the process would take far longer. I am not asserting this as fact, but I see no signs that any sort of assurances have been given. Essentially it appears as if the sole metric being used is price. It's not uncommon for the new owner of a large business to seek a reduction in costs. But a wise owner will first assess the value of an employee. Such slash and burn methodologies do not lend themselves to such a complex and diverse system.
It appears from the outside that the goal is to present short-term savings at the cost of increased problems in the long term. I use the figure of 4 year as that is the term of a US president.
All I can suggest is that US readers take a look at the UK. Beginning in the early 1980s the then-government began to sell off publically owned institutions from energy to public transport to basic utilities and now, it seems, to health. All of those sectors were constructed from monies taken from taxation. In essence our grandparent and our parents paid for each and every one of those services. What did we get in return? The right to buy shares in the privatized companies at a discounted price. What have we seen over the decades? Each and every service increasing it's prices ahead of inflation, a marked reduction in the quality of those services and worst of all, if and when it became apparent that a particualar service had ended up deeply in debt, they would simply liquidate the business and hand it back to the governent i.e. ALL of the profits were wrung out of a service, no investment was undertaken safe in the knowledge that being a vital service, the government had no option but to bail it out.
So if you think you will materialy gain from your government giving out 'free money', be aware that in the longer term, you WILL end up paying more. The UK screwed up totally and it seems like the US is going down that same path.
I feel the two gentlemen in the video make a reasonable point that there are many small, specialist branches of US government who are looking forwards, sometimes by decades, to identify, assess and mitigate threats against the American people. If anyone believes that US aid is provided for altruistic reasons, I think you are mistaken. Although the term 'soft power' was introduced to describe China's expansion, it's fair to say both the US and Russia have been doing similar things for decades.
It's yet another example of 'geopolitics is a complex topic'.
