It's not like there's a moral high ground about not collaborating with the military. Unless you want to advantage America's adversaries, namely China, Putin's Russia and Iran's current regime. There's always this implicit, sometimes explicit, "war bad" childish political philosophy in posts like this. In reality war is a given and you have to be prepared to have the upper hand.
You can explain that to the Ukrainians and tell them how they shouldn't have American technical superiority like Starlink and the American AI and data in their drones to survive another day.
the EU has demonstrated for decades that by balancing trades, equality and human rights it can prevent conflicts from happening.
Seems to me that most of our friends in the balkans that have memory of the past wars are overall pretty happy about the current state of things, and there hasn't been wars to contend Alsace-Lorraine in 80 years, is it a record already?
War is very much not a given in the civilized world
That's why they have a full blown war in their borders and they're powerless without American hardware and intelligence. Also they're right now scrambling to allocate huge investments in weaponry, of course late, but better than never.
Full blown war: putin scared that more territories will want to join the EU block. No internal wars and more countries wishing to enter the block.
Powerless without american hardware and intelligence: You wish. Big tech is spending so much lobbying our governments in fear of us leaving them for open solutions, or god forbid paying fair amount of taxes.
And regarding intelligence, we would have been so much better without the CIA & co spying our politicians and messing with our governments, aiding and sponsoring domestic right wing terrorism for the past 50 years.
We have international treaties that ban biological and chemical weapons. Other weapons that are regulated include anti-personnel mines, cluster bombs, and blinding lasers. Expanding bullets are banned in military uses as are incendiary weapons against civilian targets.
That's the state today. Throughout history there's been a long negotiation about what weapons have been allowed in combat.
tell that to the people that Assad gassed -- in his own country -- or the Kurds gassed by Saddam. Or all of the chemical weapons used in the 1980s during Iran-Iraq.
or all of the people dying from AP mines in Ukraine.
half the world signed anti-mine treaties because they knew that if the real shooting started the US or USSR (who didn't sign the treaties) had a stockpile to send them.
there are easily searchable videos of the incendiary weapons being used against Ukrainians.
