Why Europe needs a common defence fund - outside the EU | Simon Nixon

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

64% : For Britain, which quit the EU less than a decade ago, it would be a giant step back towards European integration.
50% : First and foremost, it would be independent of the EU.
46% : The EU has created a mechanism to allow member states to borrow cheaply to fund defence and has tweaked its fiscal rules to exempt defence spending from calculations of national debt.
46% : That means it would be open to some of the continent's key defence players such as Britain, Norway and Switzerland, who are not EU members, while excluding those EU members whose constitutionally enshrined neutrality complicates their participation in common defence initiatives.
44% : What's more, tweaks to fiscal rules and cheap loans will not help many highly indebted EU countries for whom the hard constraint on their borrowing is the bond market: any interest saving from accessing EU loans is likely to be wiped out by higher interest charges on the rest of their debt.
44% : As things stand, the EU has been unable to overcome this fragmentation.
42% : And unlike the EU, it would not be vulnerable to vetoes by countries such as Hungary, whose government does not share the same values.
31% : Even as European leaders plead with Trump that a peace without robust security guarantees for Ukraine is no peace at all, their position is fatally weakened by the fact that they are in no position to provide those security guarantees themselves.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.