Cars before drones

Sander Tordoir is the chief economist of the Centre for European Reform in London. Tordoir says Europe’s rearmament won’t rescue its industry. What Europe is mounting is not one rearmament program but dozens of national ones, small-scale and barely co-ordinated - expensive and inefficient. A car plant here and there can pivot to weapons; that won’t move the wider economy much. The White House, though, may be onto something: Poland is ramping up its spending fast, and it keeps buying American.

There is hope, Tordoir says, though it runs the other way around. Governments in Europe and America are coming to see that military orders alone will never sustain a battery supply chain China can’t squeeze - that takes a civilian market too. Which may mean Europe can’t build the weapons it wants until it saves the car plants it is losing …

Read the interview in full here.