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So, here's a question nobody asks. What do you do when one of your oldest friends is Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the former president of Estonia, the European Union nation? I'll tell you what you do. You call him. A lot.

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My name's Andy Valvur. I'm a comedian, American-born, now living in Europe, because, well, if you could, wouldn't you? I grew up in the US, hearing stories from my parents about a country that didn't exist, at least not on any map you could buy because the Soviets had wiped it out.

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I only had one buddy who understood, Toomas. His parents were also Estonian, also refugees, and Toomas and I grew up sharing the same traditions, same weird Estonian Saturday school, and same conviction that America and Europe were family. And for most of our lives, they were. The alliance held until it didn't.

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Right now, the relationship that defined the free world for 80 years is coming apart. And Europe is scrambling to figure out who it is and what comes next. Toomas and I talk about this stuff. And it seems selfish to keep these conversations to myself. So here it is, the Continental Rift, with former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves and me, Andy Valvur. Serious politics, questionable hosts.

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It's July 30th. Welcome to the Continental Rift. This week, everyone is walking out of something. America walked out of the UN and might be walking out of Europe. Europe wants to walk out of Silicon Valley, and Russia would quite like August to walk out of the calendar.

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Basically, the short items we're going to get into are: why doesn't the EU have a disaster department? The U.S. got hot under the collar at the U.N. The U.S. Department of War has lit a fire in strategic planning departments across Europe. And we're going to take a look at European tech. Toomas, how are you? Well, while

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You people down there in the South are ravaged by fires. We're on fire. Yes. Well, here today, it's 19 degrees Celsius for our American listeners, that's 66 degrees Fahrenheit. And so it's cool. That's why I'm wearing my jacket, because otherwise it's too cold here.

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Ah, well, we had 41C yesterday, which for our American listeners is 105F. But you have air conditioning. We do have air conditioning. No, we don't. It's Europe. What are you, kidding me? But the good thing is, with Europe on fire and the heat waves, hopefully the tourists will stay home. Well, they're going to come up to Estonia, which is the mushroom capital of the world. Apparently it is. Ha!

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Maybe we'll put that in the show notes. Let's start with Black August. You brought this up while we were having our editorial meeting. Russians believe they're cursed. I mean, is that what it is? Yes, it's known as the August curse or Black August. Russia has had in the last 35 years kind of bad Augusts. So there was the August putsch in 1991, which we'll soon be celebrating.

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The Russian economy collapsed, ruble devalued in August of '98. '99 August was when Putin started doing all his funny business attacking the Chechens and the Second Chechen War.

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2000, the submarine Kursk sinks and he's on vacation and doesn't do anything. 2008, August he invades Georgia. So there is this superstition that

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disasters befall Russia in August. I can see the discussion in the Kremlin: "General, what is our greatest enemy?" "Historically, August." In the Soviet Union, at least, historically, the five enemies were: spring, summer, fall, winter, and international imperialism.

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It's just that because of all of the attacks that Russia has been undergoing recently, where the Ukrainians really have perfected their drone warfare and the economy is going into a nosedive, this of course is creating a good deal of trepidation since if July was so bad,

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wait till we hit August. So I'm curious, is this a Russian people thing? Yes, it's just a popular superstition. I mean, sort of on the order of the early 90s, people would think they would cure cancer by listening to one guy talking on TV and you had to put your hand on the TV and also send him money. In any case. We had those in America, called

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televangelists. There are a lot of superstitions. And of course, superstitions really increase when you have censorship and you don't tell people what's going on. You can't say anything bad, you can go to jail. So people get kind of caught up in conspiracy theories and superstitions. So that's where we are. But on the other side of this, these things happen when Europe all

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goes on vacation. So this is, I mean, this is what happened in 2008 with the war in Georgia. This is what happened in the Soviet Union collapse in August of 1991. There is nobody home, as it were. Paris is certainly empty, as we all know. People

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do not follow events because decision makers are all on vacation. So this does lead to certain kinds of problems. If like the main security threat to the continent of Europe is having a meltdown and you're having a meltdown in the warm conditions,

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Costa del Sol. Exactly. All right. Let's move on. And speaking of fires, Europe has discovered climate change and bureaucracy at exactly the same time. Well, actually, I mean, Europe is about the only continent that has actually been taking climate change seriously, other than maybe the Chinese who also do this and have been working much more, of course,

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than Europe on going over to electrical vehicles. But the problem is, at the moment, we have fires across southern Europe. Fires, warm weather, hot weather, doesn't follow national borders. It's basically a Schengen zone. Right.

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fires don't have to show their passports. On the other hand, the European Union has not quite figured out how to deal with domestic trans-national security policy issues, such as fires that do cross borders. They do have some resources. I mean, there is a department. But we don't have a dedicated service, a fire brigade, if you will, that would go and deal with

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these issues. And so firefighting, as with hybrid attacks, has generally been something that is left to the member states. You can rent firefighting equipment to help out countries with those forest fire issues. We actually have. We've rented 22 planes and five helicopters, but that's for a continent of 450 million people.

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Yes. This is an issue that has cropped up every once in a while, where basically it's left up to other member states to come in and help you out. And there's been a history of this, of course. I mean, Portugal is now helping Spain and so forth. People are coming to the aid of France and Spain. Czechia is. I think there's some Greek firefighters. There's some German firefighters. Yes.

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People do pitch in. They're like neighbors. They come over and go, "oh, your house is on fire. I'll bring a hose." It is an issue that would be yet another one of those areas of security that would be much better dealt with if you were to do it

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in a EU context in terms of distribution of planes, who gets what. I mean, right now it's a catch-as-catch can ad hoc. But you know, Europe is really good at organizing rules, organizing food security, organizing all kinds of other stuff. And this one seems to have fallen through the cracks, right? The dramatic increase in temperatures in the past two, three years is a new issue. And in fact, recent studies have shown that

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when it comes to climate change, Europe has been getting the brunt of it far more than anyone else. This also explains why Europe, more than, say, the United States, is concerned about climate.

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Reducing climate change, this is why we have the Green Deal here. Meanwhile, in the United States, the president says that countries that have windmills are all failed states. Oh, Jesus.

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All right. Moving on. So the U.S. got hot under the collar this week at the U.N. and walked out in fury at the French. Zut alors! What did the French do? Well, what happened is, is that the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, was up for a second four-year term. And the U.S. voted against giving him another four years alongside with? Yes, with...

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Russia, North Korea, Nicaragua, and Mali, those other great defenders of human rights. And this led to the French ambassador in Geneva tweeting out, quote,

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"The U.S. used to be a beacon of human rights. Not anymore. Today it stands alongside North Korea, Nicaragua, Mali, and Russia, isolated, and the world no longer listens to it." And the hashtag was "#AmericaAlone". Well, the U.S. replied to

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France, also on X, I mean, we're getting into a Twitter fight here. "France voted for someone who has been lecturing free sovereign democracies while cozying up to the world's worst oppressors." So that was last week and then Monday at the Security Council session on Ukraine, when it was the turn of France to take the floor

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The US delegation stood up and walked out, and the U.S. representative there, not Ambassador Walsh, called French behavior "disingenuous grandstanding." It said the U.S. will keep walking out until France, quote, renounces its rhetoric. Basically, the U.S. did the equivalent of la, la, la, la, la, we're not listening.

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I mean, okay. I mean, in the broader context, this is, you know, another little part of the rift that we see between Europe and the United States. And of course, it is kind of a big thing for the U.S. to walk out on a NATO ally. Can you imagine somebody said to Ronald Reagan in the office? Well, the U.S. voted with the Soviets. They did what? Yeah.

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I mean, a lot of people saw that French tweet and said, well, you know, they kind of have a point. Yeah. But the U.S. was angry about that and

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well, here we are. At some point, will this just get swept under the carpet? This is like yesterday's news. Or are there real implications? Well, you actually don't know when it comes to the US government at the moment. Because if it gets to Donald Trump, he may decide to escalate. If he doesn't pay attention to it, which is also, you know... So this is basically like a food fight in a middle school cafeteria. Yes. Well, that's going to be like

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Big Macs versus Gruyere

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Gruyere is stickier. But the French are famously independent-minded. Are they gunning to create a non-American alliance? Well, I don't think they are, but maybe the United States is. Yeah, they seem to be doing a really good job. All right. So, up next we're going to talk about the European Posture Review, which apparently has nothing to do with slouching. Well, it does because the Europeans have been slouching.

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So we're now referred to as the slouches over there. I'm not sure, but. I'm sure that's how they're referring to- That's how Elbridge Colby is referring to us: those slouches. Well, I think actually that's probably far too nice a term.

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Well, I know, but this is a family show. The United States, which has been promising since the beginning of Donald Trump's return to office, has been promising to look over what their role in security is in Europe or in NATO, to be precise. That means how many troops do we have in Europe? What kind of

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weaponry will they have? Will we have fighter planes there? A big issue that has not been looked at very much either in the

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European or the US press actually has to do the role of the United States in various sort of inside details of how an army or how a force works. And so this has finally begun. And it was, quote, "a real review designed to ensure that NATO is moving fast and irreversibly toward Europe taking primary responsibility for its conventional defense."

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Interesting and noteworthy there is "conventional defense", which means that at least the U.S. is in that sentence by Elbridge Colby, the Undersecretary for Political Affairs at the Department of Defense slash War. It means that actually the nuclear umbrella, according to that, would remain. So we're going to see a six-month long study, which,

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based on the 2025 National Security Strategy and the 2026 National Defense Strategy, which both foresee a decrease in a U.S. role in Europe,

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Of course, the National Security Strategy that came out also talked about basically regime change in Europe, but that's a different matter. In any case, this is all part of this thing called by Elbert Colby, NATO 3.0.

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This is the new NATO. So the 1.0 was the Cold War NATO, where you had like 400,000 U.S. troops up against the East German border.

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Then you had NATO 2.0. These are all terms invented now, but basically it covers the period from the collapse of the wall to basically today or the last two years with the rise of an aggressive Russia. NATO 3.0 is this time it's personal? Well, 2.0 was the peace dividend, which is the cause of all of the problems. We have now.

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Yeah, but it's, I mean, this is where, you know, the US keeps bashing us here saying, okay, you're not spending enough. It was, however, George Herbert Walker Bush who

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famously said, the Cold War is over. Now we have the peace dividend. We don't have to spend money on defense, which unfortunately, Europeans all took very seriously and said, yes, sir, now we're going to stop spending money on defense and we'll put it into vacations. Well, it didn't work out too well because people like us here

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in the East and the North, we were saying, no, no, no, no. We don't want to decrease defense spending because we know these people. No, trust us. We know. I mean, the fact that you are not communist, you don't have a.

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a communist model of the economy, does that mean you automatically become a rule of law based democracy? So here we are with 3.0 where Europe has to spend a lot more money, which they are, we are doing. However, this leads to the next point of contention, which,

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is what the United States didn't think about previously.

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kind of like bombing Iran and thinking that the Hormuz Strait, that it might be closed. It's like, well, if the Europeans have all this money, why would they necessarily buy their military stuff from us? And in fact, this is precisely what's happened, is that the Europeans said, oh, we have more money, and we need to help our industries. We'll buy stuff from the US, but

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when it's really something we don't have or we don't produce, but they do. So why would you buy a tank from the United States if you have Germany producing tanks? Why would you buy jets from the United States when, in fact, France and Sweden

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produce very good fighter planes. So this is an ongoing controversy. And we'll see how it goes. Okay. Up next on our show, apparently there is talk that they're thinking of putting in a revolving door at 10 Downing Street in the UK. Yeah.

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because they have yet another new prime minister, Andy Burnham, who I don't know much about. Well, we really don't either. He ran Manchester for a while. I do know that. Apparently did a good job, got some good reviews. But I find it really fascinating that suddenly, out of nowhere,

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this guy gets a seat in Parliament, and the next thing you know, everybody's looking over going, you want the job? Because I sure don't. Well, this is a parliamentary democracy. This is the way these things work in parliamentary democracies. In order to be a prime minister, you have to be a Member of the Parliament. So the Labour Party...

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which is in power in the UK, had gotten tired of the Prime Minister. And so if you're a Member of Parliament, as Burnham was, and he was voted as the new Prime Minister. And

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apparently, his first meeting he took was with Zelensky. Yes. This is clearly a signal sending opportunity because the first question that other people outside the UK ask is not about housing or any of the other issues that the UK is facing, but rather what is going to be his foreign policy posture, as it were.

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Yeah, I mean, given the fact that they've got problems in the UK, I mean, they've got NHS problems and they've got infrastructure problems, etc. It's interesting that as a Labour guy, he would actually focus on foreign policy first. And so the issue really is that

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the first person I'm going to meet on my foreign policy issue here is Volodymyr Zelensky, to show that there is continuity from the Starmer government and that labor has not changed its views of supporting Ukraine. Another signal was that

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the second foreign policy meeting that he had was with Ursula von der Leyen, showing that the UK also harbors warm feelings towards the European Union. I mean, he did not meet as his first foreign visitor the United States, which is often what has happened in the past, but now we see that that's not the case.

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All right. Well, let's leave this because this is going to evolve over the next several months. And we can talk about this as we get going. Time will tell. All right. Our main topic/story is Europe's technology. Basically, the way it looks, Europe doesn't want to be held hostage. I mean, you know, they want digital independence and they're using an American laptop running an American operating system to complain about American software.

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We, we, we are using American software right now. You know, I'm surprised Estonia hasn't invented some sort of software because we're good at that. We have. Okay. 25 countries use the open source software used in coordinating government activities. So we have, but that's not the point. It all started when the European Commission last week finally rendered its decision

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to fine Google a billion US dollars for antitrust issues. Now, the antitrust thing is important because basically they found that Google was directing people who searched on Google to other Google-related products. And you're not supposed to be doing that. And this violates EU law.

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which is passed democratically by the European Parliament. Now, what happened to this in response was that President Trump immediately threatened to use tariffs against Europe for this decision. Well, there are a couple of issues related to this. First of all,

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the whole idea of using tariffs as a weapon against someone for political reasons. Tariffs are a way, are supposed to be, (and have been, at the insistence of the United States for the past 80 years) a mechanism for balancing trade so that you don't get any certain advantages. It is not meant to be a weapon.

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An economic weapon is a sanction, which is a whole different kind of-. Hybrid warfare. When you start raising tariffs or using tariffs as a means of political warfare, they're no longer tariffs. You're actually getting into the area of sanctions. And this probably does run into serious issues also with U.S. law. This is not a great

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development. Which brings us back to your point that if you use U.S. technology, then the U.S. could hold you hostage, right? I mean, is that the lesson we're getting from Trump? Yes, but it's more than that. First of all, yes. If you're going to

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fine a US company, doesn't matter if it's technology, for violating antitrust law in Europe, the United States will object and then will put tariffs on you. That's the first problem.

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The second problem has to do with what we started out with, that we're all using US tech. And the issue in Europe is, can we trust the United States? We have already seen instances where the United States has limited tech use

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in Europe. Already under the Biden administration, the United States divided Europe into so-called Tier 1 and Tier 2 countries, which had to do with the kind of chips you were allowed to purchase. Some countries could, some countries couldn't. Secondly, we had a new form of AI from

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the US that it forbade to export. Now what this does in Europe is that it makes countries very nervous because the US is going to basically keep us behind. The problem right now is that we simply are behind, way behind the United States in technology.

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Why that is, we already talked a little bit about that last week and the Draghi report, because we don't have the kind of tech companies in Europe that the United States has. So, no EU company with a market capitalization of over 100 billion has been created from scratch in the last 50 years.

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50 years! No new companies. Okay, the old ones, you know, they're there, but the future is tech. All six US companies worth over $1 trillion were founded in that same 50-year period. So, the tech companies are way more advanced. And of course, 30% of European unicorns, or billion-dollar companies, have moved out of the

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out of Europe and basically they moved to the United States. So basically computers and software are easy to replace, but cloud storage, chips, frontier AI stuff, that's hard to replace. Especially when we get to AI, because that presumes, and this goes back to the Draghi report, AI presumes big data centers. We don't have those. Where would we put them?

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We have plenty of space in Europe. Look at Estonia. I don't want to see a large data center in Estonia. Well, okay, I'll get there. First of all, we're falling behind AI because we don't have our own AI here. We don't have the data centers that are required to run AI. And on top of that, we don't have the electricity to power AI and we have the most expensive electricity in the world.

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So, we're in trouble in that sense. Now, the President of the Council, Antonio Costa, will

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hold a first ever council meeting dedicated to AI. I should say in terms of full disclosure, I was one of the signatories of the letter to Costa asking him to convene this. But okay, leave that aside.

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And we see this increasing awareness on the part of Europe that we are technologically behind and we have to do something. And this is going to cost us money. And that's going to be a fight for the next several years. I don't understand the logic, though. I mean, you were the president of a nation and you would think that this topic

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gaining independence, becoming more au courant in terms of technology, would be at the top of everyone's list in Europe. I don't get it. No, no. I mean, that was Estonia's way out of the mess it was in, which was to become completely digitized. Yeah.

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that's us. There's no problem in countries that have gone that route. So, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, yeah, digitization is a no-brainer. AI is a no-brainer, but the rest of Europe hasn't really caught on. Germany is the leading industrial power of the EU.

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It is, however, ranked as the least digitally advanced country in the EU. If you want to communicate with German businesses, you send them a fax. And you'd think the Germans, of all people who are big on efficiency

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would be leading the charge. They're big on efficiency in some areas and other areas they're not. Is there a fear among the leaders? I mean, what are they afraid of? Well, let's be honest. Most of the leadership in European countries, at least south of Estonia, which is most of Europe, are not digitally native.

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But look, I mean, I'm a weird guy. I learned to code in 1971 in high school, and that was like a one-off program. The point is that Europe has not been at that level of

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digital sophistication among the political leadership that we see in other places. You don't have all these tech people in the parliaments the way you do in, say, California, where you have people who are from the software sector who have run for office. The other problem is that there is a luddite strand

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in European politics, and we have to recognize this there. I guess the counter-argument is that Europe doesn't want to lead. It just needs enough tech to make sure that no phone call from one capital to another can switch the continent off. I mean, the first country to learn that the hard way was us. Well, I'll tell you where the issue is, is that there are in

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this massively exploding area known as artificial intelligence, there are two countries that are at the forefront, way at the forefront. That is the United States and there's China.

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And the fear, and perhaps not big enough fear, is that if we don't manage to be at the forefront of AI ourselves, we can be easily victims of one or the other. Because AI just makes you smarter. This has happened before in

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mankind's history, there used to be two kinds of humans. There were Neanderthals and there were Cro-Magnons. Cro-Magnons now are basically everybody, and the Neanderthals went extinct. We do not want to be the Neanderthals of the 21st century. No, we do not want to be Neanderthals.

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And so we want to be just as smart as the other two. Right. Well, hopefully Europe needs to wake up and get smart about this, but you don't seem to have a lot of,

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hope for this? Well, I think that people have not realized the extent of not always friendly powers having far greater AI capability than we have. And we see that between the Southern Europeans who want to spend

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as much money as possible on agriculture. And the northern Frugals who want to limit the amount of money spent on anything, the understanding has not yet reached either group that it's not about agriculture and it's not about 19th century economic theory about not borrowing money. It is about our future survival

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as Europe. So in wrapping this up, essentially Europe needs to wean themselves off of U.S. technology. I imagine we're working on it. This is a very big topic about the EU and technology, and we will come back to it, I'm sure, many more times in the future because this is one of the hot issues of the time. I would say that other than

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the heat in Southern Europe, it is the only real hot issue overall. I mean, we will see lots of fighting, infighting, on all kinds of issues, be it taxation, be it borrowing, and all those things. But Europe's survival as an entity really depends on Europe becoming a tech powerhouse itself or

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we will be, to quote Mark Andreessen, eaten by software.

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And on that note, thank you. This is always, it's always so much fun to talk to you. I want to thank all of you for tuning in and giving us some of your time. I want to thank my co-host, the former president of Estonia, Toomas Hendrik Ilves. I'm Andy Valvur. This is a Fresh Lens production, All Rights Reserved. We will see you next week on The Continental Rift.