He is picking the easy target. He tries to keep the alliance together and probably knows that talking to US Americans is meaningless or too difficult, so he chooses the easy way out.
The Europeans won’t deprive him of his Amazon account after all.
Could be honest… but I never hear him “talking sense” into US Americans. It’s always Europe that should fall in line. Maybe I just missed it?
This is the idea of a Multi-Speed Europe. This is nothing new, but voices haven’t been that loud (except for these moments when Angela Merkel floated the idea rather vaguely and called it “Europe of two speeds”.
This is not limited to military cooperation but also extends to economic and societal integrations. In reality, we already do have these cooperations especially at border regions where enablements of Schengen hits the people directly. Why should these cooperations stop at border regions, for example? The eurozone ist yet another example of a different Europe.
They never were neutral. Austria never was neutral. This is just a diplomatic term but ultimately doesn’t mean what it implies.
Switzerland is always happy to launder and store money for any despot or pariah state. That is not neutral.
Austria’s companies made (and still make) good money with Russian oligarchs. Anything but neutral.
It’s a made up concept to have some sort of argument for the newspapers and common ground between diplomatic talks.