The government had no problem instituting mega sanctions on Russia, entire European will obviously be a harder political pill to swallow but really doesn’t seem out of the question.
Oh man. You do realize that some 50% of GPS satellites are EU satellites right now? The US doesn’t even have a fully functioning constellation without the EU’s Galileo satellites (which are far more advanced in offering a cryptographically provable time). If the US were to go down that road, I’m fairly confident you’d have to go back to MapQuest and print out your directions.
The US barely traded with Russia anyway, and most of it was aircraft, vehicles and various services [1]. Sanctioning off Russia was and is easy for the US, the only major problem is the loss of soft power the US had with the OPEC and the resulting hike in oil prices.
The ones really affected by the sanctions are us Europeans.
Sanctioning Russia was a huge gamble in that it will likely lead to a heavily decreased reliance on USD globally as well as create competitors to swift which the us uses to enforce its hegemony.
The US dollar will always be the major currency of the world. What should replace it? The Euro is a good valuable currency, but we lack the military power that secures the US dollar plus we suffer from internal issues like the Italian debt that threatens to destabilize the Euro once again. Japan is a major economy, but still small and it has issues because its backing by the government is uncertain after "Abenomics" and the gerontification of Japanese society. The Chinese currencies suffer from cashflow control measures, and who the fuck would buy anything from Russia even if they had more to offer than barely functioning tanks, oil, gas and grain?
