Well this was quite openly communicated, why germany bought the F35 for example. To still get (nuclear) protection. (with the homebuild Tornados phasing out and the Eurofighter not getting a licence so easy, only the F35 is capable of delivering nukes with german pilots).

But I think it was a pretty bad appeasement deal.

The F35 is also just a much better plane.

That's a true claim today. The defence industry moves surprisingly slowly for a field where more advanced technology is such an advantage so it probably will be true for close to another decade as well because Europe has no native fifth gen fighter.

However the story might be different in a decade as sixth gen aircraft like Tempest are entering service and probably other modern technologies like unmanned/autonomous drones and hypersonic and directed energy weapons are more widely deployed. Connectivity between units in the field is also clearly a huge deal that is going to matter more and more and that is going to require a level of interoperability and trust that won't be kind to "partners" who aren't good team players.

On that kind of timescale I expect "buying American" will be much less attractive to most "allies" of the US than it has been for most of the past century and it will show exactly in decisions like who is making and buying whose planes.

The F35 is a fighter-bomber/light-bomber. Others are air superiority platforms. Different tools for different situations.

F35 has far better bvr capabilities than the eurofighter and in practice ends up being far more useful in the air superiority role.

Eurofighter is really only good for peacetime patrols, the F35 will detect and shoot down enemies in real conflict far before the Eurofighter can do anything.

In a bizarre hypothetical conflict you would certainly not want to engage a F35 in an Eurofighter, the Eurofighter would be knocked out of the sky long before it could even see the F35. It certainly couldn’t turn on it’s radar.

There are extensive public studies available from e.g. the Danish government that ended up with the conclusion that the F35 is far superior in air-to-air combat. https://www.fmn.dk/globalassets/fmn/dokumenter/strategi/kamp...

One would hope, as the Eurofighter is a 20-year-old design. There are older fighters that serve their purposes quite well, but the F35 will end up being compared against fighters yet to appear. And I wonder whether any of these birds will be effective during the day in a modern battlefield before the missile and radar systems are taken out.

Against Russia? Why not.

Against China? If you’re willing to accept a level of losses we haven’t seen since WW2, but that’s just the nature of peer to peer warfare.

That's a good point.