Scholz added that, from now on, Germany will invest more than 2% of its gross domestic product on its armed forces. According to data collected by NATO, Germany is expected to have spent 1.53% of GDP on defense last year.

Germany’s parliament erupted into a rare standing ovation, a roar that filled the main chamber of the Reichstag, a building whose destruction and rebirth were at the center of the horrors of the last world war. It was now again witness to what Germans labeled a Zeitenwende: a historic turning point.

Defense expert Jana Puglierin watched on in disbelief. “It was mind-boggling for me to see this because for many of the things that he had basically decided overnight, I had fought [for] for years and I was sure to never see them materialize,” she says.

Germany long resisted building a stronger army
Puglierin, who heads the Berlin office of the European Council on Foreign Relations, says for years she has listened to Germany’s allies urge it to step up and spend more on defense and provide more leadership, while Germany’s government has repeatedly dismissed the idea.

She says defense spending wasn’t even an issue in the country’s elections this past autumn. “And I think the main reason for it was because German citizens did not feel threatened for a very long time,” she says. “They never saw that their security was actually a fragile thing. They took it very much for granted. And the sheer idea that, I don’t know, a Russian missile would hit Germany was completely absurd.”

This German mindset is rooted in a past that’s difficult for many citizens to reckon with; a time when the country, under Adolf Hitler, built one of the world’s largest armies. “They started the war, and obviously all industry was turned into the army. And then afterwards, everything was flattened,” says military expert Constantin Wissman.

Wissman, author of “Not Quite Ready for Combat: How the German army became a rubbish army,” says World War II not only destroyed the German military, but left a residue of shame around its future. “And actually, you can see a lot of problems which the German army has now stems from that time because we never really got comfortable with having an army.”

Money can’t buy everything
After the end of the Cold War, Germany slashed its defense budget and used its reduced military not so much to protect its homeland as to assist in NATO missions abroad, such as Kosovo and Afghanistan. The state of Germany’s military suffered so much that, in 2015 during a joint-NATO training exercise, German troops were forced to use broomsticks painted black instead of guns because of equipment shortages.

Once the parliament passes Scholz’s defense spending plan, the new funding will help, but money won’t solve everything, Wissman says. “I think the structural deficits of the German army run deeper and they have the structural problems which should be resolved before you spend the money on it.”

Even with the new money, military analyst Thomas Wiegold says Germany’s armed forces will still be forced to play catch-up. “Funny enough, this does not mean increasing the size,” says Wiegold. “This doesn’t even mean to add completely different capabilities. First and foremost, it means to finance what actually should be there already.”

Things like modern fighter jets — earlier this month, Germany pledged to buy nearly three dozen F-35s from Lockheed Martin to replace its 40-year-old fleet of Tornado jets. Wiegold says that’s just the start. Germany needs to buy new tanks, weapons and warships, among many other things.

Europe could feel safer and rely less on the U.S.
And as Germany rebuilds its military, Wiegold says the rest of Europe will feel safer. He quotes a former Polish foreign minister who said, “I’m not afraid of a strong German army. I’m afraid of a weak German army.”

“It’s not that France or the U.K. or Italy or even the Poles would see a militarily strong Germany as a threat,” he says. “I think it’s more or less the other way around; that they expect Germany, with its economic power, to do its part on the security side.”

Defense expert Puglierin says she hopes Germany will move forward with the responsibility that Europe’s largest military brings with it. Because for too long, she says, Germany has relied on the United States to help defend it. “I have heard so many Europeans and Germans saying ‘Thank God we have the United States.’ But at the same time, we need to realize that we should not take it for granted that the United States is there to babysit the Europeans forever,” says Puglierin. “So I think we need to become a much more capable partner in the trans-Atlantic relationship to create a trans-Atlantic relationship on a level on equal footing.”

And she says this means not only sharing the U.S. military’s burden, but also having a fair say in how international security develops. She says Germany is not only wary of Russia, but also of China, and depending on who takes the White House in 2024, it’s difficult to predict what Germany’s relationship with the U.S. will be like. A stronger German military, she reasons, should help Germany navigate this uncertainty; a military that is now on track to be the world’s third largest, behind only the American and Chinese militaries.

“What I would hope to see is that we develop a healthy relationship towards this notion of European sovereignty because I think it’s definitely necessary,” she says.

Puglierin says, for decades, Germany’s leadership believed it could bring peace through trade and wouldn’t need a big military. But the world has become more unstable and unpredictable. And a capable military, she says, is now a necessity.

Esme Nicholson contributed to this report from Berlin.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/22/1087859567/germany-military-buildup-russia-invasion-ukraine

The post With war on its doorstep, Germany plans a major military buildup first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

At the end of World War II, the Allied powers convened the Potsdam Conference to determine how Germany would be supervised, considering its role as the instigator of the war. After restraints on Germany following World War I proved unsuccessful at preventing another global conflict, it was decided that more stringent measures had to be taken. Germany was divided into four quadrants to be directly controlled by the four Allied powers. The United States controlled the southern zone, Britain the northwest, France the southwest, and the Soviet Union controlled the east zone. Berlin, located within the Soviet-occupied territory, was run jointly by the Allies until 1948, when the city was split between East and West Berlin. Germany was ultimately reunified in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall during the decline of the Soviet Union.

This reunification elicited anxiety from the European community, and many eurozone nations feared that a reunified Germany would alter the balance of power and disrupt the peace they had experienced for nearly half a century. Germany is a powerful force in Europe and around the world, and their recent policies have challenged transatlantic relations and European cohesion. Their positions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, the Iran nuclear deal, and the NATO alliance are several examples of this disruption.

Germany is the destination of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which would double, to 110 billion cubic meters, the volume of Russian gas entering Germany and other European countries. Political tensions over the pipeline are high because Nord Stream 2 would not only increase German reliance on Russian gas but would also bypass Ukraine, a key ally in the region which is working to counter an expansionist Russia. Critics are concerned about European reliance on Russian energy, which is already at 40% across the continent. Nord Stream 2 would only increase Russia’s market share.

Nonetheless, Germany has been a powerful force in support of the project. This is a case of Germany pursuing policies contrary to our Allied geopolitical strategy.

Another problem for the United States is Germany’s position on the Iran nuclear deal. Signed in 2015 by Iran, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, Germany, and the European Union, this deal compelled Iran to willingly relinquish its nuclear program in return for the removal of sanctions imposed by other signatories. In May 2018, the United States withdrew from the agreement, citing evidence that Iran was not in compliance, and reinstated sanctions. Meanwhile, Germany’s Foreign Minister Heiko Maas publicly called for a payment system to purposefully bypass United States sanctions on Iran.

Finally, Germany has been challenged on its funding of NATO. At the NATO summit in Wales in 2014, member states agreed to increase their defense spending to 2% of GDP by 2024. The United States has the highest defense spending of any NATO country at 3.6% of GDP. Germany, however, spends only 1.2% of GDP on defense, although it is Europe’s strongest economy. Of the 29 NATO members, more than half spend more than 1.2% of their GDP on defense.

Given that Germany can clearly afford its fair share for NATO, its commitment to this important alliance is seriously lacking.

We need a Germany which is in sync with the West and aligned with the eurozone instead of going it alone. To promote a positive and cohesive Western geopolitical strategy, Germany should pay greater consideration to the goals and concerns of their partners: the United States and our European allies.

Francis Rooney is the Representative for Florida’s 19th Congressional District. He is the ranking member of the Western Hemisphere subcommittee on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and previously served as U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See under President George W. Bush from 2005 to 2008.

Source: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/germany-goes-it-alone-without-respect-for-its-partners

The post Germany goes it alone without respect for its partners first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Bob Gates, perhaps the most farsighted post-Cold War defense secretary, presciently predicted in 2011 “that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress—and in the American body politic writ large—to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense.”

Gates, who once rightly understood that the Saudis would fight Iranians to the last American, also essentially hinted the same with regards to Germany and Russia, “nations apparently willing and eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in European defense budgets.”

Put simply, he was saying the Germans would talk about an international liberal order for as long as Americans would pay to defend it. The day they are caught not tangibly supporting this order, they would throw a tantrum and blame Washington. “Future U.S. political leaders– those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me—may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost,” he said.

The last two weeks have brought back this long-time question, as Germany yet again reneged on its pledge to increase its defense budget, which was already far short of the required 2 percent of gross domestic product to uphold North Atlantic Treaty Organization commitments. Under a nominally conservative leader in Angela Merkel, the German government is apparently struggling to have a defense budget of 1.3 percent of GDP, and reports show it is set to decrease to 1.2 percent by 2023.

In short, Germany is not even trying to increase NATO funding, but actually planning to decrease it, in a rub to the American and British taxpayers who subsidize European security. Adding insult to injury, some German politicians accused the American ambassador to Germany, Richard Grennell, of acting like a colonial viceroy or high commissioner of an occupying force, and wished he would leave Germany immediately.

Yes, you read that right. Germany refused to pay for its share in NATO, and when the American ambassador pointed that out, the German leaders wanted to make him a “persona non grata” and take away his position. In a similar timeframe, which I am sure is “purely coincidental,” the EU fined Google for the third time, and Germany signaled it would continue to be protectionist in trade.

Grennell has been one of the most effective President Trump picks. He managed to align European sanctions against Iran, deport Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Odeh, and get East European countries to agree to increase their defense budgets after 15 years of the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations failing to move the needle.

But as reality bites, former Cold War rivals like China and Russia return to Cold War form, and the EU turns into a liberal empire, the question before Americans (and the British, while we are at that) is what to do with Germany. Berlin is not behaving like an ally, and not even behaving like a partner with whom Washington can have a tactical alignment. Germany is openly hostile to America while, in perhaps the most insufferable development, sanctimoniously lecturing America.

Ever since Trump won, partly as a reaction from American taxpayers opposed to foreign interventionism and permanent sacrosanct alliances, there has been a conventional wisdom of sorts that the Great Grand Mutti, Merkel, is the next leader of the liberal world order. Sometimes this position is laid at the feet of French President Emmanuel Macron or Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but Merkel is worshipped by the Max Boots and the Anne Applebaums of the world.

Oddly, however, I have yet to see a single op-ed on how Merkel is wrecking the very foundation of Euro-Atlantic peace by importing Russian gas to Europe and calling for a European army to replicate NATO, while simultaneously ruling out spending on NATO. So, what should the Brits and the Americans do?

NATO was formed in the mid-20th century, in the words of Lord Ismay, to keep the Germans down, the Americans in, and the Russians out. It was primarily a geopolitical alliance. Everything else was secondary.

NATO meant to ensure that no single hegemon dominates the European continent ever again, and American hegemony in the Western hemisphere was by design, not a flaw. It was needed, as the Western European states were weak and subject to Soviet threats—which vanished as early as in the mid-sixties.

John Kennedy, for example, as early as in the mid-sixties, said, “We cannot continue to pay for the military protection of Europe while the NATO states are not paying their fair share and living off the fat of the land. We have been very generous to Europe and it is now time for us to look out for ourselves.”

The new reality, however, is that NATO is bloated and the German strategy of buckpassing is evident. Contrary to popular opinion, the first NATO expansion idea in the early 1990s was from Germany, under the cynical and crafty Volker Rühe, who was clear about German frontiers shifting towards Russia. It was not the East Europeans, who even though were rightfully feeling threatened by Russia, driving the enlargement.

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