US relations with Germany should be in crisis. Instead Washington bends over backwards for Berlin. This has to change.
"a year on, Germany’s armed forces are in an even worse condition than when the war started, according to military commanders..." 1/
wsj.com/articles/when-…
"...and Mr. Scholz has struggled to invest any extra in the depleted military."
It's insane that Washington is not heavily and insistently pressing Berlin to live up to its most basic NATO commitments. This policy is 180 from what US and NATO interests require. 2/
"The country has 180,000 active soldiers and just over 300 tanks, half of them not roadworthy, down from 500,000 troops and 5,000 tanks at the height of the Cold War." 3/
"Yet a year on, not a cent of the €100 billion has been spent on weapons systems, according to German officials... Berlin has said it won’t immediately raise military spending to meet the 2% of GDP level pledged by NATO members in 2014." Incredible. 4/
This is *bad not good* from Ivan Krastev: "Ivan Krastev, a political scientist and permanent fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, said: “Europe continues to be a U.S. protectorate.” 5/
"A key reason for this is Germany’s shifting threat assessment of Russia...Ukraine’s stiff resistance and a string of Russian military setbacks have since removed the sense of urgency, according to multiple officials." 6/
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