Opinionated piece by Stefan Wolff, Professor of International Security, University of Birmingham, UK.
… the EU’s largest and Nato’s second-largest economy, Germany is now also aiming to turn its Bundeswehr (the German army, navy and air force) into the “strongest conventional army in Europe”. Its most senior military officer and chief of defence, Carsten Breuer, has published plans for a rapid and wide-ranging expansion of defence capabilities.
Germany is finally beginning to pull its weight in European defence and security policy. This is absolutely critical to the credibility of the EU in the face of the threat from Russia. Berlin has the financial muscle and the technological and industrial potential to make Europe more of a peer to the US when it comes to defence spending and burden sharing. This will be important to salvage what remains of Nato in light of a highly probable American down-scaling – if not complete abandonment – of its past security commitments to the alliance.
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My take is replacing american militarism and imperialism with that of Germany and France is not good actually. I know its suddenly unpopular to oppose massive rearmament of European imperial powers for some reason but I’m going to stick to my guns of opposing massive militarization.
Yes. And no. Develop capabilities to ensure you can defeat your enemy. Then scale down using game theory. It’s what has been done with nuclear warheads count.
Right now we can’t trust several players so yes, do arm. Also get into politics to prevent bad players (national or foreign) to take over the government.
Yeah like why would former colonial powers who both had the ambition once to conquer all of Europe be untrustworthy? I’m sure they won’t ever get drunk on power and start bullying their smaller neighbors, oh wait…