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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Judging by what they’re doing around the whole Gaza Genocide (both the “uwavering support” for the genociders based solely on the ethnicity they claim to represent and the various authoritarian laws and abuses of force to silence dissent claiming it’s “anti-semitism” which even affect the server hosting this very forum and the forum itself) as well as the growth of the AfD (the rest of German politics being big fans of Racially Discriminatory policies is perfect grounds for a “Let’s Be Racist For Ourselves” party like this to grow), Germany isn’t at all a reliable “guarantor” of European security, unless the rest of Europe is willing to risk something similar to 1939 if and when Germany rides this current Racist and Authoritarian direction to its natural end.
Even if the Humanists in Germany (who, granted, seem to be waking up of late to the reality of a heavily racist political environment in modern day German and that the notion of “good” racial-discrimination was always a manipulative lie) manage to somehow stop this slide towards the full-on “good old days”, more in general it’s also a pretty bad idea for Europe to rely on a single large nation as guarantor of European Security: best for Europe to make itself safe as a group, following the very same principles of the European Union, but in the field of Military Security, were no doubt Germany would have an important role, just not an essential and irreplaceable one of guaranteeing anything.
Professor Wolff’s ideas are themselves a throwback to older days with older concepts of a hierarchy of nations and military power and we’ve been doing a big effort since to move from that to “together we’re strong” approaches that don’t have big strong nations on top and little weak nations as little more than their vassals praying that that the big boys don’t trample on them.
Yeah agree, Germany arming up and wanting to be strong leaders again is something we should fear, not cheer at.
That’s not what I wrote and is not what I defend.
Germany should be a fully participating member of the group, maybe even primo inter pares, just not a required and irreplaceable part of European defense.
All of Europe should make itself ready to defend all of Europe rather than rely on some mythical father-nation that protects us from the baddies (especially not Germany which has issues, but in general that whole concept is risky and outdated).
No that was my personal take, and Germans can downvote me as much as they want but they’re a shitty neighbor and I don’t need them to show up as a “strong leader”. It seems to me that even the progressives there are mostly ignorant as to how seriously bad the current trajectory is, and they expect us to trust them?
IMO centralized power is always bad but especially bad in a country that has a terrible fascist history and that seems to be repeating its mistakes while being offended by anyone who warns them about it because they still believe they learned their lesson and are now the main moral instance on combatting fascism.