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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Easy: have a provision that if AfD or anybody like them ever gets into government, all the MIC and weapons stockpiles will be handed to surrounding non-Orban-stan EU countries or NATO itself.
Mate, have you not noticed the authoritarian measures in Germany to silence criticism of the Gaza Genocide, not all that dissimilar to what the US is doing?!
The rot of Racial Discrimination and the tendency to use Force to silence dissent crosses most of German politics, the AfD being but the current pinnacle of it (easily replaced so long those very fields keep getting watered and fertilized by the rest of the German political body).
People in power in Germany NOW are the very opposite of Humanists who equally care for other people merely because they’re human beings, and it would be very dangerous for the rest of Europe to rely on the goodwill of those in power in Germany even if the threat of the AfD was stopped.
And who is supposed to enforce that mechanism? That would require stationing a few hundred thousand soldiers from all over NATO to be stationed in German bases and eye their “allies” carefully, make sure they are the ones handling the stockpiles etc.
That is completely unrealistic.