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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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.