Azor....you bring up a number of interesting points concerning the German split personality ..........Originally Posted by Azor
Outlaw 09 may agree with many Germans on the value of the European Union, but Germans clearly disagree with him on the value of the trans-Atlantic alliance. Despite the pressure that Merkel has put on European cohesion with her disastrous border and migration policies, it is difficult to imagine her successor taking a harder line with Russia. Many German leaders, Steinmeier included, would love for the Ukrainian issue to just go away so that they can expand Nord Stream and go back to business as usual.
See here from Der Spiegel: http://www.spiegel.de/international/...578-druck.html
Below are the juicy excerpts:
Are we to assume that a country that has the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons, which openly talks about using them even in limited conflicts, which openly talks about targeting non-nuclear NATO member states, and which has conducted more than one simulated nuclear strike on a neighbor is not more of a threat than a terrorist group mostly contained in the Middle East?
The concept of total war was not invented by Goebbels and pre-dates World War II. Larsen could just as easily be referring to a whole-of-government approach, which would be required to counter hybrid warfare. According to Wiegrefe then, NATO is rife with hawks and Fascists...
Firstly, an open-source back-of-the-envelope analysis from ten years ago regarding the US benefiting from the Russian strategic C4ISR being in shambles has naught to do with NATO-Russian relations today. Secondly, Prompt Global Strike has not gone far since its initial conception, and the United States, Russia and especially China are all working on hypersonic glide vehicles.
NATO is not seeking to achieve local superiority, let alone supremacy, in the Baltic region, especially given that the affected countries border Russia's Western Military District. However, it is incumbent on NATO to ensure that: (a) a "hybrid" or less-than-Article V conflict in the Baltics is unattractive to Russia; and (b) that the Baltic republics feel assured that NATO will defend them as much as say Germany.
Remember the German "baby boomer" generation post 1968 was raised to hate and loathe war and BTW a number of those born in say 1933-37 were old enough to remember spending their nights in bomb shelters and the march of the Soviet Army into Berlin based on their parents Nazi history and that expressed itself in the German student movement SDS.....which was a generational break with their own parents and with the German society as a whole up to 1968....ie in German universities in the 60s male students had to wear a tie and literally had to bow down to the Professors...a hangover from the 30s....
Coupled with a hefty anti VN war movement as I do remember their marches down the Ku-dam by the thousands waving NLF and VC flags chanting Ho, Ho, Ho chi-Minh...until they ran into the water cannons of the riot police.
That same student movement turned then into a general anti war anti military movement in the 80s with their Stop the Bomb railroad demos when the US was shipping bombs from Bremerhaven to the USAF bases and then it was against the stationing of the US cruise missiles...BUT when the Wall came down so died at the same time this energized student and baby boomer generation. This coupled at the same time with a strong anti nuclear power plant movement which led to a massive riot that was fought literally in a forest with thousands of demonstrators and an equal number of riot police.
Now jump forward and you have a complete new generation in their 30-40s that is politically unmotivated about anything outside of earning money and enjoying life in general.
Then along comes an existential threat which they cannot comprehend as they are not from the Cold War days and their inherent lack to get motivated politically about anything.
Except Pocomon Go where they will have a demo to demand it be released in Germany led by over 2000 teenagers....
Right now many of those that I know that are still politically active openly complain about the total lack of German interest in anything political...
NOW jump into the current German politics and you will notice that those that want to move back to business as usual are from the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and those in that party in their 40-60s....driven by what I call simply greed. Remember the SPD is basically a tad to the left and had a close socialist/communist past thus an inherent affinity for Russia.
The former SPD leader Schroeder has made a ton of money by being named by the Russians to the Nordstream 1 board and their FM is a lackluster politician not well liked by Merkel as he states things that often have not been cleared by her ie his recent critique of NATO as a "warmonger sable rattling organization..
Right now the SPD has in polling slipped under 21% and for a party that polled in the 40-50% in the Cold War days...that is a major loss.
And based on the recent federal elections and with the increased number of populist parties polling in the 12-15% ranges you are seeing the SPD slip badly into 3rd and or 4th position with the newly elected governments being Centrist to Green or what they call Black Green governments.
Merkel and her CDU has though starting polling upwards in a strong move as the public now is seeing her as a stability factor and as they have become more open to the refugee issues.
Part of the refugee problem was that the numbers initially overwhelmed the government and they had no messaging and narrative e for the public to accommodate the sheer numbers...since then the government has caught up, has a solid integration program in place and is controlling tighter and tighter and thus the confidence of the public increases...
Notice the comments made by Merkel during the Warsaw Summit....some of the strongest ever made by a German leader against Putin...BTW not even matched by Obama.
The Russian sanctions will hold in the EU as long as Merkel holds the line as the EU knows who the EU paymaster is...thus the drive by the SPD to try to do workarounds ie the new NordStream......
BTW....recent polling as late as last week clearly shows over 54% of Germans are now naming Russia as a serious threat to Germany.....up from say about 14% during Crimea...and remember Russia has now made Germany a prime info warfare target as it has a large Russian community and a large Russian mafia community.....and the FSB has been working Germany hard since 1991.
That increase is due namely to the constant reporting by the German MSM newspaper BILD which is about the only one carry a constant stream of reporting on both eastern Ukraine and Syria and the Russian actions in both those locations.
BILD recently received a ruffle by the German Press Institute for supposedly false reporting and then BILD blasted back with photo after photo and totally fact checked articles and the Agency went totally silent...and BILD is correcting and calling out the mistakes made often by the German national news channels....earning them the direct Russian info warfare directed by RT and TASS....
So all in all do not write off the German public as not wanting to do anything except "business as usual"...they have indeed caught the curve...it will be interesting to see where they go in the coming years...especially as they slowly rearm and rebuild their military to match the now perceived Russian threat.
BUT one thing is a given for sure...with the exit of the UK from the EU...the next US President will be forced to work ever closer with Germany something that did not happen under the Obama/Rhodes WH....
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