News that Germany’s lawmakers have approved a € 107 billion fund to beef up its military is foreboding, telling, and cause for reflection. After all, what could possibly go wrong if the Germans decide to spend more than any nation except the U.S. or China?
Of course, the western alliance is suggesting the Germans are only answering to decades of criticism that Germany has not held up to agreements to support NATO in the past. But, few believe that Berlin’s aim is to assume “responsibility” for protecting the pack. Germany is in a fix because of the country’s leading role in warring with Russia, both economically and with material support. The rhetoric is running hot and thick, as this statement from Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock reveals:
“This is the moment in which Germany says we are there when Europe needs us.”
And everyone in Europe and abroad knows how the Germans love and care for their EU and NATO brothers and sisters. Next, the advertisements for the Fourth Reich will show Greek and Romanian children being coddled by blue-eyed German youth leaders dressed in colorful brown shirts.
The Germans have gone so far as to amend the country’s constitution to allow for building a new panzer elite and Luftwaffe legion. And for those who doubt NATO created the current Ukraine crisis to bleed Russia, it took exactly three days after Russia was forced into military action before Chancellor Olaf Scholz to pledged a special budget of 100 billion euros to rearm the German military and modernize its outdated equipment.
That’s pretty fast action for a bunch of German bureaucrats to pledge huge sums of the only thing EU politicians care about. Don’t you think? Well, anyone who can analyze geopolitics objectively, knows this answer. So, it was no surprise when Russia blasted the move, accusing Germany of “remilitarising” and recollecting the Nazi past. For many experts, the news simply means expanded war in Europe.
Finally, with the bulk of the suggested budget earmarked for German branded F-35 multi-role fighters from the US, it’s pretty obvious who’s behind the surfacing new German-led European Reich. Germany’s Scholz may as well be working in the US State Department given his parroting of Biden administration decrees. Just recently the German chancellor echoed the idea that “Putin can’t dictate peace in war,” saying the Russians “won’t win.”
The truly sad part of all this is that the leadership of these countries bear zero accountability for policies that are already hurting more than a billion souls. Germans will pay for these new weapons, and EU countries will follow suit. Here in Greece, the F-35 is already on order to combat ghost battalions and the Turks, who are vilified and fear mongered daily on Greek TV.
And Lockheed Martin execs and investors are grinning and wringing their hands over production quotas to come. News that the company is already doubling its production of Javelin anti-tank missiles wreaks of Vietnam-ish blood money nightmares.
These are desperate and dangerous times. And the people seem helpless to do anything to stop the coming cataclysm. Even though politicians like Republican Sen. Deb Fischer holds stocks in companies like Lockheed Martin while leading a US Senate Armed Services subcommittee, voters from Athens, Greece to Washington, D.C. seem either helpless or apathetic to the looming apocalypse.
Phil Butler, is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, he’s an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books. He writes exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.