I really feel for all the politicians having to try and uphold the appearance of something resembling normal international relations while dealing with this embarrassing bully.
I can picture Putin with some of his cronies sitting in on the call, stifling laughter while Trump tries desperately to convince them how much of a tough guy he is.
Or Erdogan betting a drink with his buddies on what he will be able to get out of Trump with his next call.
What a disaster.
Few people with spines went to work in Trump’s cabinet to begin with, and those that had them have long since departed.
That’s patently wrong.
This is OT, but I insist on putting this right, in public.
As of March 24th 1999, under the Schroeder-Fischer government, Germany bombarded targets in Yugoslavia. For the very first time since the German capitulation in WWII, German troops attacked another country.
This is a historical fact.
There was a strong political disagreement about this, but saying there would have been no “appetite” for a war in “any stratum” of the German society is false. There was no majority in the general population. But Germany attacked another country, and it did so fully aware of the consequences. I don’t care about finer semantics here, “appetite” might have an interpretability leaving room to wiggle. But the fact of war remains.
I will not hijack this thread, but this needed to be written down.
Yes. And that, as well as the participation of the Bundeswehr in the Afghanistan war, which was justified with ludicrous rhetoric (“Deutschlands Freiheit wird am Hindukusch verteidigt.”) is exactly what led to this lack of appetite. I’m not quite sure what it is you are trying to say.
I’m saying that if major political decision makers, like the ministry of war, is actively pursuing this politics you cannot say that no stratum of society has n “appetite”.
There were and are parts of society which are strongly advocating that Germany has to do it’s part. That Germany has an obligation.
OK, I grant you that my use of “any” was making me guilty of the sin of hyperbole.
This is all about being taken seriously on the international stage, which for better or worse involves the threat and, at times, execution of warfare. During the Cold War there was a standing joke saying that the main job of the German Federal armed forces was to delay the Russians a little until the real soldiers show up. We laugh at this now but even so it rankles a bit with a people which, according to many, fielded the most competent military in the world not so long ago. After all we Germans are good at a lot of things, and even if we’re all about peace and prosperity these days, if we do have to have armed forces at all we would like them not to be laughing-stocks.
Right now we’re trying to simultaneously eat our cake and have it by sending soldiers to places like Afghanistan, Iraq, or Mali as part of UN, NATO, or EU missions but infallibly with very restrictive ROEs, marginal equipment, and in roles that as far as humanly possible don’t require discharging weapons in anger. We do prefer to leave actual combat operations to the Americans or the French who seem to be a lot less squeamish about such things. For the most part this both ensures that people at home wonder why we bother at all (it costs a whole lot of money, and soldiers occasionally get hurt or killed in enemy attacks, training accidents, etc., even so) and gives the impression with our allies that we’re not pulling our weight quite as we ought. But joining such operations is what is required if we want a place at the top table, so even if there is not a lot of popular support for many of these expeditions, we have to chip in whether we want to or not.
There is, It just doesn’t include GOP politicians. In large part because anyone who hints they might lean that way gets ostracized from the party.
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