Are You Sleepwalking too?
Well, I hope you don"t bump into a German while doing so, because it looks like You and the German are headed towards a heads-on collision.
I am not aware of "The Hill" publications much. I only am aware of The Hill's Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti" Rising" videos.
So, I was a bit confused about this Hill article. Though I think it might somewhat hit the German-American feelings about each other correctly, I was a bit upset to learn what kind of bad guys we Germans are. Too bad.
Foreign-policy sleepwalking: Wake up to Germany no longer being such a good ally
A practical “alliance” between the two simply no longer exists. Washington and Berlin disagree on far too much in policy terms for us to whistle past the graveyard any longer. The sooner American statesmen wake up to the harsh new geopolitical reality of German neutralism, the better.
Germany is the most glaring case in point of when an ally is no longer an ally. Over vast patches of primary foreign policy terrain, Washington and Berlin simply do not agree.
Germany ... today shows absolutely no desire in meeting even the most paltry of defense spending commitments; in 2019 Berlin allocated a laughable 1.36 percent of its GDP to its defense. Evidently, military spending is for other people, preferably the hard-pressed American taxpayer.
Further, Germans do not like their long-term “ally” very much. A January 2020 Pew poll found that 57 percent of Germans hold an outright unfavorable view of America, while an October 2019 ECFR poll reported that 70 percent of German respondents want their country to remain neutral in any conflict between Russia and the U.S. Alliance solidarity this isn’t.
Given its trade-dominated economy, Berlin disdains any serious effort to decouple itself from Chinese supply chains, even as Washington is urging its allies to begin constructing parallel trading flows to hedge against Beijing.
The Anglosphere countries (Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada) — far more closely aligned with the U.S. in the new era — have hewed to an increasingly hawkish line over China, ruling out long-term dependence on Huawei over vital 5G telecoms networks, for example. Berlin, instead leading the vanguard of European neutralism, has quietly but consistently failed to rule out Huawei as its potential primary 5G carrier.
Finally, despite the many examples of Vladimir Putin’s general dastardliness — most recently over the Kremlin’s likely poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny — German Chancellor Angela Markel has stubbornly refused to halt construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which will double Russia’s gas exports to Europe. Leaving supposed concerns about human rights by the wayside, Merkel finds herself susceptible to the American charge that while the U.S. defends Germany from the Russian threat, at the exact same time Berlin is doing big business with Russia.
What can I say, I do like and even love sometimes some Americans, but I don"t love their foreign policies. Do I have to? May be some Americans feel the same vice versa about us? When was the last time that Russia threatened Germany? I must have been tightly asleep when it happened. I used to have Putin under my bed, but have thrown him out a while ago. Now there is a nice woman sleeping under my bed and I feel great about it. 
Best to forget about. Move on. Nothing to see here. This Hill is not shining much, don"t you think so too?
Sigh. Dear God, where does this all end?
Comments
Hulsman is a member of
The Council on Foreign Relations.
Says it all right there. Regard anything he has to say as warmongering propaganda.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
I laughed out loud several times
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"Washington" means who? Donald Trump? Joe Biden? In the area of international affairs, just one "policy" in our nation's capital? Yes, but this policy is not the product of popular democracy. No that single and unnecessary to specify "policy" is conceived and executed by unelected "experts" in the permanent government and its related private sector "national security" organizations.
This jackass imperiously assumes that his readers agree that this class of American "experts" should run the world.
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Coming out of World War II, the ostensible goal of our national security policy with respect to Germany was to make sure it quit attacking other countries. This scumbag has moved far beyond that naive approach -- being "neutral" is self evidently immoral and cowardly. He is a spokesman for perpetual war after all.
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Where to begin with this howler of a paragraph? "Paltry" defense spending commitments of just 1.36% of GDP. Ah, the old Reagan Era measure of military strength by how much money you spend on a hammer. Hilarious. By the way, one and a third percent of Germany's GDP comes out to the paltry sum of about $50 billion. But the funniest aspect is the pearl clutching concern for the "hard-pressed American taxpayer" who now has to foot the bill for keeping Putin out of the Ruhr. Oy ve.
There probably are not a whole lot of people in Germany who remember this, but a few really do remember seeing Russian tanks rumbling through Berlin in 1945. And there are millions who remember something called East Germany. If your people are not afraid of Russia, why in the hell should the American taxpayer be afraid of Russia? And why are our hard pressed taxpayers obliged to buy all those $700 hammers and to maintain military bases surrounding Russia? What do we know about Russia that the Germans don't?
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This factoid is supplied to support the assertion that Germans do not like Americans. Uh, it looks to me like the poll shows that Germans do not like war. In the mind of this asshole and his co-conspirators in the Intelligence Community, being against war is equal to not liking Americans. I guess he has a point there -- but then again, by that standard. I don't like us either.
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So because Washington urges Germany to buy more expensive products and services from sources other than China, Germany is being shitty by following the logic of capitalism. Just as with military spending, this human pile of excrement asserts that Germany has an obligation as an ally to follow our instruction to throw money down the toilet bowl. Here is where neoconservatism and neoliberalism come into conflict. And, you can see the arrogance implicit in American "foreign policy" -- we give orders and our allies follow them.
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General dastardliness? Are you shitting me? Stop a contracted construction project costing in the billions of dollars because of general dastardliness? I look forward to this guy's next article calling for the US and all its "allies" to stop buying oil from Saudi Arabia. Opponents there don't get poisoned -- they get their heads chopped off.
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What I found most amusing and perplexing about screeds like this is whom is this asshole trying to reach with this message? Face reality, reader, Germany is now neutral -- them bastards. Maybe he is suggesting Regime Change in Germany?
Maybe we should consider listening to your country, Mimi. At least it is not run by morons as is ours.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
A country is our ally
as long as you do what we tell you to do, then you are a target for regime change, because, ya know, we (the US) must defended Democracy abroad, to save it at home right? If you don't do as we tell you, you are no longer a Democracy, got it?
PS: The Hill is a shit bag rag, i.e. a propaganda outlet, imho.
C99, my refuge from an insane world. #ForceTheVote
I've been meaning to drop in a comment about Huawei in
France. Our networks have Huawei throughout, and we get network components in boxes with their logo. It just is. And noone is saying anything about it.
Ham-fisted tactics are not going over well in France either. But we do seem to follow the US into any military adventure they get into.
A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit. Allegedly Greek, but more possibly fairly modern quote.
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American Dastardliness
This malarkey says it all about who is dastardly: "the Kremlin’s likely poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny". And it ain't the Kremlin. There is not a single reason why Putin would give perennial candidate Navalny (1% in the polls) weeks of free news coverage by poisoning him. Not to mention that "Novichok" is 0 for 3 at killing supposed targets and should be retired in disgrace. This is American manufactured bullshit, one of the few things still reliably made in the USA.
This is actually an unexpected benefit from having tRUMP
as the bull in the ceramics department of foreign affairs.
tRUMP and Republican Party are just the Democratic Party on steroids.
The Democrats have a shared interest in almost everything the Republicans support, except the Dims want to achieve the same goals but quietly in a stealthy manner while tRUMP and Repug leadership are blowing whistles and honking horns on their way to the same goals.
Declaring they are in the Middle East (and Latin America) for the resources and control of the area, while Dims murmur about protecting some previously unmentioned group and installing 'Democracy', but don't block Repug efforts.
There have been many perpetually wrong pundits crying in mainstream media that tRUMP is diminishing our 'influence' in the world,which is a blessing to the people of those Countries.
The buffoon has shed the mask of respect and concern for others and exposed the ugly face of the US as the hegemonic rogue force that it is,killing, torturing, looting and destroying Countries around the world.
In the words of GW Bush "you're either with us or against us", only now more people are realizing that the US is serious about that and aside from those in the compliant zone, aka 'allies', the others are either under direct or indirect attack by proxy forces.
Nothing shows that better than when people realize the US has an economic war via sanctions on Thirty-Nine Countries which represents two Billion of the World's population.