Germans can only blame themselves for kicking the can down the road for 13 years. They were naive with Russia for energy, they were naive with the U.S. for security, and they were naive with China for its economic growth.
And still don't understand anything digital.
They're politically captured and lacking sovereignty more than they are naive. It's awkward and nobody wants to admit it but fundamentally they have a relationship with the US that is similar to the one Belarus has with Russia.
That's why when the pipeline was blown up and they became dependent instead on more expensive American LNG they accepted their fate with a minimum of protest. It's why they've not demonstrated much interest in finding the culprit, despite the incredible economic damage it incurred.
the entire EU is a huge US colony nowadays.
just look back 15 years, for all those emerging sectors that were/are hot during the period, how many new EU companies managed to rise? a few drug makers for sure, but everything else is just dead despite the fact that they have a huge economy and a relatively unified market with hundreds of million people.
EU is dying a slow economic death, the US must be very happy for that.
Having weak and moribund allies is not happy news for the United States.
If they were a puppet of the U.S. like you say, they wouldn't have been investing in and dependent on Russia in the first place. When Trump was President the first time and he chided them on their dependence on Russia and asked them to build a floating LNG terminal, they laughed.
The Germans are in the situation they're in because they did not take U.S. advice on the entirely predictable Russian bad behavior.
There was terrorist attack that destroyed most of Germany energy infrastructure. You can hardly blame Germans for not prediction that!
The one that shut down their nuclear plants because vibes?
Nuclear power isn't substitute/alternative for cheap gas as inputs/feedstock for German industry. German industrial model depended on cheap RU gas more than it does on nuclear power. Whoever took away that cheap gas (and it was unlikely to be RU), made that industrial / economic model unworkable. Germany has better industrial prospects re-exploiting its 150 years of coal reserves + RU natural gas than all the clean nuclear energy in the world.
Unlike the U.S., Germany has no natural resources. U.S. LNG dependency means that it has another master. Except that the previous one never dictated anything to Germany, just like Saudi Arabia never dictates anything.
They are not naive with security. Either they fully defend themselves and get nuclear weapons or they keep the status quo. Buying useless F35 (possibly with a kill switch) from the U.S. just enriches the MIC.
Germany should have build up a "high tech" Internet industry so it could control which parts of the narrative get flagged and which ones stay up.
Oh, they were dictated to. It was simply implied. "Let us repress our people and reclaim our neighbors, and the pipes will stay open."
Russia used that NG to bully and dictate to it's neighbors like Poland, Hungary, Romania, and others. Germany learned to keep it's mouth shut. Divide and conquer.
It's very likely that arrangement would have still been in place had Russia's "special military operation" succeeded. Kyiv would have fallen in days, and by the time Germany and the others felt any sense of unease, it would have all been fait accompli. "Oh well, wasn't us, that's a Ukrainian matter." and life would have gone on for Germany industry.
Only that's not what happened, and Germany and the others were forced to take a good long look at things and the ugliness behind it. Poland had been ringing the alarm bell for years, and they were right.
Other notes: - There's a lot wrong with how the German economy doesn't reward risk, and that stifles their innovation. Economics Explained on YouTube has done a few videos on this, and it's more than just Germany. I think there's ways to German prosperity that doesn't require just another Google however, just as the U.S. economy isn't solely dependent on it's tech giants for it's GDP gains.
- The "useless F35" argument is a tired and uninformed one which fails to understand much about how these platforms are developed and why they're developed in the first place. I'll direct you to a link here, which, while hardly academic, is spot on with it's examples and references. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxVsS9ZNUOU (TL;DW: Every plane goes through this stuff. No, drones won't replace everything; that ignores the role of the strike aircraft. And if the F35 is so bloody useless, why is China pursuing so many versions of their own? Because regardless of what the internet peanut gallery thinks, warfighters around the world know exactly what they need.)
F35 are useful against insurgents. They are perfect for Israel.
Contrast that with Ukraine, where there is a de facto no-fly zone for both sides because anti-aircraft missiles are too good. That is why there is the strange mixture of WW1 trench warfare, howitzers, drones combined with glide bombs and missiles launched from far away.
China has other enemies than big ones. The Sukhoi 57 is also useless in a big power conflict, as we see now.
Germany only has big power conflicts to worry about, so why does it need F35s? Saudi Arabia on the other hand might need them.
Israel has the F35 because it can strike Iran, not because of insurgents. And it was successful in this.
Anti-aircraft missiles are not that good. If anything, this conflict is showing that. But the platforms both sides are using aren't up to par either, which is why aircraft like the F35 were made. Vaunted systems like the S-400 didn't prevent Israel from reaching deep into Iran, which is giving some of it's buyers second thoughts.
Su-57 had serious problems because the Russian aerospace industry lacks the technical ability to build a reliable 5th-gen fighter. (Engine problems galore). They made some excuse around "its so good, we don't need it".
The rest of your argument is built around the premise that the F-35 is not for use in big power conflicts, which frankly is incorrect and the opposite: That's exactly what it's for. Much of the hate it gathered early on was centered around why it existed when insurgencies were the majority of what we were fighting. (You don't need a stealth strike aircraft to drop a 1,000 LGB on a Toyota with a DShK attached) but you certainly need one if you want to penetrate defended airspace.
If you can't penetrate said airspace, you throw glideb bombs from long range instead. =P
China's stealth fighter projects are not for "other enemies", but precisely in line with missions like the F-35: To penetrate defended airspace to attack high-value targets. Like Taiwanese and U.S. defense sites and naval assets.
But it is amusing how many accounts there are out there saying F-35 is useless and the U.S. should stop building them, while China, South Korea, Japan, India, and others are all working on building or are building its equivalent.
Good try.
> But it is amusing how many accounts there are out there saying F-35 is useless and the U.S. should stop building them, while China, South Korea, Japan, India, and others are all working on building or are building its equivalent.
The comment you reply to literally says that the Sukhoi 57 is useless and that the F53 is useful in certain situations.
It must feel very powerful to argue in bad faith and maintain upvotes just because the opinions align with the U.S. state department views. And you can do it from you own account because you know there is no penalty.
I left Russia out not because they don't want an F-35 equivalent or wouldn't benefit from them. But because the Su-57 in particular is a bad airplane.
Sorry if I wasn't more specific on that.
But the point I argued with the comment above is that the situations for which the F-35 is deemed useful is incorrect. It misunderstands the aircraft's role and the missions for which it's buyers intend. It makes broad assertions about the nature of warfare that have been repeated ad nauseum lately. I hope to correct the record there.
> good long look at things and the ugliness behind it
German strategic thinkers probably saw the obvious before - profitable DE industry = RU gas inputs. DE security = US military and Baltic as buffer. It doesn't much matter for DE bottom line if UKR die if the gas kept flowing. Even if the Poles did the dying. If anything it would keep east euro labour cheap. That was really the optimal setup, the optimal was ugly, but acceptable.
Do German's really care if RU slaps around some buffer states if it kept their industries competitive and people wealthy? Of course as Europeans, they do. But we'll see in a few years how they feel as Germans, but current voting patterns hint no and imo GDP going to contract eventually when germans realize being dictated by US who promises (promised?) to protect her neighbours but also jacked up the pipe prices "feels" suboptimal for german prosperity. Germany sipping LNG directly from RU via NS2 even if their neighbours burn is going to "feel" more optimal in retrospect.
But realistically/geopolitically, DE continuing RU energy relationship even post war would piss US+co off too much, and US has much more net leverage on US-DE trade surplus than cheap RU gas. Frankly that's a much more difficult/awkward conversation(s) between "friends" to have than if someone made decision on DE behalf by having NS2 mysteriously explode, and everyone not think too hard about it. Saves bickering. Saves face.
Regardless, in the military sense F35s is useless for Germany because in world with cheap RU gas access, DE wasn't incentivized to use it against the Russians regardless. Now without RU gas, DE now knows buffer states can hold out against RU, so it's still frankly not optimal procurement vs just dumping that cash into reviving domestic DE MIC. But what ~10 billion dollars of F35s are useful for is ensuring Germany keeps getting US gas, and maintain ~70 billion per year of trade surplus from US, whose going to continue buying overpriced DE cars, since cheap PRC cars will be functionally banned. Likely same deal Korea got for complying with CHIPs. But that was under Biden. No telling what Trump will do with respect to trade imbalance.
> And if the F35 is so bloody useless, why is China pursuing so many versions of their own?
because China has the resources and motivations to bet on everything all the time.
back in the covid days, China invested heavily on all types of vaccines, more precisely, for each possible tech route, they invested in multiple companies. they ended up approving like dozens of different vaccines.
they are now leading in the EV sector, interestingly the CCP recently ordered to continue to invest on the R&D of ICE cars.
I needed a certain type of instrument in my current project, did my research and found there are three commercialised tech routes, one took by the US, one by the EU, China recently claimed to have invented the third route. guess what, they have 3 competing companies selling 3 different commercial products that implemented those 3 tech routes when the US and EU just have one company working on it each.
They have rocks. They have arable land. What exactly does "no natural resources" mean in your view?
So which boogey man controlled their uranium access and made them shut down all their plants?
If you judge by U.S. Russian uranium imports until well into 2024, the culprit would have been Russia:
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/russia-restricts...
The U.S. of course is a sovereign nation and can decide for itself how long it trades with countries that it calls "terrorist states".
The US imports uranium from 12 countries and has its own deposits. Plus you can stockpile it. It was probably more to prevent Russia from selling to terrorists than a dependency.
It was the opposite - the lack of a boogey man in ~2011.
They were shut down because they weren't that reliant on it to begin with (the level to which electricity from nuclear power mattered to Germany is routinely exaggerated), because they were horrendously expensive to maintain and fix (nuclear power is always $$$$$$$$$) and because of Fukushima.
Most countries that are build their own nuclear power plants or nuclear power plants in other countries (e.g. Sweden, France, America, Russia) either have expensive nuclear arsenals which they want a nuclear industrial base to help maintain or have a boogeyman that makes them want to be able to ditch the NPT and build a nuke in a hurry. For Sweden that's Russia, for Iran that's America, for Japan that's China.
Poland has just recently gotten interested in building nuclear power stations, after having zero interest for a long time. You can probably guess which boogey man was responsible for that.
> because they were horrendously expensive to maintain and fix (nuclear power is always $$$$$$$$$)
almost the entire cost of nuclear is the capital cost of construction, running costs are a rounding error
germany shut down their nuclear because the russia successfully funded the greens over an extended period to convince germans that "nuclear bad"
Maintenance on aging plants is also very expensive (just ask the French) and German plants were getting long in the tooth.
Decommissioning is also very, very expensive, and disasters like Fukushima are also very very very expensive (that one cost about $1 trillion).
It wasn't some secret plot by Russia. Russia exported most of the uranium they used. Fukushima just made nuclear power more of a headache than it was worth, especially given the cost and pressure from the environmental movement (who had agency, despite what you might believe).
The reliance that the US/Europe had on Russian uranium is, in fact, one reason why it was never sanctioned.
The greens in Germany are mostly captured by America these days - that's why they shifted to becoming massive war hawks.
> Maintenance on aging plants
the three that were last turned off were practically new
there was even one that was fully constructed and ready to be turend on, and then never was
> Decommissioning is also very, very expensive
but once the plant has gone live you'd be paying that anyway
so you might as well keep the existing reactors running for as long as they remain safe
> and disasters like Fukushima are also very very very expensive (that one cost about $1 trillion)
fortunately germany isn't very prone to tsunami
the russian psyop seems to have worked pretty well on you!
> Germany should have build up a "high tech" Internet industry
Could have been cool. But even project like a digital medical patient journal that other countries had for 2 decades they have trouble with.
There was a certain NHS fiasco in Britain ... Apart from that, Germany has still some data protection left and Germans like their privacy. Which is the real factor that prohibits large data collection brokerages.
Additionally, if every country goes into the digital fluff economy, nothing real is produced and you are even more dependent on China (and Russia for resources).
I suspect the german state's total reliance on fax machines, notaries and and physical paper forms is what keeps german records out of giant electronic databases
rather than "germans liking their privacy"
> if every country goes into the digital fluff economy, nothing real is produced and you are even more dependent on China
funny that China itself has a huge digital economy while producing real stuff for the entire world.
I would like to learn more about the situation of the German economy.
Is there any industry in Germany that will grow in the coming decade?
Has anything important been developed in Germany in the last decade?
Have there been any big IPOs in Germany in the last decade?
Germany's companies seem to have very low p/e ratios. This means the market expects them to tank. Are there companies in Germany with a high p/e ratio, say over 100? Off the top of my head, I can only think of SAP. A company that I find hard to reason about.
Anecdote: a friend of mine, a mechanical engineer with master’s degree in automobile engineering from one of the good German Universities ended up working for the biggest German Automakers. Him being the only non German, non White person in his department, had his entire experience be “This in not <insert your country>, this is Germany. We do things a certain way.” He moved to the US after 2 years and worked for Tesla and now Rivian. Not only did he make a bunch of money, but he now gets to work on the new technology. Meanwhile the old company is trying to keep up and stay current with the times.
While it is definitely unfortunate that his origin was involved in this, this is one of two general arguments you hear in Germany and to some degree Switzerland whenever any kind of change is suggested. "We've always done it like this here!" or "We've never done it like this here!" pick one. Where "here" refers to anything from the country down to the department, depending on the topic.
The German car industry is completely outdated and very, VERY conservative. This includes Bosch. I would never work there.
The VW board even fired the CEO (Herbert Diess) because he wanted to make too many changes at once. The German car industry is a hopeless case, except maybe BMW.
It is the experience of every non-german working in Germany and especially in automotive. I'm white fwiw.
I probably lost years of my life expectancy just working there. In fact I think the best thing that could happen for the european tech sector would be for the german automotive industry to collapse.
I'm not disputing that the German economy has issues, but is a large number of companies with a P/E ratio over 100 really a sign of a healthy economy?
Explosive growth can only continue for so long before the bubble bursts.
A high p/e just means that the markets expects the company's earnings to grow to a multiple of what they are today. That does not have to be explosive. And there is no reason some "bubble" has to burst.
The fastest growing economic sector in 2024 was "Information and Communication" with a 2.48% inflation-adjusted growth rate: https://www-genesis.destatis.de/datenbank/online/statistic/8... I think it'll likely keep growing faster than the rest of the economy for a while.
Important new developments in Germany in the last 10 years? Interesting question, I can think of two right now:
- Stable Diffusion at Heidelberg University
- Biontech/Pfizer covid vaccine in Mainz
- What else?
Interestingly both seem to have had no benefit to the German economy?
Stability AI is not a German company and Biontech's market cap is where it was before Covid.
Stable Diffusion main author is now doing BlackforestLabs, valued 1B?
Biontech is swimming in money and using it to foster its main goal, finding better cures for cancer.
My main point was that I can think of only two success stories.
Is BlackforestLabs a German company? On their website, they provide an address in the USA.
If Biontech is swimming in money now and did not before Covid, why didn't their market cap increase?
Because Pfizer stole the IP? U.S. nuclear weapons and rockets were developed by Europeans, Google was set up by immigrants etc.
The U.S. props up the dollar with military force, buys IP and talent from everywhere and profits.
Did they steal it or did they buy it? Which is it?
If they bought it, why was it more attractive to sell to the US?
None of them were commercialized in Germany though.
Offense industry.
Germany is still a complex economy. They will likely be like Japan over the last 30 years.
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Germany’s economy has been heavily dependent on specific sectors, particularly the automotive and machinery industries. These sectors are so vital that any decline in their performance could have significant ripple effects across the economy. However, the global market is increasingly shifting towards electric vehicles (EVs) with advanced software interfaces. Companies like Tesla and Chinese manufacturers have taken the lead in this space, while German carmakers have struggled to adapt to the EV and software revolution.
Germany also has been facing two big challenges that have seen limited action: rising energy costs and slowing exports to China, both of which have started around 2020. The decision to rely heavily on Russian energy to sustain its industrial economy has proven to be a bad idea. The influx of low- or unskilled labor into a social welfare system, coupled with the challenges of cultural integration (German culture isn't the sexiest of things), has also turned out to be a bad idea.
Bonus issue: Germany’s taxes are high, particularly for individuals and workers. Some of the highest in the world. This gives consumers less $ to consume with.
>The decision to rely heavily on Russian energy to sustain its industrial economy has proven to be a bad idea.
The decision to rely heavily on American military hegemony has proven to be a far worse idea than piping gas from Russia. Without military sovereignty, they don't get to choose their economic partners. Without the ability to choose their economic partners, they have to accept dictates about their economic relationships. Because of that they have to suffer.
The same thing happened with Huawei - America decided that Europe needed to decouple from them so decouple they did.
As for the moral argument - what Russia is doing in Ukraine is awful, but what Israel is doing in Gaza (with Germany's blessing) is SO much worse. Germany follows America's dictates on both, so their economic relationship to the genociders is still maintained even though it has very little impact on the health of the Germany economy.
Now Trump is in charge, Europe is being told that it still has to fall in line, but it needs to jack up its own military spending as well - America has shifted focus East and isn't all that interested in defending Europe any more (if it ever was).
Are you suggesting that Germany is not "free" to choose to have economic relationships with e.g. Russia because of United States military reasons? Do you think the US military is the primary reason Germany (the people, the government) is reluctant to trade with Russia?
Just think about it. A German Russian partnership would become a major rival to American Hegemony. German know-how and Russian resources. Can you imagine what a force they would become? From Americas point of view it must not happen. It has nothing to do with Putin in particular, its Russia period. It has everything to do with threats from potential rivals to American power. Nixon and Kissinger thought a China Russia alliance was a threat so did their best to keep them apart. Jake Sullivan, Anthony Blinken, and Brett McGurk are the unholy triumvirate you want to look into for US Foreign Policy decisions in recent years. They obviously thought pushing Russia and China closer together was a good idea for maintaining America's world hegemony. Pax Americana.
As long as American bases remain on German soil, you bet your boots on the ground Germany is beholden to Americas hegemonic wishes.
Must be why the U.S. has been closing so many of them.
>Are you suggesting that Germany is not "free" to choose to have economic relationships with e.g. Russia because of United States military reasons?
Yes. America deeply disapproves of Germany having economic relations with Russia and it puts political pressure on Germany to sever those relationships.
It also puts heavy pressure on Germany to maintain good relations with Israel in spite of the racially-motivated genocide (which is a bit awkward morally speaking given Germany's history...).
It's plausible that blowing up the pipeline was supposed to reduce the risk of that relationship being rekindled - it was probably seen by America as a risk that all that was required to stop the Germany economy from screaming was to turn on one switch.
>Do you think the US military is the primary reason Germany (the people, the government) is reluctant to trade with Russia?
I think the reason that Germans are, on average, reluctant to trade with Russia but less reluctant to trade with Israel is mostly about the propaganda they consume which is, yes, indirectly driven by US hegemony.
Non-mainstream parties (i.e. those that America doesn't have its claws into) have a lot of wacky ideas about tossing out immigrants and turning on the gas taps to Russia again. There is a significant risk of them winning.
> Now Trump is in charge, Europe is being told that it still has to fall in line
Trump might ask the EU to be the 52nd state of the US.
What I fear: blaming on the immigrants.
Don't blame it on the people, correct.
However, it is safe to say that the policies surrounding this sector have failed quite spectacularly in bringing new talent to Germany in the past 10 years.
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Who turned off the cheap GHG free Nuclear power? Who cheated on the emissions tests for the main exported vehicle? I have to assume you think all of germany's problems aren't of their own making per the tone of your comment.
> Who turned off the cheap GHG free Nuclear power?
Probably the 100th time I have to say this, but it still seems necessary: Phasing out of nuclear power was a decision that was made in 2011 (after the Fukushima incident) and even the power companies didn't want to have their reactors run any longer because they were EOL.
"cheap" is also not true if you look over to France and their newly built systems.
True, but there was a bit more to it than that. Anti-nuclear sentiment has always run high in Germany, but Fukushima made it more intense. At the time of the accident, campaigning was underway in Germany. Merkel announced the closure as a way to hold off the Left and achieve a win for her party (It worked.) The Greens had always campaigned hard on this, the timing of Fukushima was a godsend for them, and had the potential to swing the election. Merkel had a tough choice: Keep the reactors online and lose the election, or announce a shutdown and take the wind out of The Green's key issue. She chose the latter, and CDU/CSU won. The reactors weren't EOL.
"Cheap" (or "costs") can get complicated to calculate as there's more that Europe factors in than simply the costs of running the plants. Europe doesn't have fantastic energy reserves, so that energy has to come from somewhere. Historically, a large percentage has been oil via the Middle East. That has political and military costs such as how they work with the Arab states, support for the U.S. which maintains security of the Persian Gulf, etc.
France's choice of nuclear is influenced in part because of security decisions they made in the 50s and their (until recently) ability to source cheap uranium from Mali.
Germany phased out their plants in order to stave off a last minute electoral disaster, which worked. But I'd argue that it was before they were ready. Renewables have promise, but have not reached the point where they are cheap and plentiful enough to power the energy-intensive Germany economy. I'm sure they'll get there eventually, but they're going through a painful phase to bridge that gap thanks to Merkel's decision.
Good read: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/history-behind-ge...
Cheap is absolutely true if you look at the older assets cost of baseload power providing the core stability of a lot of electrical systems. The only two things that aren't factored into the cheap component (sub 5 cents/kwh produced of baseload) is that you don't properly factor in the externalities -- $/ton of GHG avoided and waste removal properly. I would argue that if we had pollution pricing it would be even cheaper.
The new power plants are more expensive since you have all the upfront costs of development but those are long lived assets that as they get to the end of their lives are producing very stable cheap power.
And yes Germany absolutely turned off their Nuclear power - your comment agrees 100% with that. It was made by Merkels party and is absolutely tarnishing her legacy.
The U.S. and France bought Russian uranium until 2024, long after the Nord Stream pipeline was blown up.
They bought Russian oil via the so called shadow fleets. Pure hypocrisy.
Just now Biden sanctioned Rosatom and the shadow fleets in order to make things more difficult for Trump.
Just last month The U.S. coerced Ukraine to stop transit of Russian gas (while collecting transit fees).
The US probably bought uranium because of fears it’d otherwise get sold to North Korea, Iran or terrorists. Just like it basically financed the Russian space program for decades to ensure those rocket scientists didn’t take a nice salary from Iran.
Uranium contracts are long lived contracts. It doesn't make sense to kill off a contract in the middle. They also buy uranium from many other countries since it is available only in certain countries.
Nord Stream was a very long lived contract that is attacked viciously in this thread.
Because it was a project negotiated by a German Chancellor in the waning days of his office as a way to bypass countries the gas would have otherwise transited through. That chancellor immediately took a job on that project's firm, then later became an executive in those same Russian energy companies. It was extraordinary conflict of interest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schr%C3%B6der#Views_an...
> The U.S. and France bought Russian uranium until 2024, long after the Nord Stream pipeline was blown up.
Unfortunately in times of conflict like this, things aren't exactly clear cut, and our need for Russian uranium may be too high to stop buying. It is what it is.
> They bought Russian oil via the so called shadow fleets. Pure hypocrisy
Cite your source.
> Just now Biden sanctioned Rosatom and the shadow fleets in order to make things more difficult for Trump.
How does this make things more difficult for Trump? You mean it makes things more difficult for Russia? Or should we buy oil from Russian shadow fleets? I'm not following your point here.
> Just last month The U.S. coerced Ukraine to stop transit of Russian gas (while collecting transit fees).
Weren't you complaining about the United States and France buying Russian uranium?
Merkel's plan to buy prosperity for Germany by buying cheap resources from Russia and selling a lot of manufactured products to China failed totally, so to say.
Meanwhile Germany didn't invest enough into infrastructure, nor into high-tech industries. Too much reliance on extant branches such as car production.
They are sick man of Europe again, and mostly as a result of Merkel-era politics. Any US pressure is small fry compared to their self-inflicted wounds.
That plan worked very well for several decades which is more than can be said for most plans. Buying cheap energy when you have an opportunity to do so makes perfect sense, it's putting all eggs into one basket that was a huge mistake.
I'd argue that while Merkel continued them, those policies were taking hold under Gerhard Schröder. One needs only look at his resume to see his opinions on the matter.
No it is not "small fry". Whole industries shut down, it has nothing to do with Merkel. Cheap energy from Russia was sabotaged by provoking the Ukraine invasion.
Sabotaging German energy from Russia isn't new. Already Reagan did that. Tony Blair of course also wanted a huge Russian oil deal, but was rebuffed. Perhaps that is the cause for the jealousy.
Nor into education, I'm at loss where the money went.
> I'm at loss where the money went
Well, I think the number of billionaires has doubled in Germany in the last years, so... Seems like it went somewhere.
But the reason it failed is primarily the fault of the US. Forced decoupling from Russia because of NATO expansion and forced trade war with China at the behest of the American Masters.
You're assuming Merkel had a plan - I for one, having lived through her 16-year "reign" of stagnation, have doubts about that.
Maybe Germany should have begun decoupling from Russia in 2014 after the invasion of Crimea.
Instead, Germany Inc sold out to Russia and China - with national champions like Deutsche Bank becoming addicted to it's Russian originated business and Volkswagen becoming addicted to Volkswagen China.
Better, they shouldn't have decoupled for another decade or two. Given the proximity of all the fossil energy they need for their industries. A big part of the shrink is energy costs, Germany is industrial.
Germany was a global leader in solar manufacturing in the early 2010s, but political infighting and lobbying against tariffs from China-dependent companies like Volkswagen undermined their solar manufacturing dominance.
The "Made in China 2025" strategy itself is a knockoff of the "Made in Germany 4.0" strategy of the early 2010s.
The 'US foreign policy blob' had been warning Germany that basing your energy policy on purchasing fossil fuels (which you are trying to get rid of) from a dictatorship in the hopes it gets them to play nice was a stupid idea and now Germans are paying the price for poorly thought out foreign policy. Good thing they still have those nuclear plants, right?
Energy prices are down a lot from their former maximum [1] and have been replaced by lots of renewable sources, which will pay off long term.
Hard price to pay, but it had to be paid at some time. Would have surely been nicer if it had been a slower switch, but former governments didn't want that to happen.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1267541/germany-monthly-... [2] https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Economic-Sectors-Enterpris...
Its funny because from the perspective of Germany, Russia was always a good partner in trade with a win-win situation. But can't rely on your allies not to blow up our infrastructure. The US has always behaved like a bully and a Mafia boss. No matter how low you bow, if Master wants to whip you, he will.
If the U.S. had had a moderate Ukraine policy, none of this would have happened. Instead, Germany's energy policy is now based on U.S. dependency in the hope that the U.S. will play nice. Which it does not.
The thing that gets me with arguments such as this is that it talks right over the heads of the Ukrainians like they don't matter. "Oh, the U.S. should moderate it's policy." "NATO shouldn't be pushing East." "The West didn't listen." I hear the same sentiment around the Baltic states: "NATO shouldn't have pushed in, and that angered Putin."
Give it up for those repeating those misconceptions and making the argument into one where NATO is pushing, or the U.S. isn't being "moderate" enough with regards to Ukrainian sovereignty.
Talk to the Ukrainians, the Lithuanians and Estonians, the Poles, and the Finns. And they'll all tell you the same: It's been Russian imperialism for centuries, be it under the guise of the USSR or Tzar or the current president for life. They don't want to give up their land and populations to become part of Russia's empire. And just a very cursory glance at history will pull examples of this. Finland lost it's second largest city in the 40s, and is still without it. The Baltics and Ukraine only became free in the 90s. The Poles went through multiple stretches of time where they were divide up and didn't exist.
Your country gets invaded one day, the occupied lands vacated of their residents, the children re-homed in families elsewhere, but you'd tell them to "moderate" their policy? That further more, they shouldn't be allowed to seek alliances? If someone invaded the U.S., I seriously doubt that line of opinion would obtain support anywhere.
It's not about U.S. policy. It's about Ukraine wanting to be independent and Russia wanting it as part of theirs. Simple as that. Don't ask the U.S. about Ukrainian policy like the Ukrainians aren't there. Have some respect, and ask the Ukrainians what they want.
Then I dare you to tell them to moderate it.
Of course the Ukrainians matter. That is why they should have accepted the Istanbul agreement (confirmed by Naftali Bennett and not the Russians) after the illegal and horrible Russian invasion instead of fighting a U.S. proxy war and dying for nothing.
You mean this one that he walked back? https://web.archive.org/web/20241213114710/https://www.busin...
How is it a proxy war? Again, you frame your argument as though is the U.S. driving everything, and that the Ukrainians have no agency or say. On one hand, you take shots at the U.S. as running roughshod over other country's wishes, and yet in your very same argument, deny that these nations have any say of their own.
Try this one on: The Ukrainians don't want to stop fighting, because they want their land and people back. They were given a security guarantee once, handed over their nuclear weapons as part of it, and that guarantee was ignored. They're not going to be burned twice.
If I were a Ukrainian, I'd find it rather insulting to be told that I was "dying for nothing" and that my country's sovereignty didn't matter, and that furthermore, I wasn't part of a real country (as Putin attests) but just some U.S. puppet.
If Europe invested more in their militaries they could dictate their own terms with their neighbors.
The Germany would have to get nuclear weapons. The U.S. knows that perfectly well, that is why it stays and hypocritically complains that the EU isn't doing enough.
Also, the U.S. MIC wants to sell to its NATO "allies".
Can't dictate terms with a nuclear superpower.
European nations like France and the UK have the nuclear trident (the ability for global MAD). They can dictate more than enough.
Also, until the 1990s, Western European armies were VERY professional and capable of military and technological innovation.
Hell, the Bundeswehr was well equipped with fairly competitive weaponry made by German manufacturers such as Heckler and Koch, KNDS (Leopard tanks), Rheinmetall, etc