This article is about Germany rapidly increasing defence spending, and also the fact that they’re considering conscription. I also found this interesting:
A recent YouGov poll showed that 79% of Germans still see Vladimir Putin as “very” or “quite” dangerous to European peace and security. Now 74% said the same for Donald Trump.
Thoughts?
Germany is pretty confused. They continued doing lucrative business with putin even long after he invaded Ukraine for the first time, but now they are arming against him. If they could only have stopped themselves from funding the russian military for decades then maybe they wouldn’t need to be funding theirs now.
Hopefully those soldiers won’t be deployed to build nord stream 3 in a couple of years.
You could say Germany isn’t unique though. The US is also split between those who want to be friendly with Russia (Republicans) and those who don’t (Democrats).
With Germany I guess Merkel believed that business ties with Russia would persuade Russia to not threaten Europe, but now that theory has been disproven, so Germans seem to be more supportive of the idea of cutting ties with Russia and boosting Germany’s defence spending.
Well, the gas pipeline was built in the early 2000s to get russia on board as a business partner to prevent escalation. As the saying goes: if the goods are not rolling, the tanks are rolling between countries.