Hellraiser wrote: ↑Sun Feb 23, 2025 11:13 pm
_Os_ wrote: ↑Sun Feb 23, 2025 10:52 pm
Hellraiser wrote: ↑Sun Feb 23, 2025 9:52 pm
That's paranoid nonsense.
Hugo's post has some of the smell of "NATO/US started the war to divided Europe/Germany from Russia" for sure, a staple of Russian propaganda earlier in the war. It was Russia that started the war as part of some mad imperial project, something which very quickly proved a total disaster for them.
But what is US strategy now? Fucked if I know. Some mad plan to steal Ukraine's resources and make Europe pay, a bizarre mirror of Russia's attempt. A stupid plan to have regardless of how the war turns out. Forcing Europe to be dependant on the US for security, was a very good deal, for the US. It meant the US got to wear European power like a skin suit. Telling Europe it's on its own could work out about as well for the US as building a few factories in China to make cheap junk. They could be unleashing Balrog, again.
Merz, an arch-Atlanticist, has declared America an unreliable ally, said an alternative independent European defence alliance to NATO may be necessary, and that the Anglo-French nuclear umbrella may be preferable to the current American one. That is an epochal shift for any German politician.
All other considerations aside, completely unshackling the German defence industry now offers a potential route out of Germany's current economic problems.
Edit: and in the last couple of hours he's stated that Musk and Washington's election interference in Germany was "no less radical and outrageous than that of Moscow".
Europe could well be more at risk of being defeated by the US than Russia.
As the situation unravels those on the worse end of the deal will come to realise what the deal was. Europe doesn't have bases in North America, cannot dictate if the US has nuclear weapons, cannot control US foreign policy, cannot basically force European arms suppliers onto the US so it can integrate into European armed forces, there's "arch-Atlanticists" in Europe does such a thing exist in Washington. Europeans have "America brain" no Americans have "Europe brain".
The foundation is nukes. It's not about the weapons themselves, it's about power. Germany has let itself get into a situation where it has a weaker nuclear industry and is much further from the threshold of having a bomb than South Africa. If you're not at least on the threshold then you have no power. It's the reason Starmer and Macron are now very busy.
Europe's security architecture has been demolished. The US security guarantee is at best "unreliable" and at worst a bluff, and with Trump worse than that an opportunity for "transaction" aka extortion. Russia propaganda talks a lot about nuking and invading Poland. If Russia launched a first strike of 50 nukes into Poland then advanced 100k men into the rubble that was once Poland, is anyone sure there would absolutely be a response from the US? The response to that from the US should be exterminating Russia. If there's doubt that would happen, then there's no real deterrence.
I've posted before Poland should have the capability of wiping Moscow off the map, that's now the only certain deterrence for Poland. The situation has deteriorated. One of the items on my "mad dog" list of options for Europe to flex its power was proliferation. It's rapidly becoming a necessity. The way to do it would be selecting countries that need them but are far from having them (Germany, Poland), and those who are closer to the threshold if they too want the capability (Spain, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland). They're then given a small amount of French weapons each as a temporary measure, they're French produced which eliminates/limits US leverage, if the US tries anything with Trident the UK will also need some French weapons.
None of this is kept secret which would limit the deterrence value. It's openly announced "Germany and Poland are now nuclear powers", then we see how powerful the US really is and if it can stop that happening (it cannot and will have to accept its diminished position). All this stuff about 0.2% increase in defence spending, is kak. The first move is nukes.
