Trump signs sanctions bill against German pipeline

We think you can reduce to 1.2% as well and be perfectly fine.

 

What do we get for spending 2% of GDP on defense? You dont expect us to do that wizhout massive shift in NATO and UN influence?

 

The military spending in the US is completely out of control. It spends more than the REST of the world all to gather.
There is no question that Germany has to do better, but it has first to do better with the money it is already spending. Once the readiness of the military is up to par, than it can spent more.
Other wise the money gets thrown out of the window, sheer waste.
Germany spends as much money as France, but does not have nuclear forces or aircraft carriers, but does not get the bang for the money and that has to change first.

 

Global Military spending is $1.6T, about 37% of that is us, roughly the amount of the next 7 nations combined.

That's a very good point. France does seem to get far more value for their money. You think Germany might be calling some things "military" spending that France accounts as something else?

 

Of course not.

 

So what would change? What does USA offer? We never hear that.

Germany wants a seat in the UNSC. We would also need a permanent base at pacific coast and high command over several NATO branches.

The way USA act appear like they want a powerful german army under their command. And thats plain and simple not going to happen.

 

There are 2 problems Germany has. After the end of the cold war, military spending was drastically reduced and a lot of the military infrastructure vanished, like warehousing of spare parts etc.
Naturally the experts for warehousing were not any more needed. That's the reason why air force, navy or the tank troops have such a low readiness. If something breaks it can not get fixed, till the manufacturer produces a spare part. Now Germany is spending a huge amount of money to rebuilt that infrastructure within the military.
Now comes the next problem, the switch from a draft system to a professional military. That to is rather expensive, you have to attract young folks. In the US one can do that with social benefits, education, health etc.
That does not work in Germany. Naturally you can not offer the same living quarters a 2 year or 1.5 year draftee has to put up with and so on and so on.
It took the US over a decade, when it switched, after Vietnam, to have a decent or good military again.
Despite all of that Germany has troops stationed abroad, Afghanistan, Jordanian, Africa and the Eastern European countries, which is rather expensive, too.

Germany wants to increase the military by 20,000 soldiers. But it has to built the infrastructure for those 20,000 additional soldiers.

 

You inform no one when you have nothing but your opinion to back you up.

Next time if you are going to pretend to be so informed have more than that to support your claims.

 

Here's something interesting, for the years of 2011 to 2012 Germany had been elected as a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). However, Germany received criticism from its European and US allies for abstaining on the ridiculous Libyan no-fly zone resolution pushed by Crooked Hillary, the Queen of War Mongers.

Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer argued that "Germany has lost its credibility in the United Nations and in the Middle East. German hopes for a permanent seat on the Security Council have been permanently dashed and one is now fearful of Europe's future."

I'd argue that Germany made the right call.

 

That all makes sense. Thank you for the informative reply.

 

Supporting the libyan no fly zone would be laughable . Germany said ghadaffi is a despot, but he keeps libya together. Wizhout ghaddafi, libya will collapse into a failed state.

It appears our horror scenario proved right

 

Too damn bad the rest of NATO was too dumb to listen to you.

 

We said same about Iraq. Ex Chancellor Schröder tried evrything to make Bush understand what madness it is to attack Iraq. We also said its madness to topple Mubarak in Egypt.

One thing we dont umderstand here. We clearly see Libya and our intelligence predicted exactly what would happen when Ghaddafi falls. I doubt your secret service is incompetent. We dont understand how such misjudgement is possible.

 

That makes you 3 for 3 on good calls.

Interesting.

Here is a review of Andrew McCarthy's book where he reflects your comments. Andrew McCarthy is the Assistant US Attorney that prosecuted and jailed the Blind Sheikh after the first World Trade Center Bombing. It's a long article, you may want to key word search for "ISIS" to get to the pertinent section.

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/a-nati...arthy-exposes-the-plot-against-the-president/

The great American catastrophe of the 21st century as America wasted its resources and morale chasing unattainable, Utopian goals, and left a gigantic mess in its wake. Support for majority rule in Iraq destroyed the longstanding Sunni-Shiite balance of power in the region and unleashed a new Thirty Years’ War, with devastating consequences for Syria.

The Clinton-Bush NATO expansion included countries where we have no strategic interest and no capacity to defend. They included Balkan countries inside Russia’s traditional sphere of influence – in the case of the Baltic republics – had been integral and strategic parts of Russia since Peter the Great.… In 2008, Putin finally pushed back, ordering the Russian army to occupy the Georgian provinces of Ossetia and Abkhazian in support of local rebels.

The Syrian debacle brought Russia into Syria in 2015; the American-backed jihad brought in Russian Muslims from the Caucasus, as well as Chinese Uighurs and a motley assortment of foreign militants. Russia had interests of opportunity, a warm-water refueling station for its Mediterranean fleet, but the risk of blowback from the Syrian civil war was the most urgent motive for President Vladimir Putin’s intervention.

After the heavy hand of the Obama State Department was visible in the 2014 regime change in Ukraine, Putin seized the Crimea, which had been Russian territory since Catherine the Great took it from the Tartars. The biggest intelligence failure we’ve had since 9/11 has been the inability to predict the leadership plans and intentions of the Putin regime in Russia.
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And that's how the US Intelligence Community came to be in mortal combat against the elected commander-in-chief. The Trump-Russia angle was manufactured by CIA Director Brennan and British and European intelligence services. Instead of a glorious march towards democracy through the transformation of NATO into a grand NGO, the US had landed in a nasty confrontation with Russia over Crimea. Instead of the dawn of Arab democracy, we had the Syrian slaughterhouse.

America’s naive narcissistic intentions did much more damage than Trump’s indifference. Both the left and right wings of the American foreign policy share the End of History delusion as they made clear with their unanimous support for the 2011 overthrow of an American ally, Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, who had been our reliable ally through 7 US presidencies.

This is hard to explain to people who don’t understand the depth of American narcissism.

His point is that we really are this stupid which he illustrates through a discussion he held with a Senior Chinese Military Official. Like you, this Chinese guy was not buying the claim that we are the unfortunate combination of this powerful and this stupid.

 

I see it that way. Germany is analytical in its approach. We dont follow fancy dreams to make libya a 2nd Switzerland. USA does and is blinded by its own Propaganda

 

Very powerful can make you rather stupid

 

Bunch of pro-Russian propaganda.

 

I wouldn't go that far. He's on record being a huge fan of Merkel yet claims to be against the Muslim invasion of Germany despite having massive love and support for the one person who led the biggest invasion of Islamic invaders in German history. Does that jive in your book as realistic?

 

What are your thoughts on wisdom of our ME policy and the impact that had on the Islamic wave that hit Europe?

Announcing the 2007 "surge" in response to a Sunni insurgency, president Bush said that the US wanted to turn Iraq into "a functioning democracy that polices its territory, upholds the rule of law, respects fundamental human liberties, and answers to its people."
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But, majority rule in Iraq meant permanent war:

"The stark facts on the ground still sat there, oozing pus and bile. With Saddam gone, any voting would install a Shiite majority. The Sunni wouldn't run Iraq again. That, at the bottom, caused the insurgency. Absent the genocide of Sunni Arabs, it would keep it going."
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Those that view us not as bungling idiots but as fiendishly clever, hold that we deliberately destabilized the region as now that we are nearly self-sufficient in oil, we wanted to interrupt oil supplies to China and others in order to assert global hegemony. Very good minds throughout the world struggle with the concept that we are this stupid. I'm not saying that Germany's call was particularly brilliant, it was pretty obvious, except to us.

The Islamic State, that was very successful before Trump took over, was led by Sunni officers armed and funded by General David Petraeus, the US commander during the 2007-2008 "surge". We also trained them in leadership and large-unit tactics using sophisticated equipment. Was this short-term stupidity or medium-term malevolence?

We sponsored national elections in Iraq and brought to power the Shi'ite leader Nouri al-Maliki, who promptly purged Iraqi's security forces of Sunnis. Fearing Shi'ite vengeance, Iraq's Sunnis revolted and Iraq dissolved into violence, only we didn't see that coming.

Petraeus armed and trained the Sunni's that would fight, and along with increased US troop levels, greatly curbed the violence through fear of US forces and lots and lots and lots of US cash being distributed by US forces to the Sunnis that would form the backbone of ISIS when we suddenly left. We decided that when we left that the government we had put in place would persuade well-armed and well-organized militias, representing groups that had been war for centuries, would behave and play by the rules.

Emboldened by our "success", in 2010 we decided to adopt the same strategy in Afghanistan!

The Maliki government of Iraq, which owed its existence to American, wanted no American presence, and marked the Americans' final departure with a national holiday!

Henry Kissinger wrote a book at the time, World Order, where he diagnosed the problem with our foreign policy to a congenital flaw that extends back to Woodrow Wilson.

The conviction that American principles are universal has introduced a challenging element into the international system because it implies that governments not practicing them are less than fully legitimate. This suggests that a significant portion of the world lives under a kind of unsatisfactory, probationary arrangement, and will one day be redeemed; in the meantime, their relations with the world's strongest power must have some latent adversarial element to them.
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https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2014/11/21/book-review-why-we-lost-by-gen-daniel-p-bolger/

And it doesn't matter if we elect a Bush, a Clinton, Rubio, Obama, you get the same old State Department with the Intelligence Community protecting it. The GOP went with Trump, a direct challenge to this "order" and they united against it. We all heard the testimony of the Deep State Pukes, they actually testified that Trump not following the talking points they handed him outlining their "inter-agency consensus" was an impeachable offense!

Trump quickly noticed that whatever puke showed up thought exactly like every other puke in the hive and farmed out some of his foreign policy work to Rudy, who he trusts to follow his instructions rather than the "inter-agency consensus" these clowns think controls the world, and they call this Trump engaging in "shadow diplomacy" also an impeachable offense!