The historic decisions of NATO: Merkel was wrong, America must fix it again

Created: 06/30/2022Updated: 06/30/2022, 18:35

By: Georg Anastasiadis

A commentary by Merkur Editor-in-Chief Georg Anastasiadis.

© AFP / Klaus Haag

Europe got drunk on its “soft power” for years.

Now it's Americans again who must save the continent from the imperial fantasies of a megalomaniac dictator.

A commentary by Georg Anastasiadis.

It wasn't long ago that left-liberals hailed Angela Merkel as the leader of the free world.

As we know today, nothing could have been more wrong: While Europe was intoxicating itself and its “soft power” and Germany was scrapping the Bundeswehr as if to prove its everlasting peacefulness, Putin was preparing his brutal war of aggression in Eastern Europe.

Now, once again, Americans must save us from the imperial fantasies of a megalomaniac dictator.

They are the ones who stopped the Russian march through Ukraine to the Polish border with their arms deliveries and are now sending new troops to defend Europe.

That's what NATO just decided at its historic summit.

The US, whose ouster from Eurasia was at the core of Putin's policy, is back.

Ukraine war: Now the Bundeswehr has to defend its own country again

Those who understand Putin in the SPD (and also the writers of clever celebrity letters) have to face hard facts.

It was not the mantra of “change through trade” that kept peace on the continent for three generations, but the US guarantee of assistance and the balance of terror that meant every aggressor: whoever shoots first is dead second. Chancellor Helmut Schmidt has understood that.

He was overthrown by his SPD in 1982 for the NATO retrofitting he pushed through.

Now, with Olaf Scholz, it is again a social democrat who must lead the Germans back to the path of cool reason.

For decades they were told that the Bundeswehr was a kind of special task force for operations in the Hindu Kush.

Now the army has to defend its own country again.

For that, it needs to be massively upgraded.

That costs a lot of money and wealth.

But the most peaceful cannot live in peace if the neighbor does not like it.

KGB man Putin has always viewed the EU as the weak forecourt of a Russian empire.

And as a chatterbox.

Now he is getting to know a new Europe.