Ah yes, history has shown that this is a good idea. I’m sure it’ll end well this time. 
I so hope this backfires. First of all, I don’t think they can pull it off anyway, the corruption and incompetence is off the charts with these people and that’s not due to lack of vision (which they also don’t have) or whatever, that’s systemic. All that money will go into private pockets and fuck-all will be delivered, and thank Allah for that.
Also, this will antagonize other EU countries (well, some of them, I assume the Baltics will hail their German overlords), making it so much easier for nationalist EU-skeptic politicians to gain support.
Yeah, if they do somehow pull it off (which is a big IF), then the rivalry that Europe used to be known for might make a return. The whole idea behind the formation of the EU, which the US helped push for, was to squash this rivalry, unite the European bourgeoisie, and making them both subservient and militarily dependent on the US. I can’t imagine that Germany trying to reclaim its position as the European military superpower is going to sit well with countries like France who would prefer that position instead.
First as tragedy, and multiple times over as farce.
Of course the big difference between the historical France/Germany rivaly and a possible future one is France having an independent nuclear weapons capability. Even the UK relies on the US for maintaining - and if rumours are true, being allowed to use - their nuclear weapons. If the EU were to collapse I could see a lot of smaller powers ally with France, under terms very favourable to France, if it meant an ironclad nuclear-response security alliance with France.
The whole idea behind the formation of the EU, which the US helped push for, was to squash this rivalry
But does the US want to maintain this system now? Perhaps they see the EU as a competitor and want it to gridlock, or even fragment.
Also, this will antagonize other EU countries (well, some of them, I assume the Baltics will hail their German overlords)
Poland was one of the loudest supporters for a while. Western euros dont care, eastern euros have too many russia brainworms. The UK is irrelevant. Maybe Serbia cares or Greece idk. Its not 1950 anymore.
Stalin we need you.
The ideal form for Germany is a thousand splintered little fiefdoms fighting over codpiece sizes of their liege lord, inshallah we shall see it happen after they lose next time
its happening again
the closest analogue we have to Stalin is fuckin Putin? Good god I hope he’s stocking up on Oreshniks
Just can’t trust white people with militaries tbh
WW1 and WW2 were fought with German guns, I know not what weapons WW3 will be fought with, but it and WW4 will probably also be German guns.
We don’t learn to denazify Germany until at least WW7 or 8.
None of these weapons will be used to defend Europe. They will sit in a stockpile and be sent to assist yet another genocide in a decade or two.
As a German: I think having a military is probably necessary if we ever hope to become less dependent on the US. But on the other hand, I’m 100% confident Merz has the absolute worst ideas possible because he is a worthless parasitic ghoul and the world would be a better place if he was shot.
Also any military expansion will most definitely be buying more US or Israeli military equipment under the instruction of the US. Does Europe have a domestic equivalent to the F-35 fighter jet, and the THAAD, AEGIS Ashore, Arrow, Patriot PAC 3 air defence systems? The answer is no, which is why Germany just bought Arrow 3 air defence (midcourse ballistic missile interception) batteries from Israel last year. Europe has managed to deliver just one SAMP/T air defence battery to Ukraine in the entire war, so domestic production is just not there. The 80 or so cold war era F-16AM block 15s Ukraine are getting from Europe can only be delivered because of a US support package, and US replacements (F-35s) being sent over to the European countries giving up these F-16s. See Macron saying Europe gave Ukraine all it could give. Also, Europe is definitely not buying the Chinese equivalents to those systems, that would not be allowed. These are all critical capabilities in a hypothetical NATO-Russia war.
They are either trying to be an independent imperialist power, or they’re just doing the US empire’s bidding. Either way it’s imperialism. If you believe their insane plans will actually manifest (I doubt it), their goal is to be able to win the next round of war in eastern Europe. Clearly they’re not winning this round, so wherever the front settles, they want to be able to do re-match in couple of years.
Very dissapointed none of you nerds posted the morgenthau apology form
Surprised we don’t have an emoji tbh
Typical German hours
I’m not afraid of germans to be honest, I feel like I could take at least 20 of them and I’m not even a big guy, well horizontally I am but not vertically
I just want to point out that this is also completely necessary for europe to break free of american vassalisation.
We can’t have our cake and eat it. We can’t oppose militarisation in europe and simultaneously call for europe to be free of yankie influence.
It’s either a demilitarised europe that is subservient to america under military “protection”(racket), or it’s a europe with its own real military powers.
This is the only path to a sovereign EU that doesn’t ignore when the US coups Ukraine and even blows up their pipelines to shatter the relationship they were previously building with Russia. The EU was previously forging partnerships with Russia and is currently forging partnerships with China because it’s just geographically obvious and beneficial to do. The US doesn’t want that and will interfere in every single way it can. The only way to prevent it is to be capable of non-reliance on the US.
The EU also desperately needs this because Ukraine is really fucking dangerous and once they’re out of war with Russia they become a real threat to Europe.
Yeah I agree with take, it’s kind of like siding with Satan rather than the Greater Satan. Obviously Europe is the OG home of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism, and the various European nations benefit from this global horror we’ve constructed called the capitalist world system and the EU is a neoliberal project and causes misery across the globe, AND they caused the most destructive war in the history of the species but it’s STILL better to have them rearm if they can break free of the Greater Satan, the United States. It’s a necessary step in the continuing trend of multi-polarity. It only benefits China and weirdly even Russia, as if the EU can manage to break free of American influence down the road they’ll make up with Russia again, as the capitalists there desperately need Russian energy.
Capitalist version of the sino-soviet split where EU looks to China to build itself up fearing the US.
Any tolerance of Europe breaking free from American vassalage is nothing but a means to one end: the European abandonment of Western hegemony. But that’s a quid pro quo that the gardeners of this continent will never accept and so, if that’s not the likely outcome, then it’s a dangerous, useless path for the Global South to entertain and all means should be expended to instead have “sovereign” Europe’s baby teeth kicked in while it’s still in the crib.
The constituent members of the EU want to preserve their near full national autonomy while still banding together under a united front whenever convenient. This half-assing makes the current state of the EU an emperor without clothes—a strong federative “state” in appearance, but not in any practical substance. The bridges it’s torched in its chauvinistic allegiance to Western hegemony leave little incentive for the rest of the world to humor it, much less ignore exploiting its contradictions by pretending it’s actually clothed. The only response they should have is to break and tear this continent apart so that the EU liberal’s dream of some “United States of Europe” can never come to pass. Russia and China seem to have gotten the message nowadays by using a diplomatic divide-and-conquer strategy through bilateral relationships while giving Brussels’ multilateral fantasies the cold shoulder. The EU wants to have its cake and eat it too but there’s no reason for the world to let it.
The sort of freaks running this continent wouldn’t lead to some partnership with anti-imperialism against America but a coordinated sharing of America’s world policeman role with delineated global boundaries of responsibilities akin to the Treaty of Tordesillas. An “independent” Europe would take care of northern Africa, Russia, perhaps also Central Asia and the Middle East while America can, at last, properly focus all its efforts in its decade-long delayed “Pivot to Asia” and fully concentrate on the much fantasized showdown with China.
Europe re-empowered alongside America would simply just replay the dynamic between the British and French Empires in the mid-19th century. As Victor Hugo depicted that partnership - “One of the two victors filled his pockets; when the other saw this he filled his coffers. And back they came to Europe, arm in arm, laughing away. Such is the story of the two bandits” - so would be the exact dynamic of the modern two bandits of America and “sovereign” Europe.
The sort of freaks running this continent wouldn’t lead to some partnership with anti-imperialism against America but a coordinated sharing of America’s world policeman role with delineated global boundaries of responsibilities akin to the Treaty of Tordesillas. An “independent” Europe would take care of northern Africa, Russia, perhaps also Central Asia and the Middle East while America can, at last, properly focus all its efforts in its decade-long delayed “Pivot to Asia” and fully concentrate on the much fantasized showdown with China.
There is no “pivot to asia” for the EU. They actively do not want to participate in fighting China with the US. They see China as their ticket away from vassalisation by the US.
I strongly disagree with this analysis. You’re looking at the EU and US as permanent partners arm in arm when I believe the correct analysis here is that they are more likely to do a capitalist equivalent of the sino-soviet split.
EU will (already is) cozying up to China to escape US vassalisation. They will deepen those ties rather than participate in attacking China.
By the time Europe is in any position to do anything about China 30 years will have passed and the entire continent will be developed by belt and road initiatives and high speed rail tying together Russia, China, the Middle East and Africa into one cohesive land-based trade sector that is tied to China in a way that can never be removed.
All that needs to occur in the meantime is for EU to split with the US and want to build itself up to get out of vassalisation. That project will take so many decades of playing nicely with China that it will hand over the future of the entire landmass to it.
I think this is a far sunnier depiction of Europe than the material reality and historical record allows to be tenably held. It’s worth going back to interrogate the sheer history of the notion. The idea of a scenario of inter-imperialist rivalry within the West posed by a resurgent Europe against America, to the benefit of the Global South, traces back all the way back to the immediate post-war period. Stalin himself speculated that:
The question is, what guarantee is there that Germany and Japan will not again rise to their feet, that they will not try to wrest themselves from American bondage and to live their own independent lives? I think there are no such guarantees. But it follows from this that the inevitability of wars among the capitalist countries remains.
Stalin was wrong because World War II turned out to remain the last inter-imperialist war within the West up to today.
Europe’s fundamental problem is that it has never been held accountable for the original sin of 500 years of colonialism and imperialism. Rather than facing any retribution, it has been rewarded. The continent has managed to retain the material wealth gained through its imperial past, and even now, it continues to benefit from neo-colonial economic structures that give subsidy to its luxury through the continued unequal exchange with the rest of the world.
On the other hand, the only thing it really ever has been punished for is the cautionary lesson of inter-imperialist infighting when Europe turned its guns against itself. The lesson Europe took from the 20th century, and continues to hold today, is this: karma hasn’t ever punished its external violence, but it strikes if it turns on itself. Europe was the victor of history—until the victors began fighting among themselves.
This is the etiological source of its cultural and racial alignment with Western hegemony. It’s a self-perpetuating cyclical logic that was only broken through the alternative presented through socialist internationalism that provided a different narrative of Europe that allowed coexistence and solidarity with the rest of the world beyond the now increasingly bankrupt paper facade of liberal “internationalism.” Socialist internationalism (though itself insincere at times) offered Europeans, the first time, a way to reimagine our identity beyond the deeply entrenched cultural and racial divide of “the West and the rest,” a paradigm that had shaped the idea of “Europe” for centuries, if not millennia.
Incidentally, as a result, this is a contributing factor to why the entirety of all Eastern European states, as if eager to make up for lost time now that they’re in the club, have become uniformly some of the most ideologically extreme and right-wing chauvinistic freaks within Western hegemony today.
Lenin’s prediction of inter-imperialist infighting only came to pass once, during WWII, and hasn’t happened again since. Europe does learn lessons but the wrong ones. Stalin’s succession to Khrushchev meant the USSR never updated Lenin and Stalin’s analysis, which led to the policy of “peaceful coexistence.” This approach utterly failed to account for the solidarity among imperialist powers under Western hegemony, which ultimately contributed to the Soviet Union’s collapse.
The plain reality from the history of post-war inter-imperialist solidarity, for which the USSR already paid the price, should indicate that unless the original sin of our continent is addressed in one way or another, Europe will never be a protagonist of any scenario of multipolarity against the existing hegemonic paradigm. If it had the chance, Europe would happily loot China alongside the US just as it did in the Opium Wars and the Boxer Uprising. It doesn’t do so today not because of a lack of any will, but a lack of capacity and capability. Unless it discovers a new narrative of its identity, as it did once through socialist internationalism, the rest of the world should prevent it from ever regaining that capability - and should reject as realistic any notion of an “independent Europe” willing to repudiate Western hegemony.
True enough. But in Stalin’s time EU policy institutions weren’t churning out ream after ream of “we’re being vassalised (already have) and need to do something about it”.
Nor was this accompanied by the very clear indicator that the EU is genuinely cozying up to China. It’s not clear in the public eye although it’s obvious that propaganda outlets have stopped doing anti-China content, but the quieter behind the scenes stuff is making it very clear they want to be closer.
The EU is stuck. It either fully vassalises, something that will result in a nationalist anti-US reactionary takeover that leads to conflict in Europe, or it gets closer to China. Those are the options. Closer Russia ties is obviously off the table right now but that’s what they were doing prior to this war breaking out, even up to the very very start of the war Europe was still working on closer ties to Russia.
And if you think the above policy institute isn’t still worrying about sovereignty, here is their take on Merz 10 days ago: https://ecfr.eu/article/from-fence-sitter-to-pace-setter-how-merzs-germany-can-lead-europe/
The very final point of it is their concern about sovereignty.
But the fundamental questions about Merz’s overall chancellorship are bigger still; indeed, they are European-history-shaping judgment calls. Ultimately, does Merz act on his recognition that Europe needs closer economic and military integration? Does his rhetoric on supporting Ukraine add up to a proportional German contribution to European deterrence of Russia? Do his economic and trade policies stake out Germany (and with it, Europe) in a genuinely sovereign space between the US and China?
It is the primary concern of EU policy tanks right now. Every single thing they do is filtering through “how do we maintain sovereignty” and a “the US is untrustworthy”.
China is not a threat to sovereignty, we know this and so does everyone in Europe. Europe IS going to get closer and closer to China in a bid to escape vassalisation. It’s not a theory it’s actively what they are already doing. Trump even gave them excuses to accelerate it with the Tariff bullshit, European sentiment to China took a big boost especially when they didn’t back down one bit, population views them as a necessary partner: https://ip-quarterly.com/en/what-europe-thinks-about-china-2025
All China has to do is handle their relationship with EU as well as they’ve handled Taiwan and things will improve. China is the only way.
Perhaps we are yin and yang on this matter. I am optimistic and you are pessimistic. I agree that it could go one of either of these directions and we seem to both agree on the possible directions, merely sitting on different sides as to what the final outcome might be. My opinion is that EU will do as it does, turtle along bureaucratically for 30 years pursuing a de-vassalisation strategy. The alternative is far riskier.
