“Western allies can work around toxic decision-making in small countries such as Austria, Hungary, and Slovakia. But Germany is too big to ignore”, writes Edward Lucas, non-resident Senior Fellow and Senior Adviser at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
Calling Germany “the weakest link” of its allies, Lucas claims that the country “clearly needs a new security policy”.
“Ukrainians and their friends are justifiably furious about all this. The Zeitenwende [seachange] that the German leader announced after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 has proved deeply disappointing.”
It’s wild. Germany provides almost 2/3s of what the US provides in aid, even though the US is more comparable to the whole EU (which contributed about twice as much as the US now) and they were the signatories of the Budapest Memorandum and those who forced Ukraine to give up their nukes and long range bombers. Broken down by GDP it becomes even more obvious, with Germany in 10th place with 1.2% and the US at 29th place with 0.3%. And that’s all on top of the US military, which is so big that they have thousands of tanks and IFVs sitting in storage. They could’ve easily equipped Ukraine if they truly wanted to, to push Russia back to their borders. But instead some shit flinging is the better choice?
The US really believed the Russian nuclear threats. That alone explains their reticence to fully support Ukraine.
They didn’t want to see a mushroom cloud over Kyiv.
Was this assessment right? I guess we will never know. But the way things are going, the price we will have to pay will be greater.