What's up with Germany? Have we been feinting?

[Dreamtimer]

I haven't viewed or read much of Dr. Farrell lately but this has caught my interest.

Angela Merkel recently spoke, and Joseph is quoting from an article,

The language here is extraordinarily strong, and, indeed (take note) a first for post-war German chancellors:

Europe "must take its fate into its own hands" faced with a western alliance divided by Brexit and Donald Trump's presidency, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Sunday.

"The times in which we could completely depend on others are on the way out. I've experienced that in the last few days," Merkel told a crowd at an election rally in Munich, southern Germany.

"We Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands," she added.

He goes on to say,

The USA has been quietly playing a dangerous geopolitical game in Eastern Europe and the Ukraine, by basing American troops progressively more eastward, in Romania, Poland, and the Baltic states, positioning them between Germany and Russia. Thus, while most analysts have been viewing these moves as "anti-Russian", I view them as equally "anti-German" in that these movements and deployments were and are meant in my opinion to keep Berlin and Moscow apart, and to make economic coordination between the two European powers - the two most powerful European powers - more difficult if not impossible. It also not only puts pressure on Russia in the Ukraine, it equally denies a more "muscular" German influence in the Ukraine by breaking the direct land link through Eastern Europe.

and

We also recall then Foreign Minister Steinmeir's address in Berlin to German businessmen that Germany's foreign policy was going to have to become much more independent and military, and I suspected then, and continue to suspect now, that the backdrop for his remarks were precisely these American moves in eastern Europe.

He believes,

The Merkel government was handed a crisis of opportunity, and Frau Merkel is playing it for all it is worth, setting very long term policy goals into place because of it.

Hmmmm

[Dumpster Diver]

I agree with Trump. I was in NATO in the 90s and it was very obvious that we were the "dumb pig" that funded everything.

All the other nations laughed at us, literally insulted us to our faces.

NATO should have ended in 1992. The EU got fat off our "largess."

[Aianawa]

Will be there end of month and report back macro micro best able

[Dumpster Diver]

Will be there end of month and report back macro micro best able

Are you a NATO guy, Aianawa? You look kinda like some of my old scientist colleagues from your avatar (minus the blocks). I was always amazed at the tribal mentality each nation's scientists had. Us US guys mostly allied to our Service (Army, Navy, Air Force, even Joint Staff). None of the US guys understood NATO when they first got there. It's kinda stupid as we didn't train anybody who went there and our "Allies" took advantage of it. Had to learn on the job.