"Project Von Steuben": A Proud Germany Demands A Different Europe
Betting on NATO over the EU amid Zeitenwende
My first serious European trip took place when I was 13. I was not much younger than Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben when he went along with his father on his first assignment.
I got on a plane — unaccompanied minor — and away we went to France and Germany. I was perhaps too young to really appreciate a vacation on the south of France and my British friend was not particularly interested in anything exciting beyond English chocolates and reading trashy science fiction.
So much of my adventuring I did on my own. Though I spoke French very well I had then not a lick of German, which was just as well because all the Germans I met spoke English, including my reluctant host — my British friend’s German stepfather. (There is no relationship weirder than the relationship between stepfather and teenage stepson.)
He was only too happy to regale me with all the ways that my country — the United States of America — had done everything wrong. Being good natured (or at least politically correct) he left out America’s liberation of Europe which, I suspect, deep down he didn’t quite agree with.
My British friend’s German stepfather was particularly committed to the Eurozone and he fantasized about a United States of Europe that could rival a United States of America. I think he had a mistaken view of what made America work.
That such delusions were expressed to me by the son of a U-boat commander I found funny even when I was a child. Over the years I’ve come to enjoy meeting these foreign-born aristocrats who nevertheless seem to soak up a lot of the good jobs as academics.
From my friend’s stepfather I was to learn that the reason so many Germans love privacy is because many of them want to erase their history. And who could blame them? Who doesn’t want to erase their history, especially when their history is so other than the image they present to the world?
Here was yet another German trying to dominate Europe, albeit economically. If at first you don’t succeed militarily try, try again.
I had a similar feeling when I, then an adult, took a tour of Hitler’s Munich from a young German student. Fittingly that Austrian’s old apartment had been turned into an Apple Store. In the end, even You Know Who got assimilated. Or at least his apartment did. Perhaps on the next tour we can chat about Adolf’s ties to the anti-Semitic White Russians. I’ll bring my copy of The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945.
Then again, perhaps not. As we walked from spot to spot I darted away when the obligatory self flagellating German regaled us with the tales of the naughty Nazis who were uniquely bad among people. The apology from the twenty-something kid was a bit much.
If everyone is responsible no one is responsible. Without responsibility there is no greatness.
You can see a throughline between the German sub scandal which implicated the highest levels of Merkel and Netanyahu’s government.
Or in the disgusting doublespeak of AxelSpringer’s Matthias Döpfner whose obsession with the state of Israel stops a real examination of whether or not Germany is complicit in the deprivation of Palestinian rights.
The Pfizer connections between China-Israel-Germany are also worthy of further exploration. So too the takeover of Monsanto by Bayer.
Germany has millions of refugees. Making those migrants into Germans will not prove easy but Germany can process these new arrivals and press them into the new German economy. “Since the Russian war of aggression began on February 24, 2022, more than a million Ukrainians have taken refuge in Germany,” notes DW but Germany still lacks the kind of high skilled immigration needed to drive the economy forward.
There is every indication that Germany can take Eastern European Slavs and Turks and put them to work in Europe’s most productive economy.
That’ll require knowing their migrants better.
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Some years later I supported Brexit because I concluded — I think rightly — that Britain would wind up under American dominion. Dominic Cummings — who I knew a bit — imagined a Singapore on the Thames but I suspected that a bunch of rich Americans would effectively colonize London and indeed I’m happy to report that’s precisely what’s come to pass. With any luck the United Kingdom could replace Israel as the 51st state.
Ultimately Europe lacks a charismatic vision. In this reality, America will always have something over the Europeans. What even is a European anyway?
Maybe the reason the Europeans are always partying and seemingly always vacationing is that they don’t have anything to really work for. They have no mission and so they have no future.
It’s into this vortex that German chancellor Olaf Scholz gave his masterly Zeitenwende speech.
Wir erleben eine Zeitenwende. Und das bedeutet: Die Welt danach ist nicht mehr dieselbe wie die Welt davor. Im Kern geht es um die Frage, ob Macht das Recht brechen darf, ob wir es Putin gestatten, die Uhren zurückzudrehen in die Zeit der Großmächte des 19. Jahrhunderts, oder ob wir die Kraft aufbringen, Kriegstreibern wie Putin Grenzen zu setzen. Das setzt eigene Stärke voraus.
We are living through a watershed era. And that means that the world afterwards will no longer be the same as the world before. The issue at the heart of this is whether power is allowed to prevail over the law. Whether we permit Putin to turn back the clock to the nineteenth century and the age of the great powers. Or whether we have it in us to keep warmongers like Putin in check. That requires strength of our own.
The strength of the German people is legendary. And while a friend of mine likes to joke that the Germans are either surrendering—or invading. But I think they are doing something far more interesting — they are always building, tinkering, machining. The question is not what are they building but where they are building to.
We need their minds and their know how to save the world once again.
It’s no exaggeration to say that German Americans — Nimitz and Eisenhower — won the Second World War. And it’s critically important to understand the role that von Steuben — recruited by Ben Franklin of course — played in making America’s military worthy of the fight.
America became an Empire with the help of the Operation Paperclip Germans. Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were resettled from the former Nazi Germany to serve the American government after the end of World War II in Europe, between 1945 and 1959. The contributions were immense.
We’re all going to see Oppenheimer — who was a British spy, naturally — this weekend but how many of us understand that he was married into the German Left?
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A friend of mine is a high ranking officer in the German Air Force.
One of the ways that Germany could demonstrate its good will is to sequence every German soldier. Here Germany alone could make a considerable contribution and that contribution could pay real dividends for the health of German-Americans or really anyone of German heritage around the world.
How large a group is that? Well, in the United States that population is…
"German-Americans make up the largest self-reported ancestry group within the United States accounting for roughly 49 million people and approximately 17% of the population of the US."
Add to that another twelve million Germans living in Brazil and you’re really getting going.
We’ll call it Project Von Steuben.
There are currently 27,000 or so members of the German Air Force.
At $500 a sequence, Germany could quite readily build a large biobank. With its national health service it could produce strong genomic predictors.
There were more than 1.46 million migrants last year. Again, at $500, that’s only $730m — less than one percent of €100 billion fund Scholz has put forward to upgrade Germany’s considerable defenses.
But with less than one percent of that budget Germany would put itself at the forefront of medical progress — and help secure the peace.