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The recent visit by Olaf Scholz to Washington came at an opportune time.
What shall the future of Germany be? It’s very much a live concern and with it, the future of Europe and the NATO alliance. I favor the New Hanseatic League.
There are a number of problems as concerns Germany’s foreign policy, not least of which is an aversion to having a national security policy in the first place.
The old model of Russian gas/high-end German manufacturing/Chinese customers is under attack on all fronts especially after the collapse of Wirecard and for all intents and purposes entirely dead.
The demographics of Germany are similarly very bad. Old workers don't have much occasion to work in factories.
What’s Germany to do? But as the Zeitenwende begins to take hold there are new opportunities for the German Republic.
A closer alliance with Denmark is in the offing, obviously, and the recent news that Germany was going to be working with Denmark to build more munitions for the war effort was well received at the White House. Rather fittingly Scholz met with his doppelgänger Senator (and close Biden ally) Chris Coons of Delaware.
These arms are surely needed, as Reuters reports, and the Danish prime minister met with the German chancellor at the breaking ground ceremony.
The plant being built by defense company Rheinmetall at its existing site in Unterluess in northern Germany is expected eventually to produce around 200,000 artillery shells per year along with explosives and possibly other components, including warheads. Rheinmetall is shouldering the cost of about 300 million euros ($324 million).
Rheinmetall said that production at the site will primarily meet the needs of Germany's military, the Bundeswehr. The company said the priority is to start production as soon as possible and it expects construction to take about a year.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who attended the ceremony with his defense minister and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, said Rheinmetall was “laying the foundation for supplying the Bundeswehr and our partners in Europe with artillery ammunition independently and above all durably.”
Impressive, to be sure, but what might a post-war Europe look like?
(Putting aside the occasional fantasies, like that German drones could compete with Turkish ones in terms of quality or price.)
One could readily imagine Danish-designed, German-mass manufactured wind farms dotting the North Sea and every other sea, for that matter. This effort will require copper and rare earth resources and Scholz is committed to investing $4 billion until 2030.
Might I recommend getting in touch with Robert Friedland, Chancellor?
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But there is something deeper stirring: a fight over the soul of Germanfolk.
Of course Scholz, like Sarah Unsicker in Missouri, is battling for the soul of Germanfolk worldwide. Scholz called out President Donald Trump — himself a German-American — for threatening the world order and NATO in particular. He seemed particularly incensed by Trump’s invitation to Russia to have its way with Europe.
That’s good as far as it goes but he should instruct the BND and its allied agencies to take down the foreign espionage networks in the United States which give Trump his strength.
It’s all well and good to make a fuss about Hamas this or Hamas that or to light up the Brandenburg Gate with the Israeli flag’s colors but it’s Netanyahu (and his agents) who are the source of much of the Strum und Drang afflicting the American political zeitgeist. You can be a Jew—and a Fascist. I did not appreciate it when German intelligence was using talking points from the IDF against me.
Scholz should start in Missouri where the German-American population is most in need of coaching. It should not be the Israelis traveling to the “Show Me State” but Germans.
The recent hospitalization of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin comes after a botched data processing from none other than Kansas City, Missouri-based Cerner, a processor of medical records. (Cerner, you’ll recall, merged with Oracle in a $28.3 billion deal—one of the many terrible deals approved by the Trump DOJ.)
That merger has gone decidedly poorly and whole contracts are in jeopardy, especially with the Veterans Affairs. The disaster has afflicted everyone from the grunt in the field to the Secretary of Defense himself.
If America and her military isn’t healthy neither is the future of Europe.
“They sent the Secretary of Defense home with sepsis,” noted one of my colleagues. Grizzly stuff.
Careful readers of this Substack will recall I floated the idea of Project Von Steuben back in July of this year.
I wrote at the time:
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.
Here’s how I’d do it, having given it a bit more thought. Our Danish friends are world class in genomics. They have a new, younger king and gobs of cash thanks to Novo Norodisk, the manufacturer of Ozempic.
A son of theirs is the new CEO of Illumina, a critically important company for the future of America and Europe. A smart Germany would help take over Illumina with a Dane as its head and invest to drive up the stock price.
Were I playing the game as Germany I’d join efforts to develop new, greener mining techniques. I’d ride alongside the Liberty and Lobito corridors. I’d hire American experts to help advise.
I’d recognize that this kind of middle-manning between the great powers is going to lead to Germany abolishing itself and the alternatives won’t be pretty. We can’t allow that future.
No, Germany could lead on a New Hanseatic League. Just dust off this map.
History suggests that Germany will always have a relationship with Russia but that relationship must be in the open. No more of this Russian spy business, OK? It’s a bad look.
For being a close ally, I hardly see much partnerships in information technology between US and Germany.