This is true, misleading and repeated to the point of worthlessness.
There was a big to do among our NATO allies about ramping up their own spending in response to the previous President threatening to pull out of NATO. They want those troops there, under NATO command and especially lately.
It does matter, because it means Washington has tangible leverage over these supposedly-sovereign states and can enforce hard limits on their behavior. As an extreme example, a nationalist coup against a weak & corrupt Berlin simply can't happen with such an enormous foreign military presence. We learned from Versailles.
The IRA and NS2 sabotage were really bad for Germany. But what are they gonna do about it?
And what's that about US troops preventing a nationalist coup? That sounds like an insane conspiracy theory.
We're not an occupied nation. There are 35,000 US troops in Germany. Compare that with 180,000-250,000 German troops (depending on how you count them).
And the NS2 sabotage is pretty much irrelevant. No gas has ever flown through that pipe, and it was exceedingly unlikely to ever happen after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Oh, NS2 sabotage is quite relevant as it shows that "someone" can blow up (partially) German infrastructure while Germany have no guts to even wink in the direction of the perpetrator. Not exactly a definition of a sovereign country.
NS2 was not quite German infrastructure, it's really Russian infrastructure. It was also entirely irrelevant for Germany at that point, no gas ever has flown through it and none would have almost certainly even if it were still fully intact (one strand is undamaged).
We don't know if the German government knows who did this. So I don't think we can draw any conclusions from the lack of action here, we simply do not have enough information.
>NS2 was not quite German infrastructure, it's really Russian infrastructure
What are you talking about? Western companies literally own half of NS2.
>no gas ever has flown through it and none would have almost certainly even if it were still fully intact (one strand is undamaged)
I wonder if intentionally delayed certification of the pipeline by Germany has anything to do with "no gas ever has flown". The point is: NS1 + NS2 was a constant temptation for Germany and blowing it has removed the "wrong" incentive.
Basocally everyone wanted NS2 to be gone, including the Russians. So in all honesty, I'd expect saboteurs frok NATO country A helping out saboteurs from non-NATO country B with explosives and detonators if needed.
By the way, nobody wanted NS2 by the time it was technologocally ready. Funny enough, if Trump wouldn't have been president a deal for CNG anf LNG would have been had a lot easier and earlier.
>Basocally everyone wanted NS2 to be gone, including the Russians
I call BS. Not only have they invested a significant amount of money into it, they also sell gas to Europe through Ukraine even today. I think they would like to have working pipelines which do not cross any intermediate states, even in offline state.
Can you provide some recent (say, post-Merkel) examples where Berlin has acted in its own interest at the expense of Washington's interests? And how did Washington respond?
I'm genuinely curious since you seem to know a lot about German national governance.
That is entirely irrelevant, you're the one making absurd claims about Germany not being sovereign. You're also leaving a very short timespan here, one dominated by the war against Ukraine where US and German interests align very well.
There is one event, if you believe the reports. And that was Germany allegedly making US deliveries of main battle tanks a requirements to agree to Leopard 2 deliveries to Ukraine. That was not something the US wanted to do at that point, though obviously it also wasn't something they disagreed with entirely.
As other commenters have remarked, the bombing of Germany's energy infrastructure by a literal ally is an extraordinary violation of sovereignty. You can do mental gymnastics to pretend that is irrelevant. It's called "being in denial". And yet Germany is now in an energy-cost-induced recession. Is that also "irrelevant"?
And we haven't even brought up FM Baerbock and where her allegiance lies (the Washington-based Atlantic Council said she was "in lockstep" with them).
Regarding the German tanks, it says everything that even the Scholz-Baerbock regime was reluctant to send them. If it was truly in Germany's national security interest, it would be a no-brainer. But it's not about national security, it's about politics and Washington's interests in the region.
So there's clearly a strong case for Germany not really being sovereign. When I ask you to make the opposing argument, you evade.
There is no evidence the US destroyed the pipeline. Hersh's story is a fairytale with lots of alleged facts that have been specifically debunked. There is no robust public evidence on who actually destroyed the pipeline. Everything that is public is circumstancial and contradictory.
You are making a very extreme and frankly just plain insulting statement here by disputing our sovereignty.
I thoight you people moved on from blaming her to blame Habeck for everything by now...
Also nice, that everyone ignores the fact NATO is an alliance, and having one country moving alone woupd be really bad in a time showing strength and unity is paramount.
> It does matter, because it means Washington has tangible leverage over these supposedly-sovereign states
In case that someone is genuinely confused: Poland put quite significant effort into using far-away and much more reasonable and friendly USA to decrease risk of invasion of nearby, brutal and evil Russia.
Main leverage that USA has in Poland is risk of *withdrawing* military support.
Because getting invaded by Russia is extremely bad, war worse than average invasion results.
Yet our troops are still welcomed and NATO is more popular than ever.
I’m not saying it doesn’t put us in an advantageous position if it came down to war with Germany or France, but it does matter that we handle trade disputes and NATO as separate matters, and it isn’t as if EU has exactly been kind to American tech companies lately given with each passing year they pass new onerous legislation that mostly affects foreign tech companies more than it affects their own domestic industry because their own home grown tech industry wasn’t worth much before we took any protectionist measures.
Right now we are guests in the country with our shields and spears pointed in the direction of the East because we have overlapping interests in defending their nations with their present governments as they are against the threat of Russia. The reality on the ground now outweighs an incidental hypothetical that would be a repeat of a hundred years ago. If our presence dissuades a second rise of Nazism, that’s probably as much to Germany’s benefit as it is ours, but the market disputes are between the EU and USA, not European NATO and North American NATO and while we’re there as guests and not belligerents, we’re there to defend Germany, not impugn its sovereignty.
Where Europe is protectionist about tech, the US did the same about steel, aluminium, aircraft and certain foods. I guess the tech sector is just more present in the minds of HN readers.
I didn't forget about that, but I felt no need to double-down on the both-sides bit when the one I replied to already mentioned the IRA, and it's irrelevant to the point that trade including disputes and NATO are separate threads to the Trans-Atlantic relationships between America and our European allies. We can go tick for tack for all I care on trade—I mean I do care to the extent that I think it's dumb and we shouldn't but it also isn't a political priority for me—whereas NATO is severely more important independent of where we stand on the balance of our trade relationships at the end of the day because keeping Europe free and independent of Russia matters a great deal more.
That even includes ensuring they have the freedom to pass screwball legislation that screws with our tech companies and moves the needle closer to re-evaluating their European operations as a priority.
I'm not hearing any Europeans outside of Russia chime in to say they would in fact prefer the opposite outcome or an inverse set of priorities where we give them better access to American steel, aluminum, aircraft and food markets but dissolve NATO and pull out of their respective countries. It's a complicated series of military, trade, diplomatic and personal relationships with both profits and losses on both sides of the Atlantic, but on balance is still beneficial for Americans and Europeans.
The economic benefits of NATO for the USA wouldn’t change much today if Germany had its own troops instead of the US troops stationed there. Of course, if the troops were never there in the first place, that’s a different matter.
The biggest actual difference isn’t US troops stationed in NATO countries but rather the extent of the US as a global reserve currency and the power of the petrodollar. The concerns over these are well-founded as the powers that be have willingly traded the latter in exchange for upping the US’ position in the current brinksmanship with Russia, when Russia was never the economic juggernaut to be reckoned with and certainly not worth giving up those cards for.
