In an interview today, German opposition leader Sarha Wagenknecht called on Germany to withdraw from NATO, saying the alliance needs to be dissolved outright and replaced with a new collective security system that includes the Russian Federation.
The comments come after angry condemnation of US President-elect Donald Trump’s comments calling NATO obsolete by Foreign Minster Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who suggested that Germany’s government should use its position to foster “unity” to keep NATO together.
Wagenknecht’s party, Die Linke, is the largest opposition party in parliament, and long advocated international disarmament and urged Germany against foreign military involvement. Her comments on the dissolution of NATO was not the first time the party has made such comments, though this is a much higher profile instance, doubly-so because of Trump’s recent comments.
As the successor party to East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party, Die Linke has also often argued in favor of closer relations with Russia, seeing the end of the Cold War as an opportunity to replace the old NATO vs. Warsaw Pact system with a mutual defense system encompassing all the powers of Europe.
Proving how nuts the Western world is, one finds oneself agreeing more often with Germany’s left party than with the supposedly sensible parties, which these days are total garbage.
Trump seems to be far more relevant than the doubters could ever have imagined….. Time to establish an opportunistic real new prosperity model premised on productivity instead of offensive hegemony based on territorial occupation and enforced false loyalities….
Really should be having this discussion:
NATO: Obsolete, or Merely Criminal? Should it Be Dissolved, or Detained Indefinitely? Beaten with sticks? Burned? Buried? Will We Ever Fully Get Rid of it’s Stench?
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Sure beats the ‘dialogue:’ Two guys say obsolete, ‘everyone’ else is horrified.
This could probably work. If everyone is working together including the USA.
It may not matter but “Die Linke” is a cover name for the former German Communist Party.
East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party was neither Socialist nor Unity. It was pure Stalinist.
For years I have urged my German family: “Get out of NATO”.
A major point of NATO for the rest of Europe is to keep Germany in line, not just Russia. A combination of Germany and Russia is not going to appeal to France or Britain or Italy, not to anyone really.
That makes too much sense to happen, because it sounds like it would require a significant reduction in defense spending across the board. The MI Complex won’t like it.
Trump had a completely naive understandin of what Nato is and wha it means to the US. Nobody should have been unaware of that when he shot off his mouth about other countries paying their share.
It’s not ever going to happen and at best, the other signatories will continue to pay what they are currently paying. Germany’s opposition party even mentioning a straying from Nato is the exact opposite of the US applying pressure to any Nato country.
Americans, you have to start thinking clearly on this issue and that calls for letting go of your vanity. The other countries don’t need Nato because they understand they don’t need Nato’s (US) protection.
The opposite is the truth. The US needs Nato in order to be able to use Nato to legitimize it’s planned future wars. That is, when the UNSC proves itself useless, as most Americans charge.
Indeed the UNSC is useless when the US fails to pass motions for war. Or, you could say the same thing about Russia or China. The US makes the UN useless to their warmongering. (if there exists such a thing?)
Trump will fall into line with the wishes of the US very quickly. He would have been much better off not making stupid promises in the first place.
If there is ever going to be a challenge to Nato’s existence, it’s going to come from European countries and definitely not from *Canada or the US!
*not from Canada unless the momentum is started by an EU country and it gets contagious.