Rockingham:
"I get your point, but Germans are rarely if ever receptive to friendly talk from foreigners attempting to explain their errors to them." I have no idea what "errors" you mean, my point here has been their trade imbalance, which amounts to ~$60 billion with the US and $300 billion in total per year.
How this relates to German youth feelings toward China, I'm guessing, may be simply that they recognize China as the world's second greatest net-exporter (after Germany), and may feel a certain kinship as against the world's great net-importers, notably the USA, UK & France.
Rockingham: "Experience shows that it usually takes the Germans something like catastrophic military defeat and their country in ruins before they are willing to listen.
In the coming years, Muslims may provide that combination of calamities."
Listen to what, exactly?
Germany has a super-winning economic formula, which provides everything they need & want, why should they change it?
But that formula depends largely on the willingness of the US, UK & France to tolerate massive trade imbalances with Germany.
And our willingness, I think, is based on our abilities to keep our own economies humming along despite the trade imbalances.
As for Muslims, Iirc, there were over a million Turkish "gastarbeiters" when I was stationed there 50 years ago -- that number today is ~4 million Turks plus 1-2 million other Muslims, in a population of 83 million Germans.
Did you ever hear the term "mudsill workers"?
It was used by American intellectuals before the Civil War.
It fairly describes the "gastarbeiters" and, I'd guess, most Muslims in Germany today.
I can't see them becoming a political or economic issue for Germans in the short or medium term.
Long term is anybody's guess. ![]()
I see Germany as having four major problems that cannot be resolved or endured without major dislocations. As point five, I conclude with a speculative scenario that suggests just how insecure Germany's position actually is.
(1) Long tern trade imbalances and the accumulation of a massive foreign currency reserve tend to have the unwanted effects of lifting up the value of the home currency the reserve is booked against and suppressing domestic economic activity from what it would otherwise be. Since Germany is on the euro, the result is spread out to the entire eurozone, diminishing its economic performance.
Hardworking Germany, as the EU's moneybag, must then help offset the EU's chronically impaired economic performance by lending to financially stressed Greece, Italy, and Spain, thus helping turn the EU from a currency union into a de facto fiscal transfer union. Naturally, the German public hates this because it means paying for the shambolic and corrupt ways of Greece and other states of the EU southern tier.
This rickety contrivance of recurrent lending by Germany is essential to the EU's political survival. Now, the toll of the coronavirus pandemic may endanger the EU by generating demands for new lending that exceed Germany's willingness to pay.
(2) Like most of the EU and other developed nations, Germany's demographic decline imperils its survival as a nation. The Merkel government compounded the problem by embracing massive Muslim immigration. As the Koran teaches though, immigration by Muslims is a way to speed the conquest of infidel lands and nations. Few Muslim immigrants actually want to assimilate and become Germans.
Surveys and a wide range of practical measures show that jihadism among Germany's Muslims is growing, with little to no pushback within that community. Indeed, funded by cash-rich Qatar, Turkey openly warns of its capacity to stir trouble in Germany whenever it wants.
As Germany's Muslim population grows and the numbers of native Germans decline, a tipping point will approach. Germany will then suffer increased terrorism and will either have to resist through severe measures or install a hybrid state that elevates Islam to official recognition as the dominant state religion. Even this will be but a temporary accommodation as Muslim numbers grow and Germany is pressed to become a full Muslim state under sharia law.
(3) Germany's emerging national security strategy is to replace the US-NATO security architecture with a German-Russian alliance based on a flow of Russian natural gas that provides Germany with energy security and the profit of selling that gas to other European nations. This does nothing to remedy the Muslim issue but will tacitly give Russia a free hand to reassemble its former Soviet empire.
Ukraine, the Baltic states, Norway, Poland, the US, and Britain will not meekly accept this, which raises the potential for another European war. In that event, the natural gas pipelines that Germany expects to rely on as secure will last about three minutes. And, with Germany's army now being swiftly reduced to a notional domestic security force against Muslim terrorism, Germany's economic interests will get little consideration.
Remarkably, Germany may end up having to rely on Poland and the US for military security on her eastern flank. Or, then again, maybe Germany will be able to rely on Merkel's cozy and delusional BFF relationship with Putin as providing an enduring security partnership. At the risk of being thought unkind, I note that the Cold War KGB of Putin's formative years made deep inroads into Germany's government by sending agents to court older German secretaries and bureaucrats in positions of responsibility.
(4) Germany's current favorable economic position depends in large part on preserving the EU and the euro. Both are unlikely though to survive the end of the current decade. As they fall, Germany will lose the favorable economic position it currently enjoys.
The southern tier EU states though will benefit from regaining national currencies and control over their trade. Most of all, they will be able to alleviate their chronic unemployment by a strategy of import substitution that restores the local industries that were wiped out in favor of German industry by the EU and the euro.
(5) Who knows, but one day, as Muslims riot in German cities, an Italian-Greek army may motor to the north, seize Berlin and the Reischbank, take the transferable assets, and cancel Italian and Greek debts to Germany. So much for all the reserves and loan balances that Germany seems to believe provide it with economic and national security.
Graying and prosperous but unrealistic, Germany is like an aging pensioner who has watched his neighborhood decline but thinks he is secure because he has a fat bank balance and a large stock of cash at home, a deadbolt and a chain on the door, and a seeming friendship with the Russian tough who lives down the street.
Yet the rule of nature is that when predators make their move, they do so because their prey is isolated and vulnerable. Economically and diplomatically powerful, Germany's declining military power and security relationships make her a target.
Germans may not like it said to them, but the US, not China, has the willingness and ability to provide Germany with a reliable security guarantee. Unwilling to listen to outsiders, Germans seem inclined to learn this lesson through history's hard discipline of painful events.