Posted on 11/26/2019 11:00:31 AM PST by Olog-hai
There is a disconnect between citizens of Germany and the United States when it comes to their perceptions of the relationship between the countries, according to a survey released Tuesday.
The survey, carried out by the Pew Research Center in Washington and the Hamburg-based nonprofit Körber Foundation, reveals that Americans view their country’s relationship with Germany far more positively than Germans view their country’s with the United States.
Three-quarters of Americans saw the relationship as good, while nearly two-thirds of Germans (64%) saw the relationship as bad.
Despite the gap in opinion, the latest data indicates that views in Germany have become more positive over the past year, with the share of Germans who say the relationship is good increasing from 24% in 2018 to 34% in 2019. Germans’ outlook, however, remains more negative than it was in 2017.
For the American respondents, a positive evaluation of the bilateral relationship was at its highest in three years. […]
A narrow majority of German respondents (52%) supported Berlin becoming more independent from the US in defense matters, even if this required Germany to more than double its defense budget, currently at €43 billion ($47 billion).
When it comes to nuclear protection, only 22% of Germans supported the reliance on America’s nuclear umbrella. Two out of five Germans would rather see Germany obtaining nuclear protection from France and the UK. …
(Excerpt) Read more at dw.com ...
Who won the bloody war, anyway?
The Germans and Americans should have been asked: Can Germany be trusted by it’s neighbors if it was not tied to an alliance?
Ping, For your interest.
Germans prefers being defended by:
1. themselves
2. the U.S.
3. France
definitely not 1, and between 3 and 2, they’ll go with 3
I think one reason NATO still exists is to keep Germany quiet. Germany has been a military terror in Europe since the mid 1800s as Prussia expanded, subsuming its German neighbors, becoming the German Empire. They then tried to takeover the rest of Europe in the Great War and the Second World War. And they are still at it with their European Union project, but that too will fail; it is already failing.
Germany should have been broken up into its former countries after WW1, like Bavaria, Hanover, Baden, Saxony, etc.
No
Germany is not an ally, is not reliable, and the greater we can distance ourselves from them, the better. That should start with bringing most of our troops in Germany home and redeploying the remainder to Poland - if we intend to keep any in Europe at all.
Screw the Germans. They started 2 WW and got their butts kicked both times. They still resent that we whipped them, sort of like the Democrats are driven crazy by the fact the “deplorables” kicked their asses in 2016.
LOl, the “Super Race” is how they were referred to in the days of their paper hanging leader.
Super race my ass.
“The Hun is either at your feet or at your throat’’.- Winston Churchill.
Just returned from a Rhine River cruise. If they were pessimistic about our relations it didn’t seem to interfere with their desire for the Euros I carried.
The age old problem of taking Germans longer to learn to distrust their media.
Your view is outdated. Germany is not what it used to be as far as its national goals. The end of World War Two broke the German people’s desire to dominate Europe. They do use their economic strength to influence the weaker economies of other EU states.
Individual European nations should be treated at arm’s length with the US making a nation’s status with us dependent on how cooperative they are in working with us. A nation should not be afforded special status just because they are European. I have no problem with them treating us in a similar matter. Our wealth gives us leverage in dealing with individual nations and Trump is right not to cede this advantage in using it to put America First. Germany has a tendency to cooperate when Trump starts talking tariffs on German cars.
I am not sure why some think that France and the U.K. offer better nuclear protection.
Time to pack up and leave.
This nuclear umbrella comes to them under the auspices of NATO, whose terms Trump has repeatedly criticized and which are subject to a long-overdue renegotiation. These were set long before the EU became the super-state that it is, and one notes that NATO's membership includes member states but not the EU itself (this is true of the UN as well), which body has finally declared a desire for a European common defense but not any particular desire to fund it.
The U.S. could, of course, pull the weapons themselves from their presence in host nations without abrogating the commitment to common defense. Indeed, their presence in Turkey has proven problematic given the recent coup attempt there and their national aims diverging from those of NATO and the U.S. in Syria. However, Germany and/or the EU leaning instead on the other two nuclear powers in NATO, France and the U.K., is problematic as well, first, for the well-known prickliness of the French with respect to the independence of their own nuclear program and second, the fact that the U.K. may not be an EU member state much longer. What that devolves to is that if there is going to be an EU at all with a common defense policy and armed service, then its leaders are going to have to decide whether they wish the EU as a whole to become a nuclear power. This will, naturally, have a volcanic effect in the EU parliament, whose Greens and Social Democrats will shriek at the mere suggestion and likely have enough support to veto the project. That leaves the EU in a rather awkward position with respect to nuclear deterrence, a function that the U.S. has comfortably provided, and been equally comfortably cursed for, since the Cold War. Time, I think, for the EU to grow up and decide what it wants to be, however difficult that turns out to be.
And yes, in Tom Lehrer's famous words, "one of the fingers on the button will be German." Or not, as they wish, and risk the consequences.
Once all the Germans were warlike and mean,
But that couldn’t happen again.
We taught them a lesson in 1918
And they’ve hardly bothered us since then.
- Tom Lehrer
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