Posted on 06/11/2015 10:04:02 AM PDT by Olog-hai
A survey published by the Pew Research Center on Wednesday showed that the majority of Germans would be against their country using military means to defend a NATO ally against Russian aggression.
Despite the notion that an attack on one is an attack on all being enshrined as Clause 5 in the NATO Charter, 58 percent of Germans said they would be against helping a NATO member on the border with Russia militarily.
Only 38 percent of Germans said they would agree with the triggering of Clause 5 under such circumstances. …
(Excerpt) Read more at thelocal.de ...
The old East / West Germany still lives?
Seriously? So that cuts charter members Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Luxembourg out too I guess. And if you presume the North Sea isn't any more the Atlantic than the Baltic is, you have almost no members left.
Denazification campaigns and dealing with their past turned German civilians into very weird people when it comes to war. Soldier is a dirty word there.
Yugoslavia was never a part of the Warsaw Pact, nor in any defensive alliance with the USSR.
Regardless of whether we should have gotten involved, we did no break up Yugoslavia, they did that on their own.
I don't understand why NATO still exists. These countries have had plenty of time to build their own defenses.
NATO lost me when its planes were use to bomb Libya into extinction. Libya wasn't threatening NATO.
This is a myth. There has never been such promise. Bush himself and all high ranking members of his cabinet deny it and recently even Gorbachev came out to put out the speculation and said there was never such promise.
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up-front/posts/2014/11/06-nato-no-promise-enlarge-gorbachev-pifer
We now have a very authoritative voice from Moscow confirming this understanding. Russia behind the Headlines has published an interview with Gorbachev, who was Soviet president during the discussions and treaty negotiations concerning German reunification. The interviewer asked why Gorbachev did not “insist that the promises made to you [Gorbachev]—particularly U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s promise that NATO would not expand into the East—be legally encoded?” Gorbachev replied: “The topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years. … Another issue we brought up was discussed: making sure that NATO’s military structures would not advance and that additional armed forces would not be deployed on the territory of the then-GDR after German reunification. Baker’s statement was made in that context… Everything that could have been and needed to be done to solidify that political obligation was done. And fulfilled.”
"How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing. It seems still more impossible that a quarrel which has already been settled in principle should be the subject of war." -Neville Chamberlain (27 September 1938)
If it were not for NATO, the Baltic countries would already be hosting Russian troops, and Poland would be next. The Poles will fight like hell, but they are outnumbered. Given a chance, I think the Baltic nations would also fight like hell.
I much prefer to fight with people against a common threat, than watch them dispatched one-by-one, while we await our turn.
Poland would be a tough nut for the Russians to crack.
Obie has screwed them over once, not letting them have the missile defence Bush had promised them. But it’s Poland, they’re used to being screwed by tin pot dictators.
They have a pretty modern military, unlike the ancient one the Nazis destroyed in weeks.
Poland has been conquered and partitioned more than once.
Yet Poland still exists.
A pretty tough people those Poles.
Exactly.
They divorced one another in the messiest way possible.
Yugoslavia was a construct of dissimilar peoples and held together by Tito until he died.
The day Tito started his dirt nap is the day the country started to fly apart along old fault lines.
I am not “attacking” anyone’s resolve, ansel12. I am saying that I don’t believe that Western Europeans will risk their existence for Slovakia or Romania or Macedonia. That is not a wish, but my opinion based on observing Europe’s changing demographics, shrinking common culture and its shifting public opinions.
All of your efforts seem to be to undermine American resolve, and support Putin’s military goals over us and NATO.
There is no way to pretend that you aren’t pushing a pro-Russia message to the public.
That they are. And with a collective memory that spreads centuries. Interesting that the Kiev crowd are staying far away from antagonizing the Poles or the Hungarians.
ansel12, your tactics probably worked in grammar school, but adults aren’t put off by anonymous insults. I do not share your optimism for NATO’s future with its expanded membership and scope.
absent germany, there is no NATO
Actually, you are doing the propaganda.
You can keep chanting your anti-NATO/America opinion over and over, which you do, over and over, and over, and over, and over.
Why? Do you keep posting it because it is important to keep repeating over and over, for month after month, on thread after thread, your personal opinion that NATO/America may not really be ready to fight Russia? No, that isn’t why, that kind of simple opinion doesn’t need to be repeated endlessly, and with such dedication and passion, unless it serves a purpose, and is being delivered for a purpose.
You are passionately dedicated to advancing Russian interests, and denigrating us, our military and our ability to stand up to Russian aggression.
The Brookings Institution is liberal, so evidently they would defend the notion of NATO expansion under German policy.
So that means NATO is a product of German postwar realpolitik?
NATO was the result of fear of further Soviet aggression
My take is that that was never a real probability
The Russians wanted and created a buffer hundreds of miles deep to protect from Euro aggression. They declared no more Napoleon or Hitler will get the jump on them again
Unfortunately their political organization was crappy and they blew the plan.
Compared to you, ansel12, Barack Obama handles differing opinions like a mature adult. I don’t know anything about you, but I know quite a bit about NATO. It is a troubled alliance with an increasingly uncertain future. NATO is the last century’s solution to this century’s problems.
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