Three times in the postwar era Germany made strategic choices that benefited Europe \u2013 with the US at its side. Now it must do it in opposition to Trump<\/p>\n
Three times in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany, its chancellors have made strategic choices that opened the door to a better future for Europe. Today there\u2019s not just an opportunity but an urgent need for a fourth such historic moment. If the country\u2019s new coalition government under Friedrich Merz manages to seize the chance of this crisis, both Germany and Europe will go forward. If it fails, then by the end of the 2020s both may have fallen backwards farther and faster than most of us could have imagined in our worst nightmares.<\/p>\n
The big difference with those three earlier pivotal moments is this: in 1949, 1969 and 1989 the Federal Republic\u2019s policy was fundamentally aligned with that of the United States. This time, Germany has to build up a stronger, free, democratic and Ukraine-supporting Europe against <\/em>the current policy of the US. The most staggering moment of Sunday\u2019s election evening was when the lifelong Atlanticist Merz declared that Europe must \u201creally achieve independence from the US<\/a>\u201d. (When compared with Emmanuel Macron\u2019s almost British sycophancy in the White House the next day, Germany\u2019s prospective chancellor is sounding more robustly Gaullist than the French president.)<\/p>\n Timothy Garton Ash is a Guardian columnist<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Three times in the postwar era Germany made strategic choices that benefited Europe \u2013 with the US at its side. Now it must do it in opposition to Trump Three times in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany, its chancellors have made strategic choices that opened the door to a better future for … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34410\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}