NATO’s challenge is Germany, not America

NATO’s 21st-century problem is not the United States, which provides a large percentage of its wherewithal, but Germany. As the most populous and most affluent of European nations, Germany still insidiously dominates Europe as it has since its inception in 1871.

Berlin sends ultimatums to the indebted Southern European nations. Berlin alone tries to dictate immigration policy for the European Union. Berlin establishes the tough conditions under which the United Kingdom can exit the European Union. And when Berlin decides it will not pony up the promised 2 percent of GDP for its NATO contribution, other laggard countries follow its example. Only six of the 29 NATO members (other than the U.S.) so far have met their promised assessments.

Germany’s combination of affluence and military stinginess is surreal. Germany has piled up the largest trade surplus in the world at around $300 billion, including a trade surplus of some $64 billion with its military benefactor, the United States, yet it is poorly equipped in terms of tanks and fighter aircraft.

Ostensibly, NATO still protects Europe from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, just as it once kept the Soviet Red Army out of West Germany. But over the objections of its Baltic neighbors and the Ukraine, Germany just cut a gas-pipeline deal with Russia — the purported threat for which it needs U.S.-subsidized security.

Stranger still is Germany’s growing animosity toward the United States. At the end of the Obama administration, 57 percent of Germans expressed a positive view of America in a Pew poll. That figure dropped to 35 percent in the first year of the Trump administration. A recent poll reveals that Germans see Putin’s Russia as more trustworthy than the United States.

Why is Germany the most anti-American of NATO members? …

Germany demands that the United States continue to be the largest funder of NATO and yet has an unfavorable view of America — and an increasingly favorable view of NATO’s supposed common threat, Russia.

Other fearful European NATO nations are used to being dominated by Germany and either keep quiet or follow its lead.