FOLLOW me on my popular Twitter feed. Just click this photo! @hbbtruth - David - Common sense on #Politics #PublicPolicy #Sports #PopCulture in USA, Great Britain, Sweden and France, via my life in #Texas #Memphis #Miami #IU #Chicago #DC #FL 🛫🌍📺📽️🏈. Photo is of Elvis and Joan Blackman in 'Blue Hawaii'

Beautiful Stockholm at night, looking west towards Gamla Stan
Showing posts with label Angela Merkel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Angela Merkel. Show all posts

Monday, March 20, 2017

A Promise Kept, A Message Delivered: President Trump delivers a much-needed reality check on Germany and Chancellor Angela Merkel re their longstanding failure to honor their NATO pledge. Trump bluntly says what Americans have wanted to hear: It's time for Germany to pay what they owe and live up to their promise. No more excuses!; Anne Applebaum continues to disappoint me

Screenshot of The Drudge Report of March 18, 2017: U Owe Us





Last Friday during her visit to the White House, German Chancellor Angela Merkel received a strong dose of unfiltered President Donald J. Trump, who delivered the reality check he promised to deliver to NATO allies during the 2016 election campaign regarding their longstanding failure to live up to their own past pledges to spend at least 2% of their GDP on their own defense spending. 

 Instead of doing what the U.S. foreign policy elites in Washington wanted him to do, which was to allow this unproductive behavior of Germany -and so many other NATO members- to continue, or, if brought up at all, to talk about it away from the prying eyes of cameras of the U.S. news media and the American people, President Trump delivered on yet another important campaign promise, and did so in an honest away that neither Presidents Obama, Bush or Clinton ever did, that left no room for any misunderstanding.
We are talking about you, Germany.











Spiegel
FEBRUARY 21, 2017
Germany’s Self-Imposed Obstacles to Increasing Defense Spending
Washington is threatening consequences if NATO member states don't increase their defense spending. Germany is the primary focus of the demand. But the Defense Ministry in Berlin is already having trouble spending the money it currently has at its disposal.


By Konstantin von Hammerstein and Peter Müller
http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/natosource/germany-s-self-imposed-obstacles-to-increasing-defense-spending
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/pressure-on-germany-to-increase-defense-spending-for-nato-a-1135192.html























Message to Brussels: People on the Left in the U.S. and Europe who think that Germany is right on this issue, and that a government foolishly spending money on #ClimateChange but NOT honoring its pledge to its own allies regarding the amount of money it will spend on its own self-defense, are dreaming if they think Americans will support defending any nation that consciously chooses NOT to defend itself.
They won't. Period!




Both before and after I lived and worked in the Washington, D.C. area and was very much involved with then-current passing developments and perspectives from people involved with foreign policy and defense policy in DC, whether at the myriad Think Tanks and non-profits, Left and Right, or at the House Foreign Affairs Committee or the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I was an admirer of Anne Applebaum, @anneapplebaum, and a longtime reader of her outstanding foreign policy/defense columns in the Washington Post.

 More times than I can count, Applebaum's column was the best thing in the entire newspaper that day, combining genuine insight, forthright candor and an original POV, relative to the stuffy/fussy and self-reverential nature of much of what passes for insight in 99% of the American Foreign Policy establishment, whose journals I subscribed to for years, with walls of past issues that lined my Arlington County garage in banker boxes.

For many years I was, in the abstract, Anne Applebaum's ideal reader: someone who not only devoured her Washington Post columns and shared them with friends around who were very involved in a direct way with foreign policy, but also someone who actually purchased multiple copies of her books with my own money as gifts for friends and colleagues, as opposed to people who bought them on a corporate account.
I even bought copies of the decidedly non-holiday-friendly books, Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe and Gulag: a History.

 (As many of you longtime readers of this blog know, I have a longtime interest in Eastern European history and politics, especially Poland. My maternal ancestors fled Prussian-controlled Silesia and arrived in Texas right before Christmas of 1854, after a three-month boat trip from Bremen, eventually setting in the beautiful Hill Country of Texas and becoming Bandera County Pioneers.)

So, it's with all of that history in mind that I tell you now that it's been VERY disappointing to me the past few years that despite lots of opportunities for her to use her very important and very visible perch at the Washington Post to push for more honest and resolute critical thinking and reporting about the issue of NATO members finally delivering on their promises to pay 2% of their respective GDP for their own defense, she's punted.
Specifically, she's been far too quiet and NOT been publicly critical about Germany's failure.
Not that Gemany is alone, because only 5 of the 18 NATO members hit their marks.



Even worse in my mind, if possible, Applebaum has held her tongue about Germany's incredibly feeble response to the rise of ISIS (ISIL, IS) which I have talked to many of the people reading this blog post about over the years, as well as tweeted about when German-friendly individuals and groups seemed to be trying to give them a pass nd make excuses for them.

Instead of Applebaum being a leader for actively confronting manageable issues that a clear majority of Americans are quite justified in wanting to see FINALLY resolved, she has continued to champion the POV of the Foreign Policy elites in the U.S. and Europe, who are owners of so many broken Conventional Wisdom crystal balls that have not worked properly in many years. 
As Brexit proved to a fare thee well, as I predicted months before last year's June vote in the UK.

 She's exactly the sort of person who ought to be championing Trump on this issue because he happens to be right on the facts and right on the public's perceptions of it being an issue where supposed allies have failed to deliver.

 Plus, Applebaum's too smart to think that Trump and his supporters will simply allow the issue to evaporate. Trust me, Trump supporters like me will tell him that if Germany does not change course in tangible ways in the near-future that Americans can see with their own eyes, he will need to do something publicly to show his displeasure in a way that will leave no room for misunderstanding.

 Is that really what the folks at the German Embassy up on Reservoir Road NW, a place where I spent so much time in the late 1980's and the '90's, and the place that now continues to do such a consistently piss-poor job of public outreach to the U.S. public at large and Congress in particular, wants?
Because the truth is, that day where Trump is pushed into doing something is much closer than they think.
Every day Germany continues status quo brings it closer...

 I continue to be surprised at the large number of usually well-informed people who do NOT know that Germany's response to ISIS has been to dispatch, after more than a year's worth of debate in the Bundestag, 100 UNARMED men in non-combat positions located far from the fighting. 
That's the response of Europe's largest and most economically powerful country?
To place one-hundred unarmed men far from where the fighting against ISIS is? 
Really?

For many well-informed Americans who care about U.S. foreign policy and defense issues, regardless of their party preference, Germany's efforts of late, esp. vs. ISIS, seem incredibly underwhelming and not cause for thinking that cooler heads in Berlin are prevailing.
Just the opposite. :-(

In its own way, this Le Nouvel Observateur article makes the point.





 To which I replied with cool hard facts:

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Our new German problem: lack of effort. Have you really considered how little #Germany has been doing and is prepared to do in the future against #ISIS? Why is this topic continuing to be ignored in Washington and by the U.S. news media?

Our new German problem: lack of effort. Have you really considered how little #Germany has been doing and is prepared to do in the future against #ISIS? Why is this topic continuing to be ignored in Washington and by the U.S. news media?

Have you really considered how little #Germany has been doing and is prepared to do in the future against #ISIS? Why is this topic continuing to be ignored in Washington and by the U.S. news media?

For months I've closely followed the glacial pace of things in Germany largely via DW,
Deutsche Welle, both on TV and in print, since the U.S. news media has seemed to decide to give Germany and their current Ambassador to the U.S., Peter Wittig, a 'hall pass' on all controversial topics, like #Ukraine #Russia #sanctions #ISIS. 
Any one of which, Once Upon a Time in the '70's, '80's or '90's, would have gotten him an invite he could not really turn down.

If you didn't know it, even for something as insignificant as sending 100 German military 
"advisors" to Iraq who would never be put in a position to actually face the enemy, there
was months and months of Sturm und Drang in the Bundestag, in the country 
where Sturm und Drang was born.

As someone who spent LOTS of time over at the German Embassy in Washington, D.C. pre and post Fall of the Berlin Wall, on trade and economic issues, and who made enough 
friends there to attend the party at the Embassy celebrating the unification in 1991 -even bringing a German chocolate cake with the German flag's colors on it that I ordered at the #1 German bakery in greater DC, not far from my house in Arlington County- I was especially aghast last year that Germany's policy was, despite all the evidence to the contrary, to be firmly against arming Ukraine so that it could better defend itself.

Which is how it came to be that back on February 8th, before Chancellor Merkel's visit to DC, I asked the Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, @SenBobCorker - 
How is #Merkel #Germany an ally vs. Isis if sending 100 Bundeswehr 2 TRAIN Iraqis is political crisis? 

Condescending, patronizing pols in Germany acted like their troops were almost too important to actually deploy them to the Mid-East to accomplish something tangiblethat was in the West's best interests. But did you see anything about this in the newspaper or on network TV at the time?

And not once in all the many long months since the shoot down of the Malaysian flight 
MH17 over Ukraine last August by Russian-armed and trained separatists has the Ambassador Wittig gone on a single American Sunday morning TV chat show to lay out the position of Germany to the American people, whose own sons and daughters, husbands and wives continue to be stationed in Germany in the tens of thousands to defend Germany against the existential threat that President Obama claimed in one of his 2012
debates with Mitt Romney did NOT exist -Putin's Russia.

Well, history has shown us who was right about that question, haven't they?
And the Russia reset, too.

No, these days, the Foreign Ministry geniuses at the German Embassy on Reservoir Road prefer to employ their old standby, checkbook foreign policy, and simply pay for ads on Foreign Policy magazine's email newsletters, like this one I received, below, so they aren't forced to explain or defend their policies in-person to people who know the facts and could pin them down.
Yes, it sort of explains a lot about the current Foreign Policy Establishment and what it just winks at:

And paying for ads also means they don't have to deal with curious ethical issues like this:
#Germany hires ex #Stasi to check #Facebook for critics of #immigration policy. 

So, to sum it up, Peter Wittig, the German Amb. to the U.S. has not appeared on one of the most guest-friendly forums he could possibly appear on in all of DC, esp. for an important ally like Germany, Sunday morning chat shows, and been forced to defend Germany's feckless position on all these important matters, even while smaller countries with much less resources are continuing to punch above their weight.

Meanwhile, Germany, the European economic giant opts largely to stay on the sidelines as a spectator in the fight against ISIS, preferring to play the role of pit-crew grease monkey,
and not be one of the actual participants.
How much longer is this kind of unhelpful behavior going to be allowed to continue -and continue to be unremarked upon by the American press?




















Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Saturday, May 5, 2012

Sarkozy vs. Hollande: Watch the French Presidential election returns on Sunday LIVE in English online with France24's Élysée 2012 coverage



france24english video: Campaign Chronicles: 
Countdown to Sunday's French presidential elections and other top headlines. 






http://www.bfmtv.com  video: Les candidats à l'élection présidentielle passent la soirée en famille. May 5, 2012. http://youtu.be/MolZvdkfrK4



AFP video: Paris and Berlin set for standoff if Hollande wins. May 4, 2012.
http://youtu.be/W1f7tC1kfw0



From Friday, the last day of campaigning, in this review of the French newspapers and media
http://www.france24.com/en/20120504-french-election-bayrou-hollande-sarkozy-press-review-fran  
Article at: http://www.france24.com/en/20120504-french-election-bayrou-hollande-sarkozy-press-review-fran


Sarkozy vs. Hollande: Watch the French Presidential election returns on Sunday LIVE in English online with France24's Élysée 2012 coverage


http://www.france24.com/en/livefeed
http://www.france24.com/en/aef_player_popup/france24_player#



As many of you may already know, French law actually makes it illegal for the French news media to report any information regarding election results before the polls close at 8 p.m. Paris time. Similarly, because of this law, on almost every French news site you can think of, as well as popular blogs, there are representations of the blue Twitter icon that bears the following:


Présidentielle sur 
Afin de respecter la période de réserve avant l’annonce des résultats, les flux twitter sont désactivés jusqu’au dimanche 6 mai 20h.
Merci de votre compréhension


This even applies to the Twitter accounts of both presidential candidates, which bear the same message as above. 
Which is to say that all Twitter feeds featuring news regarding the Presidential election are disabled until 8 p.m. 


But that won't prevent neighboring news media in Belgium to the northwest and Switzerland to the east from announcing some tallies before that 8 p.m. deadline arrives.
http://www.bfmtv.com/presidentielle-les-medias-suisses-et-belges-actu27253.html



Election returns start at 8 p.m. Paris time, i.e C.E.S.T., which is GMT +2, so for those of us looking keenly towards Paris from the East Coast of the United States, that means 2 p.m.
is when you want to be near your computer to watch the action via France24.



-----


Over the past few months, as the French presidential election was fast approaching with the spectacle of the European Union  making like Humpty Dumpty over the most promiscuous spenders being in hock, I've been spending more and more time on the French TV, public policy and news websites than usual.


Which has necessarily meant getting used to seeing our old pals at France24, Vanessa Burggraff and Stéphanie Antoine, all over again after all these months apart, which is no problem. They're very smart and very watchable.


As always, and just as was the case when I was closely following the 2007 election between Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal, you get a real immediate sense of the difference in how party politics is played in France compared to the U.S. when you read the nuances on how and why the various left and Right alliances are assembled from one election to another.


Sometimes, it seems more like a national convention of Favorite Son candidacies or an American Idol or Swedish Idol try-out in a large city like Atlanta or Göteborg that's going to be televised.


The TV producers and show judges know in advance that just as in the U.S., some political parties are held together by commonly-held beliefs on issues that their most reliable supporters will support, regardless of the actual nominee, others will only support it or watch it if there's an abundance of candidates who sing their own favorite genre: rock, pop, Indie, rap, et al.
They actually want to be the choir who is sung to!


Too much of another genre or catering to one issue or sub-group, to the exclusion of their favorite, and it's both a tune-off and a tune-out, and nobody wins when that happens.


After the first round of the election where Socialist and PRG candidate François Hollande narrowly defeated President Sarkozy for first among the many candidates, I went back and looked at many of the French videos I've received at my YouTube Channel since Hollande received the nomination last Fall that I never got around to watching the first time around, so that I could see if there was something I was missing that could explain his popularity besides the straight-out anti-Sarko factor.


No, there really wasn't, which is why the specter of someone like Hollande winning so deeply concerns many of my friends living over there now, or who visit there often from other European countries, because they can't quite wrap their heads around the idea that France will take a giant step backwards after finally breaking with the past and getting someone with common sense pragmatism in French policy like Sarkozy, instead of soft leftist pretentions masquerading as serious public policy, policies that nobody outside of France respected or took seriously, but instead, just laughed at.


In short, they were tired of the sort of parochial economic policies that made France forever seem to them like it was the least dynamic nation in Europe, relative to its size, because it always had to indulge certain domestic interest groups and forces that acted like the 21st Century hadn't yet arrived in France -to say nothing of the 20th!


Groups that used the state's power as a weapon against coming to terms with reality and who  
don't want anything to do with a real competitive marketplace where consumers, not producers, make the choices over what is popular and profitable, not bureaucrats and manifestos.



France24 video: Campaign Chronicles: France in denial over the economy? April 3, 2012.

The thought of Hollande winning and creating hundreds of thousands of subsidized jobs only would further postpone France's coming day of reckoning, where the professional activists, professional misfits and professional students have to leave the warm embrace of Maman et  l'état and grow-up and make something of themselves.
Time to take off the training-wheels, kids!


A country that is so full of so many well-educated people who produce or create nothing that anyone else wants is... well, the slippery slope.
And when you throw in all the myriad problems associated with assimilation of overly-indulged immigrants who think nothing of throwing rocks at ambulances responding to emergency calls... and who expect the same kind of lifestyle as the well-educated without the hard work, well, c'est un déluge pour la France all around, n'est-ce pas?
-----
Take that! The cut that sears the most: days before French runoff election, Jean-François Copé, Sarkozy's UMP Sec.-Gen., accuses François Hollande of not being a true intellectual. Election Sunday could be beginning of Francs rushing across the Channel to wait out the economic storm under Hollande
So, all that said, for me, the most genuinely interesting and only-in-France moment came this week when I read an interview in Metro where Jean-François Copé, Sarkozy's UMP Secretary.-General, accused Hollande of not being a true intellectual.


Jean-François Copé : "Hollande est une imposture intellectuelle", A quelques heures de la clôture de la campagne. Jean-François Copé a reçu "Metro" au siège de l'UMP.
03-05-2012 22:15


Read the interview at:
http://www.metrofrance.com/presidentielle-2012/jean-francois-cope-hollande-est-une-imposture-intellectuelle/mlec!qUd9TN9yzmlA/


Be sure to see their excellent presidential election webpage: http://www.metrofrance.com/presidentielle-2012/


New York Times 
In French Race, the Tortoise Sets His Own Pace
By Steven Erlanger
Published: May 5, 2012
PARIS — François Hollande, the 57-year-old favored to be elected narrowly on Sunday as France’s president, is no revolutionary. He likes to talk of “harmony” and “pragmatism” and often quotes the poet and politician Aimé Césaire about “lucid hope.”
Read the rest of the article at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/world/europe/in-race-to-french-presidency-hollande-sets-his-own-pace.html 


After watching the Sunday morning chat shows, I'm heading to the beach for a bit and then stop off and get some French wine and some La vache qui rit and see what happens like the rest of you. 
And hope for the best
-----

In English: 

In French:
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)