Last month, on the sidelines of NATO’s summit, Berlin and Washington announced that the United States would start deploying long-range conventional capabilities to Germany (which could hit Russia), those being systems that were eliminated in 1987 by a United States-Soviet Union agreement under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty.
They could be used to carry nuclear warheads, despite statements to the contrary (the Tomahawk Land Attack Missile, for instance, has done so in the past). This has prompted an ongoing heated German political debate. Sahra Wagenknecht, a rising German political star, has denounced the decision as “highly dangerous”.
In parallel to that, Berlin is also getting Patriot missiles from the US as part of a $5 billion deal. There has long been a New Cold War going on between Washington and Beijing, but such developments mark the rise of a new cold war (a potentially “hotter” one, so to speak) between the US-led West and Moscow. It gets worse, with a new Cuban Missile Crisis-like episode on the way – this time in Germany.
In response to American moves to station missiles in Europe, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said last month that Moscow is “not ruling out any options.” The most logical implication of such a deployment is that it makes European sites targets for Russia. The Russian navy, according to secret files (as reported by the Financial Times) is capable to target sites “deep inside Europe” with nuclear-capable missiles. Moreover, Russian nuclear-powered submarines can in fact reach US shores. The record however shows that the West has consistently been the aggressive party since the nineties (see below).
Back to Germany, the whole affair is rather ironic considering that Berlin has recently announced it will stop further military aid to Ukraine so as to reduce spending, amid an economic crisis, with skilled labor shortage and high interest rates – all issues related to a deeper energy crisis.
The irony goes beyond that: just consider the fact that Germany has just demolished its oldest nuclear power plant, the Grafenrheinfeld one, as part of Berlin’s policy towards a “nuclear exit”. It had been closed since 2015 and used to provide more than 11 percent of Bavaria’s energy. At the time, then-Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks described the closure as “a step forward in the reorganization of our energy supply.” Of course, coal power is making a comeback to Europe, and it emits huge amounts of CO2 and even produces more radioactive waste than nuclear power. Such energy “reorganization” is in fact part of the “economic suicide” of Germany and, broadly speaking, of Europe itself, as Arnaud Bertrand, a French businessman and commentator on economics and geopolitics, has been describing it.
As another instance of such a process, Bertrand has highlighted the fact that Swiss company Meyer Burger has closed a once state-of-art solar factory in Freiberg (Germany) and is relocating their factories to the United States. Bertrand summarizes the matter quite well:
“we end up arriving at the immensely paradoxical situation where Germany cut itself off from its cheap Russian gas so it needs to compensate [for] this with new energy sources, but in order to develop these new energy sources for itself, it needs cheap Russian gas.”
I myself have written on more than one occasion on how, time and time again, Europe, and Germany particularly, has been played by Washington with regards to energy interests. Germany today is not in a good shape economically-wise, and this has been so for a while, as I wrote. By seeking to “decouple” or “de-risk” away from China and to “reorganize” its energy policies, post-Nord Stream Germany has found itself in a complicated position.
Most of those ills can arguably be traced somehow to Washington, with the US literally waging a subsidy war against the European continent that helps keep it deindustrialized and more dependent on America (for security) than ever – not to mention the fact that Washington remains the main suspect behind Nord Stream’s sabotage, as reported by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh.
So much for German talks about “strategic autonomy.” When all is said and done, all such endeavors seem to amount to becoming a kind of suicidal proxy for Washington’s war of encirclement against Moscow – while the US pivots to the Pacific – and at the same time tries to manage the tensions Washington itself created in the Middle East. The American nuclear development in Europe is the culmination of years of NATO’s enlargement, years of militarizing and OTANizing the continent, and years of a secret CIA war in Ukraine, which has included arming and funding the Ukrainian far-right, including neo-Nazi elements. Just last week, commentators on French news channel @LCI were embarrassed on live TV when the images showed Ukrainian soldiers once again wearing helmets with a Nazi SS symbol.
Notwithstanding any criticism one may raise against the ongoing Russian campaign in Ukraine, all of the above are indisputable facts, and crying “Russian propaganda” will not make them go away. Beyond economic suicide, Europe is now placing itself at risk, militarily. With the deployment of American nuclear warheads to Germany, the world becomes a less safe place, and the future looks darker.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Uriel Araujo, PhD, is an anthropology researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: US Army ballistic missiles (Source)
