Germany’s new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has started with a dramatic promise: "The German government will provide all the financial resources the Bundeswehr needs to become Europe’s strongest conventional army.”
That commitment, made in his inaugural speech to the Bundestag last week ((correct)), follows through on his election pronouncement that "Germany is back” and will now "really achieve independence from the USA.”
The excruciating historical echoes of a new and assertively militarist German chancellor need not be rehearsed. Merz’s planned arms buildup means the definitive end to the "peace dividend” that the western world had enjoyed since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, which paved the way for that decade’s great prosperity.
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